Like first time parents, new writers worry about things they never realized existed before.  For me, this became a reality when we started our writing group and the others chimed in about how I should write stories based on my twenty-eight years as a State Trooper, ten of which were as a homicide detective.  For the five years since retirement, my persistent objection to my Thursday Night cohorts has been that it would be improper or unseemly for me to write about some of my experiences.  It is a high honor and huge responsibility to be entrusted to investigate a murder and I felt somehow that to write about what I had witnessed would take unfair advantage of my position.  I have discussed this with my old detective partner and he pointed out that if people did not write about these things, then how would anyone find out about them?  Maybe I’ll soften and reevaluate my stand as I progress as a writer.  No guarantees, but I’ll work on it.

Joseph Wambaugh wrote “…what a sorrowful thing it is to be murdered” in his novel The Glitter Dome.  I read that long before I became a cop, but it stayed in my subconscious and reemerged when I saw my first dead body.  It is sorrowful.  It’s not dramatic and certainly not glamorous.  It’s not at all like Hollywood’s CSI with mood music and fuzzy, psychic flash-back visions of the crime.  It is coldly sobering to stand or kneel over the most personal physical legacy of a human, their body, a human being who only hours earlier would never in their wildest dreams imagine that before the day was over, they would be cold, gray objects of observation to be described in notebooks, photographed and measured for diagrams.  I doubt that many people stop to consider when they lace up their shoes or button their shirts in the morning that they won’t be the ones to undo them at the end of the day.

Sometimes bodies lay in some degree of repose like on TV, but often they are in the grotesque sprawl of their last attempt to retain life or in the ineffective comfort of a fetal position.  Injury levels range from a few bruises or a little hole that is hard to find to extensive, mangled trauma with copious spilled blood.  There is a stillness to death greater than sleep or unconsciousness.  Oh, there actually is real, every-day music sometimes; if a body is discovered with a radio playing in the room, that’s documented as part of the scene and left on until everything is processed and turned off with the lights only when the search warrant return is left on the premises and the doors closed and locked.  You can only guess at the weird and lousy associations I have with some popular songs from years past.  The whole thing was and is sorrowful.

Any writing inspired by actual cases will have to be done with a high regard for ethics and respect for those involved.  No person’s death should be grist for the mill of popular culture where everything is presented merely for entertainment and titillation.  Before writing about such things, I’m going to grapple with the concept of “socially redeeming value”.  I’m no Pollyanna, in fact I’m quite cynical, but I do believe in karma.

Except when it’s about something else.

I’m late with my blog post. I had thought that at the last minute Devine Inspiration would give me a good shove in the back and I would start moving forward on saying something. Apparently, D.I. has moved on herself—perhaps she’s read her share of self-help books on deadbeat relationships.

I’m particularly embarrassed about being late with my post because my day job is all about deadlines: getting edited copy to the typesetter, moving proofs through various editing stages so that we get the magazine to the printer on time, and eventually it gets mailed out to subscribers—on time.

Creative writers, too, have obligations and deadlines. The writer scribbling in blissful isolation—picture a cabin on the lake—is not the reality for most of us. If I were dumped in such a place, I might spend more time climbing the walls then actually writing. Writing is a social event; the activities of our lives, the complexities of our relationships swirl and meld in a febrile, creative mind. And as writers, we don’t just draw from our relationships and interactions with others, we are also responsible to our audiences. We need to contribute pieces to our writers groups and blogging partners, and some even have contractual deadlines to deliver a manuscript to an editor at a publishing house. It’s these social aspects of being a writer that provide that much need shove in the back.

Thanks, Heidi, Eleanor, Karen, Mike, Michael, and John. (D.I., I’m doing just fine, not that you asked . . . Do you even still think of me?)

Countless good stories are lost forever because of the non-existent page; they never get written.  If not reduced to words right away, budding tales often blow away like swirled flights of dried leaves in a November wind, never to form the same pattern again.  Without immediate attention, fleeting visions and vague concepts can recede beyond the reach of memory.  Once released from consciousness, they float back up to the heavens like a reverse rainfall and dissipate into the ether, where they may or may not coalesce and fall back into someone else’s imagination.  My “gravatar” is a blank notebook page because a recurring theme in my writing life is to lose great ideas if I don’t write them down while they are fresh in my mind.  That little notebook could have saved those stories and given them a firm toehold from which to advance.

Whether ideas are fresh or captured in a notebook, a writer celebrates a story by facing the blank page with the intention of turning it into the written page.  If a writer is the little engine that could, the result is a successful flow of words as stories grow into a rich creation.  There are no guarantees, though.  Even with notes, ideas that seemed so clever when jotted down can morph into nonsense during a second reading.  What originally appeared to be inspiration turns out to be a chimera which evaporates from the heat applied to transform it into an understandable whole.  Still, the writer sits down to face the blank page.

Sometimes words stall and headaches develop.  A blank page that is not blooming becomes an enervation to the writer who confronts the #$%^&*@! page.  Whether or not the writer merely feels stuck or is actually thinking blasphemy and crudeness, the reality is that the creative process has stopped.  Thursday Night Write’s llandrigan characterized this phenomenon as “…fear or inertia or mental disorganization…” and Karen Whalen commented that the writer “…would rather have a root canal than write…”  That’s where I am now, so I’m going to put this away for awhile.  When I get back, hopefully I’ll bring the muses with me.