The Most Important Story I Ever Wrote

There was a story I read at age nineteen that was only about four or five pages long. I don't really remember the story very well now, but what I do remember was that it had a powerful emotional effect on me. The ending was so poignant that I sat for a full minute just absorbing it. "Wow," I said, and kept saying. "Wow."

When I finally came down off this bit of amazement, my first thought was: "If I can write just one story, which can make just one person react to it like I just reacted to this story...I'll count myself a success. " Of course, I imagined that someday I'd have some brilliant, earth-shattering idea for such a story, and, knowing how pivotal it was going to be, I'd spend years carefully crafting it into: the most important story I ever wrote.

Life being what it is, however, that isn't how it happened. Not at all.

Here is how it happened: I was chatting online with some romantic story readers and ideas were floating between us. The talk turned to romances between someone attempting suicide and the person who stops them. Such romances have always intrigued me, and I was captured by one thought of a girl on a bridge and a guy who stops her by asking her out on a date. Of course, she would have to accept or there'd be no story--but what would that date be like? And why would anyone step back from killing themselves to go out on a date?

Come to that, what had made the girl suicidal in the first place? I knew she had to be serious about this. Not depressed and attempting it, but intent on doing it with this pause in plans a mere day's reprieve, an interruption, no more. Otherwise, the story wouldn't really mean anything, at least not to me. Which led to the other question: what about the guy who stops her? Why not grab her or try to change her mind? What appeal could he, as a person, offer a bleak and desperate woman in the middle of leaving this world? And what appeal did she have for him? Why ask her out on a date? I asked this last question of one gentleman romance reader and got a very interesting answer. Interesting enough to get the creative juices flowing.

The story, as they say, wrote itself. I almost felt as if I was watching the characters go on their date, and that I was getting to know them as they got to know each other. The date was prosaic, predictable even in how it progressed, but the twist, the circumstances behind it and the two troubled people involved, transformed it into something more. On most dates the couple feels separate from the world, in their own little universe. These two didn't merely feel that way, they were that way. And the reader was right in that universe with them. Maybe that explains what happened next.

At the time, I didn't even think about any of this. I just wrote it. I liked the story very much and was especially proud of my double-entendre title: "Till Dawn." But I wasn't expecting anything special when I finally put it out for people to read.

Then I started getting feedback. Some of it was the usual: "Great story," and "Liked it, but..." etc. However, the majority of the feedback was completely different from any I'd ever gotten before. "I was that girl on the bridge--" one said, and "I'm Cal. I've felt exactly like him--" It seemed I'd found some universal truth in myself that I hadn't known was so universal. And then there were the ones that really stunned me....

"I'm going through a terrible time in my life; this story helped me decide to go on living..."

Oh. My. Gosh. Had I done it? With this little, erotic romance? I'd written it with care and thought, yes, but not as if I was writing something that would transform lives. Yet it seemed it had transformed lives. Was this it? That story that had readers sitting there for a minute afterwards just saying "wow"?

I couldn't say for sure. What I could say was that after seeing such comments, I totally understood what it meant to feel that one's work had come to life and walked away. "Till Dawn" no longer belonged to me, it belonged to all those readers seeing themselves in it, finding powerful meaning in it.

That's when I realized what "the most important story I ever wrote" really is to a writer. It's the story that people say is the most important story they ever read. And I...I had written one of those for at least some people out there. Much to my surprise.

I certainly hope I have more such stories in me. Though they may not start out that way, they become as pivotal and life-changing to the writer as they are to readers.

Getting Down to the Bone

This story started with a tattoo. That is, long before I decided to write this tale, I'd seen the tattoo that would be the inspiration behind it. It was at a casual gathering and on the shoulder of this one young gentleman. The tattoo was of a fish. Not just any fish. It was a Panderichthys. An extinct fish from the Devonian with extra fins showing an evolutionary transition (or at least the possibility of one) from fish to reptile.

I was immediately struck by this tattoo and got into a long discussion with the gent, whose passion for science and evolutionary biology had led him to get that rather ugly fish beautifully inked onto his upper arm. I thought it was pretty cool. More on this later.

Jump ahead to the writing of this story. As is no doubt evident, I'm very fond of opposites attract stories and the most common such story is that of the geek and the "not geek." Like the nerdish boy who manages to take the most popular (and seemingly shallow) cheerleader to the prom, or the brainy and/or artsy girl who connects up with the star quarterback (equally shallow at the beginning of the story, but with a poetic soul she manages to draw out). In both cases, the geek usually gets a Cinderella-ish fashion make-over toward the end of the story so that their inner beauty becomes outer beauty. Meanwhile, the not-geek's outer beauty becomes inner beauty as they gain depth and empathy.

I had already more-or-less tackled the nerd and the beauty queen in "Exchange Value," but was motivated to try my hand at the jock and geek-girl if I could come at it from a different angle. There were a couple of things that bothered me about the brainy girl & the jock story, however. First and foremost the fact that it still held to the creaky old cliché that all a girl has to do is take off her glasses and let down her hair and the clueless guy will finally realize she's beautiful.

And people mock the fact that Lois Lane never realized Clark Kent was really Superman!

I know some very brainy girls (and guys) and most of them are far from fashion impaired. Some are very hip, with their own cool style, including piercing and/or tattoos (Hm. Tattoos). Any way, why couldn't the jock be attracted to the brainy girl just as she was, rather than only after she was given a make-over? One that usually made her look like every other pretty girl? Wasn't the point for the jock to evolve?

Evolve. Evolution. Hm.

And that was another thing. I didn't want whatever the jock learned from the brainy girl to be just window dressing--like an appreciation of art or poetry or astronomy. I wanted it to transform him, give him a different view of the world, like a fish gaining lungs. Likewise, his relationship with the girl needed to transform her. At the same time, however, these two had to remain who they essentially were. The fish who gains lungs is still a fish.

And wasn't that essential to the story? That the jock love the girl for being a brainy geek and she love him for being a jock?

It was at about this point that I remembered the fish.  I remembered it because tattoos are like x-rays: they tell us who a person is inside, what matters to them, what they care about and how they think. Like that guy with the Panderichthys on his arm. That he had that ancient fish rather than a trout or a shark told me an essential thing about him, something that, like the tattoo, wasn't going to change.

Evolution, after all, isn't just about our ability to change and adapt. It's also about those bone-deep qualities we have which make us desirable, the fittest to survive. That, I decided, was what I needed to explore if I wanted to mutate this story into something more, something better than the usual geek/non-geek romance. I had to get down to the bone, down to what made these characters who they were. Because we don't fall in love with another person because we know they'll adapt to us, we fall in love with them because they are special and different from us. Because however good we are on our own, we can become even better if we're with them.

And that is how a primitive fish tattoo evolved into this story, the story of a jock and geek who adapt and change even as they remain, in their bones, the same.

Full Disclosure

I got this idea while thinking about all men and women do to get ready for a date. The push-up bras and tummy flattening pantyhose, the make-up that hides blemishes. That's on the women's side, but the men do likewise with suits that slenderize or shoes that give them a bit more height. We all pick out the perfect "costume" that doesn't so much make us look our best as it hides our flaws and gives us attributes we might not naturally have.

We lie on first dates. Lie and lie and lie. We hide all the unappealing stuff, while pretending to have all the appealing stuff that might get this date to bite.

An obvious observation and true, but thinking about it, I wondered. Aren't we going about this the wrong way? With such tricks we might get short-term rewards, but won't the date be pissed off in the morning when they find out we're not so buxom or slim or tall? I know our hope is that if they just give us a chance, and find out how wonderful we are, they'll forgive the fact that we weren't quite honest with them. But it still seems like an ass-backwards way to go about finding a soul-mate, meaning someone who loves you for who you are, not what you appear to be.

So...what if we didn't pretend to be anything other than what we were? That question led me to write my, perhaps, most rawly realistic story: Full Disclosure.

I simply took that premise and ran with it. What if a couple decided to show and tell each other everything on that first date rather than hiding it? What if they decided to display their stretch marks and love handles rather than cover them up? And discuss their sexual habits, upfront and honestly, rather than fumbling with each other in the dark, playing guessing games? What if they took everything usually learned the morning after and put it on the table in that first hour, during that first evening together? What if they went on a "backwards" date?

Wow. I wanted to find out what would happen. So, I wrote up their story. As I wrote it up, though, something very interesting happened. I started to explore not only what honesty would bring to a couple, but why they (why anyone) would be dishonest in the first place. The "whys" of lies. We lie with each other fearing rejection, of course, and wanting whatever it is we want. But what about those times when we see the truth about someone we think we love or at least want to be with...and ignore it? When we lie to ourselves?

That's when the story started to become, for me, very uncomfortable. A writer can't expose the hard truths about their characters without exposing themselves. And I was asking some very hard questions. Like why men and women often date those who aren't good for them, and who they know aren't good for them. Like why they go back to such people--or pick others just like them rather than learning and going for someone different. Which was why, at this point, I began to worry. My hero and heroine were turning out to be the least heroic characters I'd ever created. They'd made bad decisions, and hadn't been honest or courageous enough to leave those mistakes behind.

As the story went on, however, and they revealed even more of themselves to me, I realized that they were also, simultaneously, two of my most heroic characters. Because they were willing to admit how un-heroic they'd been. Full disclosure. It wasn't just about characters revealing their naked selves to each other and finding someone who loved them for who they really were. It was about two, self-doubting souls standing naked before a mirror and learning to forgive and love themselves. It was about honesty, but it was also about renewal.

Fully disclosing ourselves to one another takes courage, but fully disclosing ourselves to ourselves...that takes heroism. I hope you'll find this story as revealing a read as I did--and as inspiring.

Gods of Romance

...and then there was the contest I did win. Well, I won second place. It was an erotic romance story in the most romantic of all short story contests: Valentine's Day Stories.

It might seem like a no-brainer for an erotic romance writer to come up with a story for Valentine's Day, but readers expect to see certain things in such a story: hearts, flowers, wine, poetry, cupids, candy and cards. Infusing new life into these old tunes is not so easy. Nor is coming up with a champagne-and-fine-chocolates' plot. A romantic tale celebrating the day of romance has to be a little more extravagant and delicious than the standard boy-meets-girl fare.

Which, in the context of how I came up with this story is a bit ironic, as the first thing that popped into my mind were those childhood candies (invented in 1860!) with text messages like: "luv u!" One can't get more plebeian. The other things that came to mind were treasure hunts and secret admirers. What, after all, is more "Valentine's Day" than a secret admirer? That idea took hold; I liked the thought of writing up a mystery that didn't ask "who done it?" but "who is it?" My initial image of a man or woman following a trail of candy hearts to their beloved, however, didn't seem feasible. Valentine cards with room for longer and more cryptic messages, on the other hand, could work very well. So I did a little research on valentine cards. Interestingly, the Victorian/Edwardian ones with elegant paintings and belabored poetry kept catching my eye.

It occurred to me that I found them fascinating because I'd never gotten or given such a valentine--so old fashioned, so romantic-era-romantic. Maybe...maybe that was the way to go with this story? Instead of trying to modernize the Valentine's Day staples, make them old school, so old school that they seemed "new" again? The valentines, the dozen roses, the chocolate candies, the wine, jewelry, poetry...even the gods of Love.

Once I hit on that, it all came together. I knew that my hero, for example, had to be so archaically romantic that he no longer felt he had a place in today's world. And I knew his journey, his hunt, had to be not only to find his one true love, but to learn that romance, even the sort considered passé, is timeless.

My title for this story of an outmoded worshiper of Love and forgotten love gods? Valentine Prayers. It has since become one of my all time favorite titles.

I won second place, which was awesome--but what really blew me away were the thanks I got from male readers. It seems a great many were romantics, under-represented, they felt, in Valentine stories and happy to see an avatar of themselves as the hero of my tale. This was worth a great deal more to me than that second-place prize. In the end, however, the biggest prize of all was the one I'd discovered at the end of a metaphoric trail of silly candy hearts, flowers and poetry: this personal prayer to Valentine's Day. So, my fellow romantics, keep the faith, and remember this: it doesn't matter if you're given a hand-made card for the day or a diamond ring, a bag of pastel colored M&M's or a dozen wine-red roses...they all translate to the same, most wonderful message, the heavenly message of Valentine's Day: that you are loved.