I started out as a reporter at a daily newspaper and never lost my love of that world. To this day, I’m a news junky and get many story ideas from reading daily papers.
A recent example came last month when I read this article. A local man made national news when a DNA match taken from a genealogy kit linked him to two rapes from 1999. I became fascinated with the story –– and even more so after realizing my daughter is on the same swim team as the daughter of the man accused. I’ve been working on a short story inspired by it since.
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/west-bloomfield-township-man-charged-in-decades-old-sexual-assaults-in-oakland-twp-pennsylvania/
I say “inspired by” the story because I make it my own, of course. The story intrigues me not because a genealogy kit, such as Ancestry.com, linked the man to two rapes that took place 25 years ago, something to which the media has latched on. Rather, I’m drawn to what my daughter told me: the accused man’s daughter, the girl on Keeley’s swim team, missed practice the day of the arrest because of “a family problem.”
That is what has stayed with me. This family, in a home no more than four miles from my own, woke up on a school day, and went to school with one life but came home to another. A wife and daughters, who thought their husband and father was one man, returned that evening to the same home, the same dishes in the sink, the same dog, but to a very different life.
He is a different man when they get home. Except he is not, not to them. Yet they now know he is and always was. How does the accused man’s wife and daughters reconcile this knowledge, these conflicts? He is the man they’ve known for 25 years, and yet at the same time is not.
And no bail has been set. In my mind’s eye, the sneakers he left by the front door will be put away forever, if he is convicted. His dresser cleaned out, his closet emptied. Dead but still very much alive. He left a coffee cup on the kitchen table and may never return home again to rinse it. My story is written from the point of view of the family members impacted by the man’s alleged double life.
Questions that I’m working through in my writing: Were there signs over the years? And if so, who saw them? What signs does his wife think she missed? Were there other victims? Could an alleged serial rapist simply have hit a switch and stopped, cold turkey, becoming a family man?
Inspiration. Where do you get yours? I’d love to hear from my Type M colleagues and our readers.
I say “inspired by” the story because I make it my own, of course. The story intrigues me not because a genealogy kit, such as Ancestry.com, linked the man to two rapes that took place 25 years ago, something to which the media has latched on. Rather, I’m drawn to what my daughter told me: the accused man’s daughter, the girl on Keeley’s swim team, missed practice the day of the arrest because of “a family problem.”
That is what has stayed with me. This family, in a home no more than four miles from my own, woke up on a school day, and went to school with one life but came home to another. A wife and daughters, who thought their husband and father was one man, returned that evening to the same home, the same dishes in the sink, the same dog, but to a very different life.
He is a different man when they get home. Except he is not, not to them. Yet they now know he is and always was. How does the accused man’s wife and daughters reconcile this knowledge, these conflicts? He is the man they’ve known for 25 years, and yet at the same time is not.
And no bail has been set. In my mind’s eye, the sneakers he left by the front door will be put away forever, if he is convicted. His dresser cleaned out, his closet emptied. Dead but still very much alive. He left a coffee cup on the kitchen table and may never return home again to rinse it. My story is written from the point of view of the family members impacted by the man’s alleged double life.
Questions that I’m working through in my writing: Were there signs over the years? And if so, who saw them? What signs does his wife think she missed? Were there other victims? Could an alleged serial rapist simply have hit a switch and stopped, cold turkey, becoming a family man?
Inspiration. Where do you get yours? I’d love to hear from my Type M colleagues and our readers.
3 comments:
John, what a fascinating and powerful nugget. I look forward to seeing its development. The nugget I have pondered for decades was the birth of a son to a dear friend, who phoned his father with the happy news, immediately after which the older man went out to his farm and shot himself. I've lost touch with the family but often imagine that little boy growing up with the awareness that something is very odd about his birthday that people don't talk about. Cake, presents, silence. Now grown, he has surely learned what happened, and that knowledge is devastating and has colored all his life.
Hi, Anna. Thanks for the note. That is a fascinating story. So many questions... I will be thinking about it for a long time. And your description is, to me, fascinating. I'm not thinking about the boy. I'm thinking of the man's backstory. Why do that? What conflicts are beneath the surface? And with whom? Wow. That's a keeper. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent! Some of my best stories have come from ideas or news reports or personal experiences that wormed their way into my consciousness and wouldn't go away for decades - until I wrote about them.
Post a Comment