No Good Tale Should Go Untold

Donis here. Sometimes, we writers wonder about the ethics of using a third party’s actual life experience as a plot line. I use real events, both historical and personal, all the time. When I have used personal events, I either disguise them or ask permission of the individual to whom it happened. I do have the writer’s mind, though, and when I hear an intriguing story, I do not forget it, though I ponder long and hard on whether or not I can use it in book. Sometimes I ponder long and hard for decades. 

The third book of my long-running Alafair Tucker series, The Drop Edge of Yonder, is a book that was thirty years in the making. There are at least two pivotal scenes in the book that owe their existence to newspaper articles that stayed with me all that time. I read the first story when I lived in Lubbock, Texas, back in the ’70′s. Two women, an elderly mother and her grown daughter, were out shopping together, walking down the street and minding their own business, when an insane person ran up and attacked the daughter without provocation. The old mother saved her daughter when she jumped on the  man’s back and pummeled him, and bit him, and basically beat the heck out of him.

Somewhere around the same time, I read in an interview with an old British soldier who had fought the Massoud in Palestine after WWII. He described a fighter who came at him tooth and claw and absolutely refused to be killed, even after he shot him and stabbed him and beat him with the butt of his rifle. The fighter finally sunk his teeth in the soldier’s foot and the soldier had to decapitate him to make him let go. The soldier said it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to him in his life. I took both these images and put them together to create one of the climatic scenes of the book.

The opening scene of Drop Edge isn’t quite as old an image in my head as the other two, but it is also a tale that took me a long time to tell. Seven or eight years before I began writing that particular book, I did a family genealogy for my sibs for Christmas, which is one of the things that inspired me to write my Alafair Tucker series in the first place. One of the things I learned while doing research on my family was the story of one of my a great-great grandfathers and three of his companions who were returning from the Civil War Battle of Pea Ridge when they stopped a few miles from home to rob a bee hive in a tree. While they were smoking the hive, they were ambushed by bushwhackers and killed. They were found by their families a few hours later but lay dead in the field over night, guarded from wild animals by their wives until morning, when they were buried where they fell.

The Drop Edge of Yonder came out almost 20 years ago, but I'm still using other people's experiences as plot jumping off points. I'm nearly finished with a first draft of a new novel with entirely an different plot, characters, eras. Yet as I go back and review what I've written, I see that the story is full of disguised events from my own life and the lives of many of my relatives, because no good tale should go untold.