Writing Helps

 

Terry here with our question of the week: 

 What brought you into writing, and what keeps you there? 

 I recently went through a period of distress. I’ve been politically invested my whole life, and this is such a disastrous time in politics, that I feel a continuing sense of tragedy and loss. I feel as if the things that I hold most important in the political landscape have been trashed. It’s as if a band of crazy people have come into my house and torn up all the photos I cherish, broken keepsakes, thrown sand in the appliances, smashed windows, gouged deep gashes in the floors, ripped carpets into bits, torn pages out of books, slashed art…destruction on a massive, personal scale. I know people who have lost their homes to fires, and it’s tragic, but this is a different tragedy because it is perpetrated by people I thought I had some connection to. If I didn’t agree with them, I at least respected them. No more. I’m in a wilderness created by people who don’t value the things I value. They don’t care about dignity, truth, kindness, or decency. So…I’ve been in a funk. 

 What saved me is writing. It has always saved me. Becoming immersed in a story has always been a way of keeping myself on an even keel. Long before I was published, I wrote stories, snippets of stories, descriptions of real experiences, fantasies, and dreams. Eventually, I began channeling the snippets into books, and eventually I learned the craft well enough so that the books became publishable. It isn’t as if I was writing as therapy, but instead learning to tell the story of the world as I experience it. 

Sometimes people ask why I write crime fiction. The easy answer is that there is a reckoning at the end of a crime novel. Justice gets served. But one of my favorite Kirkus reviews said, “A favorite of fans who like their police procedurals with a strong ethical center.” Writing crime fiction, for me, isn’t just about justice being served, but about the decisions people make, and why. It’s about Samuel Craddock seeing even criminals as human beings with a story that has led them to a dark place. In one of the books he even speculates that a killer carries a burden knowing he or she has made a wrong choice and that they will feel some relief at being brought to justice. 

 My parents always had books around. We were on a very limited budget because my dad went to college only after I was a toddler. He went to school by day, and worked after class and on weekends. Money was very tight. But there were two things my parents didn’t scrimp on. My mother had a piano, and she belonged to a book-of-the-month club. And at every occasion for gifts, I got books. Kid’s books. The Bobbsey Twins. Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys. But I didn’t stick to those books I was an avid reader and I read my mother’s books as well. I never remember either of my parents taking note of what I was reading or telling me I was too young to read anything. 

So I knew about stories. I don’t remember when I first thought I could write. My dad wrote a story that was published when he was in college, and he was very proud of it, so that may have been what led me to believe that, I too, could write a story. I remember as a child making up plots. We lived on a farm when I was in the second and third grade, which meant I had plenty of alone time to tell myself stories. I vividly remember once walking in a plowed field and thinking about what I could find there that might be interesting enough to tell a story about. 

 It wasn’t until the fifth grade, when I read a classic sci-fi short story that I suddenly thought, “I could do that. I could a write a story like that.” I can’t remember actually following through at that time. But I do remember writing a story in middle school (which we called junior high school in those days) that my teacher read aloud. I was completely hooked after that, and began to scribble pieces of stories. 

 The rest is history!