Thefts

Morgan’s Mill is finally out as an e-book.  A lot of research went into this one and almost as many revisions as the years it rode the bench.   The seed of the original idea came from some family history — maternal ancestors who once owned a small gristmill across the road from their farm in Eastern Shore Maryland.  At one point I thought about trying to persuade the then owner of the property to let me salvage the  millstones from the ruins.  But I was living in Seattle and nothing came of it except one of the ideas that later coalesced into the plot of a suspense novel.

Writing about what you know or personally experience is a terrific idea—if you are fortunate (or not) to be living or insist on living an eventful, dramatic life.  You can fill in the blanks as to what kind of life that might be, who’s done it and lived to tell the tale.  We all have our favorites.

Some writers, by choice or fate, live and then write about experiences others wish they’d had.  Some manage to put a book together in the midst of squalls and battles, whether internal or external, defying a prevalent belief that in order to write novels you have to lead a fairly placid life—hence all the novel-writing college professors.

Well, I’m neither a college professor nor have I had the sort of life that would make for a juicy memoir, so I have to make do with research, a pretty active imagination and…theft.

I don’t mean stealing the published words of others or, if you’re a memoir-monger, fabricating events that never happened in order to make your  life book-worthy.  (Actually, we’re all a little guilty.  We may not wind up apologizing for lies on prominent talk shows but we all tweak the past, to one degree or another — fake notches to the belt, the touchdown or home run that never happened, or reversing the score in the game of who dumped whom).

No, I mean the theft of, say, family history, conversations overheard in the office or at Starbuck’s; stories of things that happened to others that are just too delicious not to scribble down and stuff in a book somewhere; thefts of landscapes and what happened on a city corner as you walked to work; the mole on your third-grade teacher’s face; the laugh of your first or last love; the way a particularly disliked and useless boss sniffed his fingers when he didn’t think anyone was watching.

Writers are thieves, with boundless opportunities for theft.

Much like Jimmy Davis in Morgan’s Mill, I used to keep a wooden box I made myself, to carry around wherever I went, just in case I saw or heard or thought of something that needed to live on after the moment.  The box — hinged cover and all — was a handy place to stash the loot. When it became filled with notes and observations I’d hastily recorded, I’d type them up for later use.  My sons still kid me now about the habit, though at the time I undoubtedly embarrassed the hell out of them.

For a writer everything goes ‘into the hopper’ which is, of course, what millers used to do with the grist—the grain—that would come out the other end as flour for bread.

There’s a lot in Morgan’s Mill that was researched, or came out of the box I used to carry until it was retired for a newer model.  But there’s one theft that has to come with a confession.  You can read more about it in the essay I’ve posted about a friend of mine I named  “C.”.

Now, it’s been a while and I’m pretty sure C.  never did finish the book he was working on.  But the title he gave it was too good to remain dormant forever.  So I stole it, three words is all, to live on as a small part of Morgan’s Mill.

If you’re still out there, C., and you wonder whatever happened to your comrade-in-literary-arms, and happen to read Morgan’s Mill, just remember that you still owe me 750 bucks.

We’ll call it even.