Creative Writing; An Attempt to Satisfy Personal Curiosity by Bronson L. "Bo" Parker

As to biographical information, i. e., who I am; well I'm still trying to figure that one out. For more than half a century, I've hidden behind words, first as a news and sports reporter with a BS in Journalism from UT-Knoxville, my hometown.

Following that career, a quarter century was spent writing historical non-fiction. So, it was with a lot of naiveté and way too much self confidence that I decided some five years ago to write a novel, a mystery. I managed to get a well-known mystery writer with some forty books published to review my first manuscript. He sent me an eleven-page, single spaced letter. The first page and a half told me what I had done correctly. The other nine and a half pages listed the things I needed to learn. I am still learning.

CREATIVE WRITING; AN ATTEMPT TO SATISFY PERSONAL CURIOSITY
by
Bronson L. Parker




An insatiable curiosity has plagued me since early childhood. Much to “Santa’s” chagrin, interest was soon lost in merely winding up his gift of a toy train and watch it roll around an oval track. Taking apart the locomotive proved to be more fun. The innards of wind-up alarm clocks also became a favorite target. How’d they work?


This curiosity never waned. But people rather than mechanical things became the focus later in life when joining the working world as a news reporter, a craft governed by the five Ws of Journalism 101: who, what, where, when, and why. It was an easy life. Go out, get the facts, write the story, and move on. There were times, however, when the five Ws of a story satisfied the city editor, but not my curiosity.


A typical story of the day might be: A local businessman, traveling alone near midnight on a winding country road south of the city, was fatally injured when his car left the road and smashed into a tree.  There was no evidence of another vehicle involved, or that the man was intoxicated. The county sheriff’s deputies who handled the accident concluded it was simply a matter of driving too fast on a narrow road and losing control.


The news story would cover the five Ws. But such an incident was only one moment in a man’s life. What was the rest of his story? What was going on in his life that led him to be in that part of the county, over thirty miles away from both his home and business, at that time of night, and driving so fast? In the harried cycle of daily publication, those type stories disappeared into the realm of yesterday’s news, but they served to heighten my curiosity. “Why’d he do that?”


My curiosity stayed with me during the years after leaving the newspaper business, a time devoted to writing historical non-fiction.  This exercise was a more relaxed, slower process that allowed digging longer and deeper. Documentation could be found that included the location of every piece of field artillery used in a specific Civil War battle. However, in most cases, no amount of research unearthed an explanation for what motivated the men involved to made the decisions that led to the battle, or why they did what they did during it.  “Why’d they do that?”


After giving in to the persistent urging of family and friends to try my hand at creative writing, the first step back into that realm since college, the question became: how does one go about writing a novel?
Personal mentoring was combined with reading a lot of “how-to” books.  Several contained the phrases, “Write what you like,” and “Write what you know.”


Reading has never been considered a sprint race. A wham, bam, thank you, ma’am story without any explanation for the wham or the bam is not that satisfying. Those that made the biggest impression, the ones remembered, were those that told the entire story. They sated my curiosity within the context of the story. They did not make me stop and ask the question, “Why’d he or she do that?”


What was known is that each individual existence is the sum of all that has been experienced, a list of things so numerous and varied it defies enumeration. In the aggregate, these experiences define each person as distinctly as do fingerprints. Some part of that experience becomes the why, the reason a person says or does something at a given moment in their lives.


After seventy plus years of traveling along life’s road, a wealth of first-hand experience existed that spanned the spectrum from moments of happiness, joy, and contentment to encounters with unseen potholes; some small, of minor consequence, others jarringly deep, and life changing. They were viewed as explanations for the whys that followed.


So why not use that personal experience, at least in a fictional world, as a way to satisfy my curiosity about human nature? It would more than the creation a cast of characters to be plugged into a plot.  The story would be built around events, good and bad, that can affect a life. They would become the explanations for why things happened.  The characters and plot would be vehicles to tell the story.


This approach to creative writing now occupies much of my time; too much, if you ask my friends.  Some say it’s become an obsession. Others have called it a form of exorcism. Neither opinion has been rebutted.  It’s a slow process, one that would never support a book-a-year schedule.


It slow because finding the answer to the question, “Why’d he do that?” has proven to be far more difficult than assumed. It’s a complicated puzzle with many more pieces than first envisioned.  Looking for it, based on personal experience, is at times as difficult as looking for it in historical documents. The approach requires pulling memories and feelings off a back shelf of the mind and spending a lot of time thinking about another question.


“Why did I do that?”