Heroine on Vacation

I'm rushing a bit to get this blog post done because I've been working on a short story. Actually a new story as the first one wasn't going anywhere because my heroine Faith (from the Scrap This mystery series) just didn't want to participate. Originally, I wanted to title this when your heroine has you on ignore but that was a little depressing. And not quite accurate.

I had already decided she was the lead in the story. I outlined the main elements of the plot. I started writing and after two pages I was stuck. At first, I thought I started the story in the wrong place so I rewrote it. Still wasn't right. I wrote and rewrote the beginning of the story for weeks. I loved the plot but it wasn't coming together. It refused to move forward. All the characters seemed to hover around, doing something yet basically nothing. It was starting to stress me out. There was an approaching deadline. What was wrong?

I stepped away for a day and realized the issue was that Faith wasn't interested in being in the story. This mystery wasn't hers to tell. Once I released Faith from solving the crime, a character popped into my head. Her backstory. How she and the other characters fit and conflicted with each other. The story is flowing and I'm intrigued by this heroine. I don't know why Faith wasn't fitting in the story. All I could think is that maybe Faith needed a vacation.

Do you trespass?

One weekend recently I showed up to teach a writing class that was to be held on the property of a county park. The class was scheduled for ten o'clock. I showed up about 15 minutes early and found a couple of students waiting outside an impressive fence with a chain, a serious padlock, and a No Trespassing sign.

No problem; we were early. We chatted on; more students came. We hardly noticed that a half hour passed. No one showed up to let us in. A couple of delivery people came by in trucks and left when they realized there was no entry. We made a few calls with our cells—first to my contact at the school, who suggested I call the park police, whosuggested I call the city police, and so on.

The boring part of the story is that eventually someone came to let us in.

The interesting part happened while we were waiting.

A young woman pulled up in a low red sports car. She got out and addressed us.

"I have to get in there," she said. "I was at a wedding in the park last night and left my purse."

We shrugged and explained that there was nothing we could do until someone came with a key to the padlock, and we did expect the city police at any minute.

She grunted. The next thing we knew, she was scaling the fence. She plopped down on the other side. About ten minutes later, she approached the fence again, from the inside, and climbed out.

In her hands were a purse, a pair of shoes, and a bra.

She gave us a wink, got in her car and drove off.

My writing students and I got a lot of mileage out of the incident, creating many colorful back stories.

One thing that impressed me was the young woman's willingness to disregard the No Trespassing sign and its warning of a heavy fine.

I thought about how I am such a rule-keeper (well, most of the time). For me, the physical difficulty of scaling a fence pales in comparison to the mental and psychological difficulty of breaking the law.

Maybe that's why I write fiction—to break laws vicariously!




Would you have climbed that fence?