Standing at the Crossroads

If you’re not already a writer, here’s news: you have a book in you.  Maybe several.  Everybody does.

Story-writing is myth-making.  We create stories that help us understand  our own experience, shape our own lives.

I know this because it was the case with my first mystery.  It’s why first books often rush out as if they can’t wait to see the light of day, and why they’re often very powerful, even if flawed by an insufficient grasp of things like plotting.

I’d been wanting to write a mystery for twenty years–ever since I started reading them in grad school as a welcome break from things like Paradise Lost.  The idea simmered inside me until 1989 when, after years of spending my vacations on my scholarly writing, I decided I deserved a break.

I sat down at the computer on January 2.  I’ve since become a very methodical outliner, but I didn’t outline that project.  I didn’t have to.  It came pouring out as if it was writing itself.  One day as I was going at it full tilt, I hurried down to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup and slipped on the stairs, the back of my head thumping each step all the way to the bottom.  I was so excited about what I was writing that I scarcely felt any pain.  I just jumped up, refilled my cup, and returned to the computer.  Three weeks later my first mystery was finished.

And what was it about–the book so eager to be born that I could scarcely move my fingers fast enough to key it in?

It was set in the world that I inhabited at the time, the academic world.  And like many first mysteries, it aimed to settle old scores.  I murdered a self-absorbed colleague, and I lampooned two department chairs, one–a male–from my first teaching job and the other–a female–from my current school.  In my fictional world they were as repellent as in real life, but now they were yoked together in marriage.  The male, who was the titular department chair in my story, was a henpecked nonentity.  He spent his days dozing in an armchair while the female, who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, ran the department with a heavy hand and loads of favoritism.

But in retrospect I realize that the book was really about the fact that I wanted to write a book.  Not literally, but the subplot involved a romantic triangle that played out as an allegory of self-discovery.

My sleuth was me, an earnest young female professor trying to make her way in a demanding job.  Into her life came a new colleague, a brilliant scholar, as charming and genuine as he was good looking. He was totally smitten by my sleuth, and she was attracted to him, flattered by the attentions of such a luminary.

But she’d been conscripted by the department chair’s wife to offer a private tutorial to the campus problem child–a young man who’d been dropping and failing classes for years.  He was only allowed to keep enrolling because his father was a campus benefactor.  The problem child was slender and graceful, with unruly black hair, and he wore a tiny dangling jackknife as an earring.  He looked like Aidan Quinn in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Much to my sleuth’s dismay, she was attracted to this unsuitable character, her heart pounding with excitement as she made her way up the stairs to the seminar room where they had their tutorial sessions.  And he seemed attracted to her, unlikely as such a scenario might be in real life, where more likely he’d be chasing a Madonna-clone around the East Village.  But in my story, their mutual attraction became irresistible one day.  And the fact that the tutorial room had a long table rather than rows of little desks enabled me to write a rather breathless sex scene.  (Well, it was a first novel.)

But then the problem child dropped out of sight for the whole second half of the book, leaving my sleuth with a broken heart.  He reappeared for the dramatic climax in which the mystery was solved–but only after the department chair’s evil wife came within an inch of being dismembered by a chain saw.

Once the police had come and gone, three people remained, my sleuth, the handsome scholar, and the problem child.  Each man gazed at her, begging without words for her to choose between them.  Finally the problem child spoke, asking, “Wanta go somewhere and talk?”

The book’s last line shamelessly plagiarized James Joyce, the moment when Molly Bloom reaches the climax of her orgasm:  “Yes,” I said.  “Yes, I will.  Yes.”

Analyzing my book now, I realize that with the romantic triangle my psyche was asking me to make a choice of lives, like the myth of Hercules at the crossroads.  Would I continue as a responsible, respectable teacher whose writing projects were destined to wind up only on the shelves of other scholars?  Or would I gamble on writing fiction–though the rewards were much less certain?

Postscript: that mystery got an agent, quite a reputable one, who worked at selling it for a year, though she never succeeded.  She told me she couldn’t understand why my sleuth turned down that eminently suitable scholar boyfriend to go off with a disreputable weirdo.

Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar.  She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage.  Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com .  This first appeared in Writers Plot–August 2, 2008.