If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Don’t Write

One Sunday afternoon several years ago, a friend called to ask if I’d heard anything from our mutual friend Dorothy in the past few days. I said yes, that we talked on the telephone Friday night. When Dorothy did not show up to teach a class at her church on Sunday morning, the phone calls started. It seemed I was the last to have contact with her.

A half dozen of us rushed to Dorothy’s house, where we found her car in the driveway of her mobile home just two blocks away from a fire station. While we waited for emergency vehicles to arrive, a couple walked around the outside of the trailer and detected a light on in the back bedroom, but drapery was closed. However, they thought they saw a bit of arm in the crack of light around the edge of the drapery. Dorothy seemed to be on the floor.

In the meantime, a neighbor, who had a similar residence, managed to remove a window on the front of the house, climb through the space, and open the front door. By that time, the paramedics had arrived, while we friends stood around and watched them enter the place. I wondered which of us would follow them inside. It became evident not a one of them would go in. I couldn’t believe it—they were afraid to go in—yet they knew Dorothy better than I did. But I didn’t hesitate, not knowing whether Dorothy was dead or alive. I knew I could handle it.

Dorothy was alive, on the floor, in her slip, having suffered a stroke. She was somewhat alert, but apparently had fallen from her bed, possibly on Friday night, as no one in her neighborhood had seen her on Saturday. As the gurney rolled out of the house, I got the answer from her—by her weak squeeze of my hand—as to which hospital she preferred. Some of those friends, I think, went on to the hospital but I came home. A patient like that doesn’t need a crowd around her.

Dorothy, in her eighties then, recovered and moved to a brand new little house in California near one of her daughters, and survived several more years.

I’m telling you this to say, if you want to write fiction, you’d better have the nerve to walk into such a situation as I did, for your characters will have to, only probably much worse situations, and you’ll need to describe them. The idea is to do this so well that you make your readers cry. That’s reaching their emotions, what fiction is all about.

♥