Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  This wasn’t a memorial to the kaiser or his generals; it was a remembrance of the ordinary man taken from his shop or farm or office and made into a soldier, sent off to kill. Nothing was said here about the posters and propaganda that had beat the drums of hatred. Those men fought as bravely as they could, they died far from home, and in the end their sacrifice was in vain, pushed out of sight. It was not the end of war, this conflict. The Germans had marched in 1870 and would march again.

  We’re not really sure why that memorial touched us so deeply—possibly because it was shut away where no one was supposed to see it. As if the past didn’t exist. As if the dead didn’t matter, the pain and grief and heartache didn’t count any longer. Ghosts with nowhere to go now. At least the American memorial in Washington is still there for anyone to see, weathered and ignored as it is.

  Our voices, although soft, echoed here, and our footsteps as we left. We felt like intruders. Did families ever come here? Had the memorial been shut away to avoid seeing it taken away? As lovers of history, we are never eager to see the past destroyed, however sad or wrong or best forgotten. Sweeping it away only serves to sweep its lessons with it. For it’s knowing the past that makes us mindful of what we owe the future.

  The fact that this was in Germany is beside the point. We’d learned a great deal about the average soldier in the Great War, from whichever army, whichever battlefield. Many were brave; some were cowards; others did what they had to do and wanted only to survive to go home. No one wanted to be there. They just were, because someone had decided their fate for them.

  Whether we realize it at the time or later in our careers, what we’ve written about has changed us. The research, while enriching our story, also lingers in the memory, and the personal as opposed to the general somehow becomes a part of us. An experience that we’ve shared with people a century dead, but whose fate still has the power to touch us. Interacting with the past, through the people or the things left behind to tell their story, we’ve also learned from it. We see all too clearly how World War I changed our future, casting its shadow over much of the world today because of what happened there and in the treaty that was intended to end it. Instead, another war, a cold war, even problems today in Britain, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa—the Far East, too—had their beginnings in the Great War. Without even realizing it, we have paid dearly for it and will go on paying. We’ve come to realize that history is made up of millions of people who aren’t even a footnote in a book but whose lives shaped and informed that history. They became numbers, without names or faces or individuality, until their stories were lost. And with them, the reality of what they did and what they won or lost. Maybe it isn’t formal history vs. historical mysteries after all. Maybe historical mysteries breathe life into the dust of time and revive the mistakes as well as the victories. For us, the journey has been eye-opening and humbling and very, very human. Who knows how someone else might see it?

  As we left that German church, walking back into the sunshine of a spring day, we said something to our guide about finding the tower room, and he was more than a little embarrassed that we’d seen it.

  Finally, he shrugged and said, “You did not treat the soldiers coming home from Vietnam any kinder. And it wasn’t their war, either.”

  We didn’t have an answer to that.

  NUNS, MAGIC, AND STEPHEN KING

  – Robert Dugoni –

  IN THE SEVENTH GRADE, I WAS ASSIGNED TO WRITE A SPEECH from the perspective of a slave, a slave owner, or an abolitionist. I chose an abolitionist. I don’t recall being particularly excited about the assignment, nor do I recall writing my speech. What I do recall, quite vividly, is the morning I stood at the front of my class, without even a lectern to separate me from my classmates, and delivered that speech. Soon after I began, their facial expressions changed from bored interest to fear and angst. Some picked up their speech and quickly read through it. Some frantically scribbled.

  When I had finished, not one of my classmates clapped. They sat in silence, staring at me and looking uncomfortable. I looked to the back of the room, where my teacher, Sister Kathleen, stationed herself. She, too, looked perplexed. I wondered how I could have so completely blown the assignment. After a moment that felt like an eternity, Sister Kathleen seemed to recover. “Work on your speeches,” she said to the class. Then she gave me the parochial-school finger—her index finger—bending it repeatedly, beckoning me to follow her outside. I did so reluctantly, certain she would be escorting me to the principal’s office, a place where I had already spent a fair amount of time.

  By the time I reached the breezeway, I was already contemplating excuses I would tell my mother. I never got that chance. Sister Kathleen stopped me outside the adjacent seventh grade classroom. “Wait here,” she said without further explanation. A very long minute passed before she reopened the door and invited me inside. The students looked at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head. Sister Kathleen marched me to the front of the class, turned, and with a smile and touch of pride said simply, “Give your speech.”

  More than a little confused, I did as instructed, and I received the same reaction as in my own classroom. Sister Kathleen gave me a brief nod and escorted me to the door. As we left, I heard the teacher—I have long since forgotten her name—tell her students, “Work on your speeches.”

  What I had done and, more importantly, how I had done it would remain a mystery to me for many years despite many more writing assignments and newspaper articles. None would have the same emotional impact as that simple speech on slavery on my seventh grade class and teacher. It is the biggest mystery in writing—how to emotionally touch your reader with just your words.

  By Christmas 2004, I had embarked on my writing career, though without much success. My goddaughter, Amanda, gave me Stephen King’s book On Writing. Inside the cover, she wrote,

  December 25, 2004

  Dear Uncle Bob,

  Hopefully you’ll be a millionaire like Stephen King someday!

  Merry Christmas!

  Always, Amanda

  THAT WAS THE YEAR I’D HAD MY FIRST BOOK PUBLISHED—A true story of injustice called The Cyanide Canary. Sales did little to fulfill my goddaughter’s hope for me. On the heels of that book, I wrote two novels, one of which, The Jury Master, reached high on the New York Times bestseller list. I signed another two-book contract and then a third. I produced five novels in a series based on an attorney protagonist named David Sloane, yet none of those novels elicited the emotional response that my speech on slavery had elicited from twelve-year-old boys and girls.

  In July 2012, when the sales of my novels failed to satisfy my publisher, my contract was not renewed. I received the news while attending ThrillerFest at the Grand Central Hotel in New York City. I sat in my hotel room with two friends, discussing other possible careers. I felt like George Costanza in an episode of Seinfeld, throwing out the most ridiculous possibilities and trying to laugh at my failure. I came home from New York disillusioned and disappointed. I had two children in private school and a lot more tuition to pay to help them fulfill their dreams. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that.

  My books, I had been told, were good. My writing was solid. But that was sort of like the detached statements a mechanic would make when evaluating a car: “The engine is good. The tires are fine. It runs well.”

  I hadn’t struck an emotional chord, and I was left to wonder, again, why my novels had not impacted my readers emotionally, as that speech on slavery had done so many years before.

  With unexpected time on my hands, I finally sat down and read Stephen King’s book, which had sat unopened on the writing shelf in my office. I had never felt compelled to read it. I had book contracts to validate me as a writer. But I needed something now. I needed to read about how the most prolific writer of my generation had failed miserably and often at both writing and life. I needed to understand that great mystery—how a writer sitting at a desk can to
uch readers deep within their soul, move them to tears and laughter, and make them relate their own lives to the triumphs and tragedies of a fictional character.

  I needed to understand that the mystery of writing was being so totally honest with your reader that your words will transcend time and space, what Stephen King called telepathy.

  When I read that word, telepathy, I put the book down. I became that twelve-year-old boy again, standing in front of my classmates, baring my soul openly and honestly with raw, unfiltered emotion. I didn’t know a thing about the writing craft in the seventh grade, yet somehow I had been able to use words not only to describe the shame and humiliation and anger that a slave felt standing on an auction block but to transport my classmates to that auction block to see that slave, hear that auctioneer and those slave owners’ voices, and breathe in all the odors. I had not touched their minds. I had touched their hearts.

  Telepathy. That, I decided, was the answer to the mystery. The trick was learning how to do it.

  King’s book made me think of something that had happened to me at a conference in Surrey, British Columbia, years earlier, when I had just a few published novels to my name. I found myself on a panel with Diana Gabaldon, the ubersuccessful writer of the Outlander series. A member of the audience stood and asked Diana if she could explain “the magic.” He said nothing more. It soon became apparent that this was a question Diana had answered before. Without any hesitation, she explained to the audience that she wrote at night after her husband went to read or watch television. She said she would go into her office and shut the door. Then she’d light a candle and sit at her keyboard, waiting until her characters felt comfortable enough to speak to her. When a character spoke to her, regardless of the words spoken, she would type. She told the audience that the writer’s job was, in some respects, to transcribe the words of a story already told so that readers could experience the same story.

  Magic.

  Mystery.

  Telepathy.

  I closed King’s book and ruminated on his words for several days. During my years studying the craft, I had learned the traditional story structure espoused by Joseph Campbell and popularized by Chris Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey. I had studied Sol Stein’s book Stein on Writing. I had studied Donald Maass’s book Writing the Breakout Novel, as well as a dozen other craft books. Intellectually, I had learned and understood story structure and character development. And then it dawned on me. I thought again of that word, telepathy, and I realized that maybe the reason I had not been able to touch my readers’ hearts was because I had not been writing with my own. I realized that I had been writing from my brain, not from my heart. My words, carefully crafted, had lacked raw emotion, and my characters had been guarded, rather than honest. My writing had not been real, and so my words had not become real to my readers.

  I had to find that place I had stumbled upon so many years before, without any understanding of how or why. I had to find what Stephen King called the mystery of writing and what Diana Gabaldon called magic. I had to find stories already written and characters already alive and transcribe them raw and unfiltered so that readers could experience them.

  I had to believe in my very core, in my soul, that the mystery of writing was telepathy—magic.

  After my release by my publisher, I became intrigued with a character from one of my earlier novels—a most unexpected character, a female homicide detective named Tracy Crosswhite. I had no idea where Tracy had come from or why she had entered my novel Murder One. I had no idea why or how Tracy had become Seattle’s first female homicide detective, or how or why before becoming a Seattle police officer, she had first been a chemistry teacher in the small, fictitious town of Cedar Grove in the North Cascade Mountains. Her father was a well-respected country doctor, her mother a PTA mom who gardened and cooked. I had no idea about her relationship to her sister, Sarah, or why they competed in Single Action Shooting competitions, of which I had never heard or read a word. Though she had appeared on the pages of a novel I had written, Tracy was a complete mystery to me. I did not grow up in a small town. My father was not a country doctor. My mother was never a PTA mom. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve fired a handgun. I do have a sister. In fact, I have four. I also have five brothers. So Tracy’s life was not some subconscious manifestation of my life, and she was clearly not someone I had come to know.

  And yet she was alive in my novel and apparently just waiting to tell me her story.

  So I let her.

  I didn’t outline the novel because I didn’t yet know the story. I didn’t create biographies for the characters because I didn’t know the characters. I didn’t perform research because I didn’t yet know what I didn’t know. I needed Tracy Crosswhite to guide me to those revelations.

  I went into my office, I turned on classical music, sat, and waited. I waited until Tracy Crosswhite felt comfortable telling me who she was and how she had come to be. Her story. Was it frightening? At times. The left side of my brain, the side that focuses on logic, science, and mathematics, would occasionally kick in and tell me this was a crazy way to write a novel… without an outline, without well-defined characters with biographies, without research. But I had something else going for me besides the hours I had spent studying and developing my writing craft.

  I had time. I had no contractual deadline to meet. I could be patient and allow the magic to happen. The right side of my brain would kick back in and tell me that writing was a mystery. Writing was magic. Writing was telepathy.

  And so, recalling Stephen King and Diana Gabaldon’s words, I put my butt in my writing chair. The story is out there, I told myself. Trust the process. Trust the magic. Tell the story already written.

  And so I did. Tracy Crosswhite told me she had suffered a tremendous loss and was struggling to find her way through life, like all of us. She told me she was confused and hurt and bitter and angry. I understood in my heart what she meant because I felt very much the same. She told me she wanted to know why a benevolent creator would allow so much evil to exist and why she had suffered so deeply. She wanted to believe there remained something good in the world, something meant for her, and that she would someday find it. But in the interim, she was just fighting to survive.

  I wrote the first draft of My Sister’s Grave in two months. I realized that at some point during the process of writing that novel I had stopped thinking about what was going to happen next, who was to come on stage and who was to exit, what the climax was going to be, and how the story would end. Instead, I trusted the magic. I trusted that the story existed, that the characters would come into and out of the scenes as needed and, more importantly, as real people.

  When I finished, I felt in my heart that this novel was different from the others I had written. This novel and these characters were real to me. The settings were real places. The events that transpired were real events. Would I be able to achieve what Stephen King called telepathy and Diana Gabaldon called magic? Would readers experience my novel as I had experienced it, in their hearts? Would they be moved as my seventh grade classmates had once been moved?

  The book was published, and the first reader reviews didn’t critique the plot or the characters’ motivations. They didn’t question the research or the fact that I was a man writing about a female protagonist. They wanted to know what happened next for Tracy Crosswhite, and they were deeply concerned that she would be okay. One woman from back East wrote, “You told the story of my life.”

  Telepathy. Magic.

  Had I solved the mystery that had plagued me for forty years? Did I finally understand what the truly great writers meant when they said, “Write from the heart”?

  About the same time, I went back to another project I had started but never finished. Oh, I had written the novel to the end, but something about what I had written made the story feel incomplete. The story was of a young boy born with ocular albinism—red eyes. This young boy, like Harry Pott
er, could not hide his anomaly, no matter how much he was bullied and abused. He had to learn to live with it. He had to grow from it. I had no idea where this young boy with the extraordinary eyes had come from. I had never heard of ocular albinism until I created him. I had no idea what Sam Hell wanted or why it was important that I tell his story. It wasn’t enough that Sam wanted to be normal, that he wanted to be like all the other kids in his school. It wasn’t enough that he wanted to change the color of his eyes, something that was not going to happen in the 1960s or even the 1970s.

  As with Tracy Crosswhite, I did not know where this young boy had come from. My youngest brother has Down syndrome, but Sam Hell is not my brother. Sam Hell also lived in Burlingame, California, but he is not me. He’s an only child. I’m one of ten. He has ocular albinism, which subjects him to ridicule. I can’t recall a single instance in which I was bullied. Sam was another mystery, and the book had sat dormant in a file on my computer for years. Every so often I’d open the file and read parts of the story, but the mystery of Sam Hell remained hidden from me. I worked on my other projects, all the while with Sam in the back of my mind.

  After my Stephen King epiphany, I realized that I had made the same mistake with Sam Hell as with my other novels. I’d written Sam not from my heart but from my brain, and in so doing I had failed to trust the magic. I had fit Sam into a well-conceived outline. I had not, however, let him live. I had not allowed him to tell me his story. I’d failed to grasp what so many parents fail to grasp. Our children are not us. Their lives are not our lives. Sam Hell had his own life, his own trials and tribulations, his own achievements and failures. I needed to get out of the way and let Sam tell me his story. To solve the ten-year mystery of who Sam Hell truly was, I first needed to let the magic happen.