Treasure Island

  

A few days ago my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken posted a column about two stories he'd recently had published that drew heavily on his own life experiences. I suspect all of us have occasionally used our  personal experiences to provide story material--and I seem to be doing it more often in recent years. Maybe because I'm getting older, and spending more time with my own memories. (Notice I didn't say daydreaming.)

Seriously, though, sometimes it does pay to write what you know--and what we know best are things that have happened to us.

One example of that was my story "Ship Island," which appeared this past Sunday in Issue #252 of Black Cat Weekly, and which, coincidentally, was Michael's pick-of-the-week.

Ship Island

My first idea for that story came from a booksigning I did long ago in the town of Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I met a lady there whose family had for many years run a passenger ferry back and forth to Ship Island, one of the barrier islands several miles offshore. I talked with her a long time, and found her tales interesting and delightful. I've always loved the Coast anyway, and had once lived down there for seven months, in an apartment on the beach, during my stay in the Air Force. I'd even been to Ship Island myself, on several occasions.

Anyhow, when I returned home from this signing, I did some research on the island and its history, and decided it'd be fun to write a mystery story about it, and specifically about Fort Massachusetts, a 19th-century brick fort that's still standing, on the west end of the island. It's a fascinating place to visit.

Fort Massachusetts

I was already thinking, at that time, of doing some kind of story about a pair of lifelong rough-around-the-edges friends who reminded me a bit of Texas author Joe Lansdale's wonderful characters Hap and Leonard--and, as sometimes happens, these two guys I had created in my head wound up being the heroes of my newly-conceived Ship Island story. The plot is more than a little weird: They find, tucked away in a recently-deceased relative's possessions, a rough map pointing to a fortune in Spanish gold, supposedly buried long ago inside a Civil War-era fort on one end of an island off the Mississippi coast, and decide to secretly sail to the island, dig up the hidden gold, and become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Their grand adventure, however, turns out to be harder and more dangerous than they'd figured, since they soon discover they aren't the only ones with a map to the treasure.

Writing the story itself turned out to be not hard but easy--in fact, it was one of the easiest and most enjoyable stories I've ever written, and I think much of that was because of my own still-vivid memories of the island and the fort and the trip there and back. Also, I was comforted by the fact that most of the things I was describing were real and accurate because I had seen them firsthand. I wrote the whole story in one long sitting.

Fast-forwarding a while, I eventually sold that story to Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and when that magazine gasped its last breath and put all four feet in the air before "Ship Island" could be published, editor Michael Bracken suggested it for a future issue of Black Cat Weekly. (Thank you, old friend.)

Other stories that have relied a great deal on my own past were "Calculus 1" (The Saturday Evening Post), based on a cool but ill-advised college prank; "Jackpot Mode" (Strand Magazine) about an ATM system I worked with during my years at IBM; "The Winslow Tunnel" (Amazon Shorts), based on one of our family vacations; "Knight Music" (Woman's World), from my memories as part of an amateur band; "Cargo" (Black Cat Weekly), about a particularly strange night during my Air Force years; "The Jumper" (Crimestalker Casebook), based on yet another misguided college experience; and many others.

Now, my questions for today. Have any of you, my fellow writers, incorporated your own memories in your short stories or novels? If so, did you find it hard to fictionalize those incidents, and maybe make the events more interesting than they were in real life? Did you have fun doing it? How often do you seem to use your past experiences as story fodder? I know some of you have responded to similar questions asked in Michael's column the other day, but I'd love to hear more examples.

Meanwhile, if you see this issue of Black Cat Weekly, I hope you'll like my buried-treasure story.

And--before I forget--HAPPY 250th BIRTHDAY, US of A!