That’s a question a reader asked after he finished my fictional short story “Clarisse” in my first short story collection, Gone to Ground.  At first, I didn’t see the significance.  As far as I knew, I’d never been a woman and I was sure I’d never worked in a paint department.  End of story.  But as I thought about what lay behind the question, I realized that what he really wanted to know was, what was the genesis of this short story and how was I able (if indeed, I was) to write convincingly in the voice of a woman who did work in a paint department.

So let’s talk about where my short story ideas come from.  In fact, most of my short stories grow out of some experience I’ve had or heard about.  I’m an inveterate eavesdropper and take notes of conversations that intrigue me.  One of my short plays, Oakland Triptych, is a good example.  Over a period of several months, I overheard and took notes of one-sided cell phone “conversations” while I waited for flights to L.A. out of the Oakland International Airport.  At night in my hotel, I transcribed these monologues (that’s really what they were since I could only hear one side of each conversation) as accurately as possible.  Then I let them ferment.  When I had three monologues that I thought held promise, I worked through them, one-by-one and tried to imagine what the other party might have said to elicit the speaker’s next lines of dialogue.  Even though I knew they wouldn’t be part of the final product, I needed to have as deep an understanding as possible of each character and his/her motives.  Once I was satisfied that the three conversations I’d created made sense and were as powerful as I could make them, I removed the second (unheard) dialogue and edited the remaining monologues so they would work as very short, stand-alone, one-character plays.  Each of the three needed to have sufficient dramatic structure to keep an audience engaged, even for a short time.  The result:  Oakland Triptych .

I’ll tell you where Clarisse came from  in my next post.