The first short story I wrote is titled The Cardboard Fireplace. It focuses on girl meets boy—sort of.
The girl met a boy long ago and never mentioned her feelings for him. He was the “it” guy in high school, and she never felt she measured up. Years later, thanks to the Internet, she reaches out to him through a high-school connection website. They end up talking after her nasty divorce that had left her mentally paralyzed.
Come to find out, the boy always liked her too.
She has issues, and the boy, now a grown man, becomes the hero who helps her cope. She’d mentioned on their first date that she’d rather have a cardboard fireplace to snuggle up with a kind man than real flames to snuggle up with a monster.
Later, he buys her—you guessed it—a cardboard fireplace.
Nice, right? The story evokes romance and breathless moments. It is, by far, one of my favorite works.
Yet it was also detrimentally comfortable to write.
It’s easier (although writing is never completely easy) to write about the things we cherish, especially from the point of view of the good guys. But what happens when we step out of that comfort zone, enter a world far different from the roses and the sunshine?
This is where my fine arts studies took me, to that cave where I had to write about a villain from his point of view. The challenge? I had to make him sympathetic and yes, likeable.
How the hell would I do that?
I set the scene in a convenience store with dead bodies littering the ground. Blood coated the floor. The protagonist was standing there, holding his gun, looking around at the effects of his madness. Had this assignment fallen into my hands today, I would have picked a different plot. Right now, the climate on this is too raw and painful.
The story centered on his journey from the back of the store to the entrance. Two things he knew awaited him on the outside: law enforcement and the end of life.
But with each step toward the entrance, we learn about him, his pain, and his anguish over losing his family in a previous incident. A once reasonable guy turned into someone else at the hands of the evil monster known as life.
That story made me grow as a writer, made me hone a skill I never thought I could: create somebody I refuse to become.
Some characters are so evil they are beyond sympathy. If you’ve read my novels, you’ve witnessed that. I’m merely saying that we should push ourselves into different worlds, into different shoes in order to truly grow.