Will you be a character in a book someday?
If you like to write, you might want to warn your friends that the stories they tell you might end up in print someday. That's how I got my inspiration for writing I'll Be Watching — in a restaurant, over hamburgers.
See, my friend Marilyn met us all one evening for burgers. When I say "us" I mean me, my husband Rob, and our two big kids Cecilia and Drew. We're all big Marilyn fans. Well, Mar would get to talking and she'd have the best stories to tell.
This time, we were chowing down on burgers and fries and she asked Rob,
"So how's the farm in Saskatchewan?" And Rob says, with a mouth full of food,
"Oood." And Mar says,
"You know my dad grew up in Saskatchewan." And I say, with a french fry poised to enter my mouth, "Oh, I didn't know that."
And she was off, telling how, in the very early days of World War II, her dad was the youngest of several brothers and sisters, how their mother had died, and their father had remarried, out of convenience, a woman the kids didn't get along with at all. And then when their father died, the children were left in the care of this woman who wasn't their mother, who didn't like them and whom they didn't like in return. Well, the step-mother then abandoned the children for, I think two years — a terribly long time to try to scrape by on their own.
So after our burger and fries with Mar, I couldn't get that family out of my head and I knew I would have to write about them if I was ever going to get them out of my head. And I never got any more information out of Mar that what she told us that night, so I'd have to depend on the characters themselves to tell me the rest of their story.
Now when someone starts in on a story that's stranger than fiction, someone else in the group often pipes up and says, "Watch out — Pamela might put you in a book." That's what writers do.
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