The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.—Albert Einstein.
While I was waiting for some edits to come in on
my novel, I launched into a short story.
When I was twenty years old I spent a year or so as a police dispatcher in a small town on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles. It wasn’t quite Andy of Mayberry, but it was close. The story is about a particular graveyard shift I worked and some of the characters in the department, one of them based on a real officer, and the other one I made up.
The first challenge is that the story involves police officers, but this is not a cop story. It is about people and characters and it just happens to take place in a police department. Crime and cops are a strong presence in fiction and it is hard to keep those elements contained and bring out the real story.
I think I have done it. We’ll see what my critique group has to say.
The other challenge is the point of view. The chief action in the story is between the dispatcher and one of the officers on the shift. The story is told from the point of view of another officer who is listening to this drama at breakfast the next morning and injecting his own opinions about these two people along the way. The story is related in flashback s from another character through the narrator, the narrator’s own involvement in the story, and then the action switches to the breakfast diner as the story starts to resolve itself throughout the course of the meal and afterwards.
Bottom line, the story is being told by one narrator who is relating two other points of view, plus his own observations and involvement.
I am almost done with the draft. It will take some reworking to make sure the reader can follow the action. There are also some themes I need to bring to the forefront. If I do this right, it will be a great story. If I do it wrong, it will be a disaster.
I have work to do.
See ya’ later.
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