You get your inspiration from life or from art.
Sometimes the spark comes from something I read in a novel
or something I see in a movie and sometimes the spark comes from a true story.
Writing is what you do with that inspiration, how you make
the points you want to make, draw the conclusions you want to draw or just to
leave the questions you’d like to leave with the reader.
Nothing new there, writers have been doing that forever.
Standard Operating Procedure, as they say.
And yet, once in a while I’m a little uncomfortable with the
idea of fictionalizing real people and their personal situations.
The next book I have coming out, Black Rock, is based on three true stories – what we call the
October Crisis in Canada, the bombings, armed robberies, kidnapings and murder
that went on through the 60s and came to a head in October 1970, the story of a
serial killer named Wayne Boden who killed four women between 1969 and 1971 and
the murder of a teenaged girl in 1975.
When I started the research, not sure if it would be a book
or not, I’d never heard of Boden or his victims. I started with the idea of a murder
not getting enough attention because of the huge investigation into the
terrorism at the time. I thought that resonated with the world today enough to
be relevant. For the murder, I didn’t have a particular one in mind, but I
figured with all that police attention on the terrorists there had to be
something that wasn’t getting enough attention.
I remembered a murder that took place in 1975. I remembered
that one because the victim was a girl my own age, in the same grade I was in
but at a different high school. Her name was
Sharron Prior.
She left her house in the early evening on a Saturday intending to walk a few
blocks to a restaurant to meet her friends. Somewhere between her house and the
restaurant she disappeared. I remember the searches over the Easter weekend and
the story in the paper the next week when her body was found, a small story at
the bottom of
page five.
The front page headline that day was, “Pincers near panicky Saigon.” I
delivered that newspaper to about 60 houses that morning.
My intention was to fictionalize that story, move it back a
few years and make it the murder that didn’t get enough attention because of the
October Crisis.
But that murder is still unsolved. And Sharron Prior’s
mother, Yvonne, is still doing everything she can to get it solved. There is
still a reward for information.
So, as writers do, I felt that fictionalizing the story was
invading peoples’ personal lives.
Would it be too much of an invasion?
Of course, there’s no definitive answer to that question, it’s
different for every writer and every situation.
Then as I was researching the October Crisis I discovered
Boden and his victims. Again, small stories buried deep in the paper. So, I
felt if these murders weren’t getting much media attention it was easy to make
the connection they also weren’t getting enough police attention.
I was (and still am, frankly) wondering about still fictionalizing
the 1975 murder because it’s still an open case. I’m not sure I believe there
is such a thing as “closure,” but I’m certain that an open murder investigation
is still an open wound.
So I talked myself into the idea that maybe fictionalizing
Sharron Prior’s murder would bring a small bit of attention to it, that it might
help.
Ever go a week without a justification? (name the movie)