Writing
has always been a part of my life.
As a farm kid, I was sometimes dissatisfied with the stories my parents
and other family members read to me. I concluded that resetting them in modern
times and changing the endings could improve the stories. During my fourth
grade year at a one-room school, I read the World Book Encyclopedia.
Dissatisfied with its history of Greece and the Greek write-up in my world
history book, I started writing my own Greek history, abandoned when summer
came and never revived. These projects were undertaken in the winter, after the
cows were milked and the hogs fed, when the days were short, and sitting by the
fire with a pad of paper and pencil was a pleasant way to spend the long
evenings.
In
college my English literature and French classes required lots of writing. I
was a better writer in French than a speaker of the language. On graduation I was admitted to
Columbia University for a graduate degree in history of drama to prepare for a
career as a professor. The summer I graduated I went to New York City and spent
time at the Columbia Library preparing for my classes in the fall.
Fate
intervened, in this case my draft board, and before classes began in September
1954 Uncle Sam decided he needed my services. Thanks to a total immersion, one-year Spanish class in high
school taught by a college professor, I ended up in Panama as a special agent
in the Army Counterintelligence Corps.
I would have preferred the station in Paris, but Panama was better than
Korea where most of my training class ended up. After graduating from college I was a high school English
teacher for a semester, helping create my Panamanian CIC cover story that I was
an English teacher in a private school in Panama. I wasn’t a teacher, but I
learned a lot about some things I couldn’t talk about.
While
in Panama I abandoned teaching as a career and decided to be a lawyer. I applied to Harvard Law School and was
accepted. My classes required writing, and I won first prize in a legal
document-drafting program. While
in law school I was also a Teaching Fellow in the English Department at Harvard
College teaching grammar and writing to foreign students.
My
legal career involved a constant flow of contracts and prospectuses for securities
offering and the development of firm-wide training programs that included
drafting and other writing projects.
When
I started writing fiction is
difficult to answer. The children’s stories I “modified”? The reports about
Communist and other nefarious activities I wrote as a special agent in Panama?
Sometimes the “facts” needed a little coloring to get attention at
Headquarters, which designated my reports as the standard for good
writing. Actually, my Panamanian
secretary did the first drafts, she being a better speller than I, and I was
the editor. The sisters at the convent school she attended were good writing
teachers. Some of the prospectuses for public offerings I worked on as a lawyer
may have approached fiction, although none ever landed in court.
A
couple of years ago I commenced writing a fictionalized version of my tour of
duty entitled Hot Times in Panamá: What
Would You Do to Serve Your Country, a novel published earlier this year (frankebabb.blogspot.com).
That’s when I’ll take the responsibility for writing fiction. Fiction writing isn’t easy, though. You think you’ve told the story
correctly, and then a character accuses you telepathically that you’ve never
understood her and demands you write another story to “get the facts right.” What does a fictional character know
about “facts”? How does she know what’s “right”? Sometimes it’s like living
with the enemy.
