Writers are like hoarders—you stash all your little stories and lines from your life (my high school friends still remember me with my notebook). “Never date a guy who turns more heads than you do,” —interesting advice from a dear friend during college, which I had my character, Virginia, giving to her daughter years later in False Alarm. Your friends might be sick of your stuff, but writing is a way to reuse it for a whole new audience. For instance, take my trip to Belize—an incredible place, but when we arrived the hotel warned us that the Guatemalan rebels had been coming out of the jungle and hijacking tourists. A hotel in our vicinity had been held hostage—I was thinking Bel Canto or worse. You drive in on a long bumpy road to the middle of nowhere, which at least has lush plants and pretty birds and good red wine—and the Robins Crusoe bungalow we checked into was very cool. But the staff at one place pleasantly asked us to put a 15-foot 2 x 4 against the door, which was provided (!), and seemed like something you’d do in a barn to keep the horses in. But face it, you’re barricading yourself in. And from what? I never got a straight answer. Then you’re supposed to sound a Conch shell horn if trouble arises. In fact, the phone is a conch shell, but it only goes to the front desk—more like a tin can for the telephone game. Understandable why they wouldn’t let us drive ourselves to some Mayan caves, where you canoe in for miles through a dark, narrowing passageway in the mountain—you actually have to duck in places to avoid the stalactites. At one point the guide shut off our only light—just for fun. He told us that many people had had to turn around by that point. I stayed the course because I wasn’t going to chicken out in front him and I wasn’t even speaking to the crazy husband by then. I’d wanted to go to the butterfly farm. Then the guide showed us a Mayan sacrificial altar complete with a skull, which of course appealed to you know who.
The cave situation and its level of annoyance popped into my head while I was writing a scene in False Alarm. The maitre d’ led Kate down a skinny aisle to the darkest, remotest table in the restaurant—the one Pedro had requested. Here’s the excerpt:
The restaurant was a tunnel, the way they made kitchens in San Francisco, going deeper than she had imagined, reminding her of a Mayan cave that she and Sandy had canoed into on their honeymoon in Belize. Any darker and she’d need the headlamp she’d had to wear a mile in.
Of course, in real life only the guide had a light, but since it’s fiction you can change it. You can drop your misadventures into your stories, so it’s good to leave the house sometimes and do stuff. You can even call it work while you’re supposedly on vacation. After that I got to go to the butterfly farm.
