Don't Ever Do This

There are no rules. Sort of. Let me tell you a story.

When I was a little boy, my father was a lobster fisherman, among other things. But he was also a mechanic, with an uncanny ability and reckless courage to fix almost anything cast in metal. I would sometimes watch him work on an engine--usually the diesel engine of his boat--and wonder how he knew what to do. Dad picked up on the curious little boy, and was always careful to emphasize safety. Just before he stuck his hand into the whirling belts of the engine, he'd look at me and say, "Don't ever do this." Then he'd plunge his hands into the land of finger-eating gears and grinding cams and hungry pistons.

What Dad meant was this: he knew all there was to know about that engine. He knew exactly where to place his hands to fix what needed fixing, and he also knew the risks. He was deliberate and precise because he was a master of the engine. His nickname was Diesel Dan.

The same holds true in writing. When you learn the rules well enough to forget them, you have a lot of freedom. And that's the spot I found myself in recently in the writing of The Innkeeper's Husband. I decided to do something really radical: I inserted a short story, a work of fiction, right into the middle of the whirling gears of my non-fiction account of innkeeping. I didn't do it on a whim. Rather, I felt it was the best way to convey the point of view of the folks who come and stay with us. So I did it.

I'm not going to lose a finger doing this, and I carefully structured the work to lead smoothly into this fictional sideroad. But you never know. Still, it thrilled me to know that I have this ability, that I've got this kind of ability. And after all, who wants to read something that isn't a little risky? But just be careful: stories, like engines, are cranky things, sometimes possessed by gremlins. I've seen plenty of writers nicknamed "Lefty" to know that.