Susan Keene Author

The Story Behind the Story

The Story Behind the Story

One summer I had a part time job in the nearest big city. Several of my friends worked there too and I thought it would be fun. Little did I know it would turn out to be like a work camp and I didn’t see one of my friends the entire time I work there.

Every night when I left my job; I usually finished around nine p.m. I took the highway to a small town and from there I made the trek to my farm. To arrive at the farm, I had to drive down a narrow, paved road with no lights and no shoulders and a railroad track fifteen feet above it on one side.

Let me point something out. There is no light in the city and then there is no light in the country. No light in the country literally means when you turn out the lights you cannot see your hand in front of your face. This only changes the few nights when the sky is clear and the moon is full.

I’m not a fraidy cat. Every night I woke up and sat straight up in bed with a recurring nightmare.  Sweat rolled down my face and the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

The night terror included me driving down the road and seeing something at the edge of the beam of my headlight.  I would turn the car toward the movement and there would be a child chained to a crate. I kid you not. Same dream every night.

After three weeks I decided the thing to do was to get up the next time it happened and write down my thoughts because the facts I remembered every morning could not possibly be what the dream was really about. So, I did.

I woke up with the same sensations I’d had every night for three weeks, picked up a pen and paper and walked to the kitchen table. This was three-thirty a.m.  By ten that morning I had written up to chapter sixteen on the book The Twisted Mind of Cletus Compton.

I finished the book, it was published, and I never had the nightmare again.

By the way, I couldn’t force myself to write the book at night or with my back to a window.

Thank goodness my thoughts now run toward dogs, beautiful scenery and smiling people. Well, except for a murder now and then.

My question is: if this happened to you, would you have written the book?