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Thriller fiction | Non-fiction: Adventure with a Purpose

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You are here: Home / Adventure / Begin with a spark

Begin with a spark

January 30, 2013 By Eric Douglas

When I write fiction, I begin with a spark of an idea and then the rest of the story grows around that. Cayman Cowboys was my first novel and really my first attempt at writing fiction. I was visiting Grand Cayman, conducting some training for local dive instructors, when a friend took me out to do a little sightseeing. After making a dive on the East End of the island, we stopped to look at the blow holes. Over the years, waves have eroded the iron shore—exposed and jagged limestone coral that now stands above the ocean surface—and when waves crash into the shore, water shoots straight into the air.

I remember walking across the iron shore thinking that if I fell, I was going to bleed. Heavily. And then I started thinking/imagining how scared someone would have to be to run across the iron shore and what it would do to them. That became the first scene I wrote for Cayman Cowboys. Afterward, I had to go back and get the story to the point that a girl would be so scared she would run across the iron shore and then had to create the story that came afterward.

Every one of my novels has that same sort of spark; a scene that literally popped into my head that caused me to start writing.

The following is an excerpt from my first novel Cayman Cowboys. It became the seed for the entire novel. It isn’t the key to the story (we don’t need a spoiler alert here), just where it started.

 

Suddenly, a loud crash echoed from an abandoned house directly behind where the men were meeting. They heard the sound of a young woman yelp in pain.

“Check it out and find out who’s in there,” Walker ordered. The Lincoln’s driver and both men from the third car rushed toward the house. Samson started to go as well, assuming this was one of the duties his boss was paying him for, but Walker reached out his hand and held him back.
Seeing the men come rushing out of the darkness, the girl, who was just sleeping in the house, ran out the side door to get away.
All three men shouted after her and one fired a gun into the air, hoping it would make her stop. It didn’t. Scared beyond all comprehension, the girl ran faster. She was a runaway, hiding out from her family and the law. Waking up from a sound sleep, she thought it was the police coming to take her back to her abusive father in the U.S. She had tried to run away before. When she was caught and taken home, the beatings were worse than before.
Quite possibly the last thought the girl had was that these men would never take her back to her family, no matter what happened. She ran from the sandy soil covering much of the island directly onto what the locals call iron shore, limestone rock left over from millions of years of coral buildup that has been eroded over the years by the rain to form jagged edges and crevices. Even in solid shoes, iron shore is treacherous. At night, with nothing more than sandals on her feet, no light and fleeing in a panic, the girl didn’t stand a chance.
Not being from the island, she had only set foot there just a few days before. Using money she had stolen from a small liquor store near her home to buy the ticket and a friend’s passport to gain entrance to the island, she had fled during the night. She had read stories in magazines about the island and thought it sounded like a wonderful place to escape. She hadn’t had a chance to learn the land yet. She didn’t realize just how treacherous running across the iron shore could be, especially down by the shore where the wave action had made things even more hazardous.
She fell. Hearing the men’s voices, she stood up bleeding from her shoulder and tripped again just a few yards away. This time she tore a jagged hole in her leg. In agony, she struggled to her feet and tried to run again. Turning to look, she saw the lights the men carried swinging back and forth. Knowing she had to get away, she struggled to her feet one more time, pain searing through her body, already dying from the increasing blood loss from a torn artery in her thigh, she fell for the last time in a crevice between the rocks at the water’s edge.
She could hear the gentle sounds of the small Caribbean waves lapping against the rocks and the iron shore coast. When the waves hit the shore just right, the water would work its way through the rocks and blast straight up into the air, like a blowhole from a whale.
“Do you see the girl?”
Nah, I don’t see anything. I’m not even sure there was a girl.”
“Someone was out here, but I can’t find her,” the men argued at the edge of the iron shore field.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not climbing across this stuff at night.”
“You’re right; she couldn’t have gone this way. Let’s check the other side of the road.” 

 

The thing is, there’s a spark in everything. Every project, every idea, everything you think about doing begins with a spark. The key to moving forward with anything is finding that spark, that idea that moves you and then building on it. Sometimes it will move forward in fits and starts and other times you will feel like you are going backward.

The most important thing is to keep fanning the spark. The rest will come.

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