Today, I’m starting a series of posts called “Inspirations” to share some background information on what lead to each of the stories in my short story collection “Our Greatest Enemy.”

Up first: Belt

This is probably my personal favorite story in this collection. This is for a few reasons. First, it’s my most worked on story. Second, the ending (in my opinion) comes out of nowhere with a left hook to the jaw. Thirdly, it’s a very personal story (but that’s all the stories in this collection).

It started as a short story assignment for a creative writing class in college sometime in 2010-11. The first version was a very short story (around 2,000 words compared to the 10,000 that the final version ended with). At the time, I called the story “He Gathered Them Together” in reference to Revelations from the Bible. In the many iterations this story went through, it was first simplified to “Gathered”, then “Shelterbelt”, until finally I landed on the callback to the twist ending with “Belt”.

The story back then was much simpler. In it, the title character (the young boy) wasn’t developed (which was my biggest critique from the instructor of the class), had a girlfriend (a thinly veiled callout to a girl in the class that I had a crush on), and was focused heavily on the father character (which was the best part about the story – and maybe still is?). The twist ending back then was that the boy survived the car crash, saying to his mother that “everything was fine.” And that was it. There were no references to shelterbelts, and no brutal ending (I’ll spare spoilers in this post). My biggest crime in that version: the boy (a supposed protagonist) was a paper thin character against the backdrop of his well-defined father.

I’ve worked on this story a great deal (double digit drafts and edits), mostly focusing on the boy. I tried desperately to figure out what kind of character he was, and when I finally figured it out, the story really came together. The boy was difficult to understand, because he’d lived his entire life in a real life purgatory, and this is what I needed to analyze with this story. It’s a tragic story about a boy that looked up to a father that let him down. I love the boy character, and I look forward to possibly continuing his story in the future as he continually seeks his dead father’s approval.

A theme of the story, the shelterbelts, came to me through an actual conversation with my grandfather about their purpose. In North Dakota, these belts litter the highways and roadways, and I didn’t know why until my grandpa explained why they were so important. Little did he know that he helped me establish an extremely important aspect of my boy character – a child stuck in between warring parents, protecting them from each other. Thanks grandpa!

In many ways, this little boy was me growing up (sans his… behavior at the end of the story). I often felt like I was stuck between fighting parents, and I would warrant this is a somewhat common thing kids deal with (shame on you if you do it!). My parents are wonderful and I had a fantastic childhood, but there’s room for improvement for everyone. Don’t stick your children in between your fights. Go to a sealed room and duke it out quietly and respectfully.

Lastly, those late night drives with dad on gravel roads were real, and yes, they did inspire the first edition of this story. Yes, dad did tell me never to get married. I know he didn’t mean it. We all say crazy things when we’re mad, and mom and him have a marriage that I’ve looked up to my entire life.

If you haven’t read the story yet, pick it up on Amazon. Free for Kindle Unlimited readers.
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Greatest-Enemy-Stories-Fatherhood-ebook/dp/B0CW1J8TM9