Laura Leigh Morris: WRITING TIMELY FICTION • Craft Essays

Laura Leigh Morris
WRITING TIMELY FICTION

Picture it:

Twenty-five university professors in dresses and sports coats crouched in a dark classroom, waiting for a gunman to walk through the door. More nervous than we should have been, given this was only a simulation, the only sound our ragged breathing. We had signed up for active shooter training so we would know what to do if the unthinkable ever happened, but even the idea of that reality put us on edge. My heart raced as an officer with an airsoft gun slid through the door and moved around the room, shooting each of us with plastic pellets.

After we’d all been killed, another officer turned on the light. “That’s the advice we used to give: turn the lights out and hide. But then you’re waiting for slaughter.” He eyed those of us who’d been shot. We rubbed at red marks left on arms, legs, butts. “Now, we teach you how to save yourselves. Or at least to make sure the shooter doesn’t get beyond your classroom.” Even in the moment, my writer brain made note: a possibility for further conflict. Upping the tension. Maybe the shooter wouldn’t get past the classroom, but how many would emerge alive? And how could I use that in a story?

The officer taught us to climb out a window if we could, to barricade the door if we couldn’t. “If the shooter makes it through the barricade, throw whatever you have at him. Phones, laptops, shoes. Do you know how hard it is to shoot a gun with a stapler flying at your head?” Then, the coup de grace: “Before you even get in this situation, you should have a plan. You need five volunteers to rush the shooter, two for the legs, two for the arms, and one to go for the face.” He explained how thumbs pressed into an assailant’s eyeballs would end the rampage.

***

The night after the training, I woke up with a scene in my head: a professor and her students charge a gunman who’s entered their classroom. One student dies. The rest attack the assailant, but when trying to disarm him, they kill him. The students are both heroes and murderers. While society applauds them, they must learn how to live with their own actions, as well as the resulting emotional trauma.

Without wiping the sleep from my eyes, I padded from my bedroom to the kitchen, grabbed a piece of notebook paper and a pen, and drafted a rough version of that scene.

All of this happened in 2016, a few months after the Pulse nightclub shooting, while I was waiting for reviewer comments on my first book. When I told people about this new idea, they said, “Write the book quickly, before the idea’s no longer hot,” or, “You have to write the story before someone else does.”

The Stone Catchers: A Novel, which began with that active shooter training, a dream, and a note scrawled in the middle of the night is being published by the University Press of Kentucky in August 2024. But the story had to wait—for revisions and publicity on my first book, a global pandemic, meeting and marrying my husband, building a relationship with my stepdaughter, and the birth of my son. I did not write it quickly. I didn’t write about school shootings before anyone else did, either. By 2016, I was already late to the party, following several others, including Lionel Shriver’s 2003 seminal novel on the subject, We Need to Talk about Kevin.

Even as I was writing my version of the school shooter story, others were publishing theirs. When Rhiannon Navin’s Only Child came out in 2018, a friend rushed to tell me that I’d been scooped. I read the book nervously, worried her story would be too much like mine. Which was totally unnecessary. Navin’s book is beautiful. It’s also not my story. We may tackle similar subject matter, but we do so in such different ways that our books aren’t in competition. They complement one another.

Are some stories more timely than others in terms of news cycles? Sure.

Do writers try to tap into that market? I’m sure some do.

But I can’t. For me, novel writing isn’t a fast process. It’s not straightforward either. The first draft of The Stone Catchers doesn’t look like the final draft. Even the fifth draft doesn’t. My novel writing process is circuitous, one that takes years to complete.

Yes, sometimes authors do pen great novels in very short periods of time, but that’s not the norm. (Usually, it’s not even the norm for those writers.) Most of us work through stories over the course of years. Sometimes, those stories start because something was in the news, and then that topic is no longer current by the time the book makes it to print. Sometimes, a story only becomes timely because of unforeseen events happening when it’s published. That’s just a lucky coincidence. (Or sometimes unlucky; think of those authors whose novels about disasters were published in September 2011.) When embarking on a multi-year project, except for a handful of evergreen subjects, you can’t know how timely it will be when it comes out.

In the end, that hardly matters. Great books explore what it means to be human, and that’s always timely, whether or not the world of the book is on the nightly news. The complexity of the human condition will always be a story with an audience.

The way I see my job is not to sprint toward publishing a story about current events. Instead, I find story in whatever odd place it’s born, and then I write and revise the book that develops, until it’s as done as I can get it. Whether the topic of the book is considered current or not doesn’t have much to do with me. Whether it’s good or not does. I aim for good.

Laura Leigh Morris is the author of The Stone Catchers: A Novel (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and Jaws of Life: Stories (West Virginia University Press, 2018). She’s published short fiction in STORY Magazine, North American Review, Redivider, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Furman University in Greenville, SC. To learn more, visit her website.