RomanceEverAfter

Romantic Tales - Contemporary

Interview with Sue Scott
author of Class Reunion

This past June (2003) I attended my twentieth high school reunion, and I went through a sort of time-warp and turned seventeen again. It amazed me how friendships with old classmates rekindled instantly. I laughed, cried and gossiped with people I hadn’t seen since graduation-as if only a day had passed rather than twenty looong years.

Like Libby, I’d recently ended an engagement and had to plaster on a smile while listening to stories of perfect marriages and wonderful children, and field questions about when I planned to "settle down." Whew! I only came across one other single female, and we bolstered each other’s spirits some. Towards the end of the night a few friends and I sat around a table, resting and feeding our faces, when this guy I vaguely remembered plopped down on an empty chair. He started talking to the friend next to me, and when she got up he took the vacated seat -and stayed to chat for the rest of the night. It’s been almost five months since the reunion now and he’s still hanging around.

The point of that winding bit of blather is that the reunion had a deep impact on my life, and parts of it showed up in the story I wrote. Unlike Alan and Libby, I never dated Jim in high school and never wondered whether or not he’d be at the reunion (truthfully, I’d forgotten he existed. I hope he doesn’t read this!), but the feeling of coming full circle and finally joining with the right person is definitely the same.

I love to tuck real people into my stories. In this instance, my best friend back then and now is Laurie Linville, and I do know a Brad Yarchin- but from college, not high school.

You are the humorous editor with the e-zine "Long Story Short." Why do you think it's important to incorporate humor into our daily lives?

Life is grim, and without humor it would be unbearable. I blame my father’s genes for my love of sick jokes, but the ability to laugh at the absurdities of people and circumstances is something I developed on my own. I started by not taking myself seriously and spread out from there.

The 1990s were ten dreadful years, for the most part-and if it weren’t for a sense of humor I never would have made it through. Even during the rock bottomest of lows I managed to find some things so laughable that I perked up a bit and started thinking maybe life wasn’t entirely hopeless after all.

This shows up in most of the things I write. I’ll play the clown to make readers laugh. My favorite type of story is the "normal situation gone berserk" because I find myself in them so often. For example: I break a fingernail and my doofus of a cat eats it. The nail gets stuck going down and she hacks up the entire contents of her stomach all over my shoes, but can’t get the nail out. Despite the fact that I have a date coming, I rush the cat to the 24-hour vet hospital, which charges an arm and a leg, but it’s the only thing open at 9:00 p.m. at night.

They have to put the cat to sleep and pull the nail out of her throat with some sort of torture-device that makes me cry, thereby ruining my carefully made up face. The operation is successful and the cat will have to stay a couple of days for observation. I hurry home but it’s too late and my date has come and gone, and in my rush to save the cat I forgot to leave him a note. So I get to spend my Saturday night cleaning cat barf off my shoes and the kitchen floor and leaving messages on his machine apologizing.

Crazy, but true. Some people might cry over the broken nail, missed date and vet bill. I just laugh at the total ridiculousness of it all. A spoonful of hilarity makes a bad situation palatable.

Do you think writers can be inspired to write stories from personal experiences or from an event she/he has seen?

Definitely yes! Maybe half of my writing is directly inspired by personal experiences or events, but all of my stories contain a jumble of memories, scraps of conversation I’ve overheard, news items, things I read in books/magazines or hear on television/radio.  There isn’t anything that happens in life that can’t be recycled into a story. 

Lots of times it’s the tiniest event (a cat up a tree inspired a children’s tale about a superhero who’s a flop that I’m currently turning into a book), or a bit of dialogue said in passing (in the mall I heard an elderly lady say to her friend, "Louise ate three roses yesterday."), or a childhood memory (trying to teach my three-year-old sister to say "alligator."), that will cause an idea to form. I’m always jotting anything that catches my fancy down, since it might come in useful one day.

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