Stories All Around

When you are a writer, you see stories all around you.

You read about a man who lures his business partner to his death out of greed, and you don't think about the crime. You don't curse the man to hell for such cold-blooded, calculating cruelty.

Instead, you work your way into the murderer's head, to determine what would drive a person to such drastic action. Then you start composing a story around your observations.

Sean McGin owned a gym with another man, the KO Zone Gym that was located in the rust-belt town of Joliet. There was a time when the town's name was synonymous with limestone and quarries, and with the state prison that has since become a museum.

With a name like KO Zone, it's all about boxing, and if it's all about boxing, you picture troubled young men who are hoping to use their fighting skills for something besides gang warfare.

The police have said that Mr. McGin was lured to the back of the gym building in the middle of the night by the man who killed him. The murderer was offering to sell and deliver cocaine.

That makes the victim sound like a drug dealer, or a man so desperate for cash to shore up his failing business that he'd make a little easy cash with drug sales. Perhaps he was once a troubled young man who turned to boxing, but the troubles never quite left him.

What of the business partner who is said to have committed the crime?

Was he only greedy? Did he have a genuine understanding of the finality of death, or was his brain stuck in a video game mentality in which you start over and keep on playing.

Police claim the perp admitted under questioning that he didn't have the drugs, but he did take the money that Mr. McGin brought along to pay for the goods. And as you'd expect him to say, he's claiming that a co-conspirator did the shooting.

As the writer, you wander around in his head and find the core of the person. Then you put these two men together and set them in motion until they collide in story of vengeance, perhaps, or greed or even blackmail by a third party who comes into the manuscript in the last third.

It's real life, that murder over drugs in Joliet. But writers see real life and turn it into fiction that says more than the cold, hard facts everyone else reads in the newspaper.