Write with Authority: Creating Grandpa: Guest Blog

Dr. Michael P. Riccards, educator, administrator, three-time college president, and ex-Executive Director of a New Jersey think tank, is our guest writer today. Notably, Mike has written and published over thirty books and numerous plays, some produced on stage. He has written about Presidents and met some. His stories are interesting, varied, true life or fictional.

CREATING GRANDPA

I always used to avoid fiction. The best of it seemed wordy, overly romantic, and generally hard to follow from one day to another. It took me a year to read MIDDLEMARCH. So I stayed with my major interest: political history and biography. After I retired I decided to write a personal memoir which was moving slowly until I saw in the Hamilton NJ Public Library a notice on a bulletin board near the men's room for the establishment of a group of people interested in memoir writing led by Rodney Richards.

I joined the group. At times I would grow weary of retelling my life and even was going to ditch the whole thing and go back to the American presidency which was the area I was most at home in. When I got a note of congratulations from President Bill Clinton, that only solidified my dedication.

So in the group, I read short segments of my memoir, sometimes with minimal enthusiasm. The group, especially the American consul to Trenton from the Italian government, Dr. Gilda Rorro, was especially wonderful in her critiques, especially on my Italian American roots, Suddenly I decided to finish up my life story just after my retirement, which was on my birthday, October 2.

The group continued on, and some of my colleagues asked me to read their life stories and even offered to pay me for that review. I insisted that I did not charge friends and was pleased to take several of those fine pieces with me for a long boring winter in Florida. I was delighted to see them published as well over the coming years.

The group continued on and began to change: it became more interested in the genre of fiction, exactly what I had so avoided. But I decided to start with a simple short story about my maternal grandfather who was born in Naples and came over to the United States in 1898 at 16. As I searched out more information, I suddenly found that he developed a character of his own, as he faced the trials of living as a paterfamilias in the twentieth century. I freely mixed fact and fiction, and in the process members of my family said they remembered this or that particular incident about Grandpa. How could they?

One cousin even told me that his funeral was interrupted by a poor woman whom he had given vegetables, wood, and flowers to in her later years. She came to a sacred funeral and screamed out "God bless him, we shall not see his likes again." That was not how I wrote, but it came about in real life. When I showed Grandpa in one story in a less than flattering light, one of my fellow students complained that this was not in character for him, so I should changed the story. Actually, it was a true story, but by then Grandpa had become a real persona in her mind, someone noble and decent and paternal, the way men used to be, or so we thought before the fractures our time.

Anybody starting fiction should give it some time to grow. I try to create characters and also have the stories end with some moral for our confused lives. Sometimes the moral is too subtle, but such is life. Give yourself a chance to make mistakes, for that is realism. Look around at the symbols and metaphors that exist in your vision. Grandpa had a tiny rosebush in the middle of his garden. Surely it was out of place? But I learned that he planted it when his 25-year-old daughter died unexpectedly. That was how he remembered her.

It really happened.