How do writers decide what to write about? In “Death on a Quiet Street“, by Jack Heffron and John Boertlein, Cincinnati Magazine, April 2008, Jack Heffron writes:

Last September, I was having dinner with my friend John Boertlein when the Bricca murders came up. John, who grew up in Delhi and has known about the tragedy since childhood, worked on the Cincinnati police force for 25 years. He’s written two books about crime — Howdunit (Writer’s Digest Books) and Ohio Confidential, which I edited for Clerisy Press — along with articles on local crimes for Cincinnati Magazine. I grew up in Bridgetown, less than a mile from the Briccas’ home. More than likely I was with my family at the mass Jerry attended on his last day. The case has fascinated and horrified me since I first heard about it. As John and I traded the rumors and theories we’d heard through the years, we wondered about the feasibility of, if not solving the case, at least shining a new light on it — separating fact from fiction, busting a few myths, and answering some of the questions that have haunted the area most of our lives.

By the end of the night we resolved to try.

That resolve led to an article that the editors of Cincinnati magazine introduce this way:

Forty-one years ago, the Bricca family was savagely murdered in their Bridgetown home. No neighbor heard a struggle. No weapon was found. No evidence led to a suspect. And no one was ever charged with the crimes. So why does the Bricca name still resonate in the collective memory of west-siders? Because it haunts them still.

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Sheila
When in your writing process did you know you would start the story this way:

Looking back now, Jerry Bricca’s last few hours on earth seem utterly poignant. On September 25, 1966, Bricca, a 28-year-old chemical engineer, went to work at the Monsanto plastics facility on River Road in Addyston. It was a Sunday, but it wasn’t unusual for him to work on a weekend. Before going to the plant, he attended 10 o’clock mass at St. Aloysius Church, then worked all day. On his way home around 8 p.m., he stopped at the United Dairy Farmers on the corner of Bridgetown and Aurora Avenue, bought milk, and drove the last mile to his three-bedroom tri-level on Greenway Avenue in the Woodhaven subdivision of Bridgetown, where his 23-year-old wife, Linda, and 4-year-old daughter, Debbie, were watching television and folding laundry in the first-floor rec room. The young family had moved to Cincinnati three years before when Monsanto transferred Jerry from Seattle.

When he got home, he remembered Monday was trash day, and lugged the cans to the curb.

I read the opening of your article and I feel like I am on the street you are describing, in the neighborhood where Jerry Bricca and his family died.  I feel empathy with the writers who want to investigate this unsolved murder.

 Jack
I think that opening came fairly early in the writing process, though the writing really didn’t get underway until after several months of research. I experimented with a few openings before arriving at that one. The opening line actually wasn’t added until I’d submitted the piece to my editor, who wanted to suggest right away the perspective of looking back. My version opened with the second line. I wanted to create a flat, dispassionate tone, a recitation of the “facts” in the case, which supplies the needed details for the reader but also works thematically — statements of what is known because most of what follows focuses on the unknown. My editor wanted a somewhat softer first line, and I was okay with that approach.

Sheila
It isn’t long before you use “I” in this story that is co-written. “Last September, I was having dinner with my friend John Boertlein when the Bricca murders came up.”  A little bit later you write, “If John and I were going to cut through the fog of rumor and local legend, we needed to clarify the facts as originally reported. We began by spending hours at the main library, winding through back issues of The Cincinnati Enquirer and Post Times-Star on microfilm.”

So it is clear that you are writing and John is researching with you. How did the two of you formulate your co-writing process?

Jack
I’ve known John since high school, and we’re close friends. I’ve edited a couple of his books, and so we’d worked together before, which I think was helpful in working together on this story. From the start, I was the writer and he was supplying help with the research and also expertise in the subject — true crime — which I lacked. So the boundaries were clear right away, and we were both comfortable within them.

You’re absolutely right about establishing the first-person point of view early in the piece. During the writing I moved that around a bit but knew I needed to do it early in the story, which is structured in a dual arc. The main arc focuses on the murder itself, on 1966, on what happened to the family and the investigation by law enforcement. The second arc focuses on John’s and my investigation many years later, on the personal feelings we bring to the case and the feelings that still exist in that part of town. One challenge of that structure is keeping both moving simultaneously, figuring out how far you can move one before you have to switch to the other and move that one too.

The second arc was suggested by my editor. My original plan was simply to tell the story as a third-person investigative piece, along the lines of Capote’s In Cold Blood. I used that book as a model, especially in terms of tone. I also used Bill Allen’s book Starkweather, which is a true crime book with a literary bent and one I admire quite a bit.

Sheila
It is always great to hear about a writer’s intent and the way an outside reader, in this case your editor, helped develop the story.

In another part of the article, you tell your readers, “In short, we tried to trace every lead we knew the police had followed. Though much of our efforts led to dead ends, the building blocks that would help us tell the story slowly began to fall into place.” Then you recount the Bricca’s story, their move from Seattle to Cincinnati.  How long did it take for the “building blocks” you mention to fall into place? How did you and John work together to make sure they did?

Jack
We started working on the story in early September and I turned it in early February. We were still adding substantive information during the edit stage, turning in the final version in late February. We put in an incredible amount of hours. During those months I worked my day job and I worked on the Bricca story — that’s it. John and I talked nearly every day by phone or in person. And there were times in early January when I doubted that we’d even have a story. The magazine scheduled the piece for the January issue, moved it back to March and then bumped it again to April. My editor, Amanda Walters, and the editor in chief, Jay Stowe, were enormously supportive and helped pull some strings to get interviews. As far as making sure the building blocks were in place, we just kept pushing, taking time to track every possible lead and talk to every person we could find. I wish I had some shortcuts or tricks of the trade to offer, but mostly we relied on sheer tenacity. Just starting again when we hit a dead end. I had hoped that we’d have made more progress than we did by the time the story was due. In fact, John and I continue to investigate.

Sheila
So, there may be follow up articles. I am sure you will fold in more details of place as you have done in this article.  Here the way you tell the story of the Bricca case very much involves the neighborhood, the Bricca’s neighbors, and even yourself as a kid sensitive to the fears of adults:
Trick-or-treat the year of the murders was moved to Sunday afternoon. Like many others, I recall traipsing around in my costume in the raw sunshine, bored by what had been in years past a fun and spooky ritual. The world, however, had become too spooky for our parents.
With only a few brush strokes you’ve conveyed the feeling of a changed neighborhood and your connection to the story. How did you decide how much to put in of your own experience as a kid in the neighborhood?

Jack

In early drafts I tend to write more than I know I’ll need, but it’s better, for me, to put everything on the page and then trim than try to edit in my head before putting the words on paper. In the Bricca piece, I needed only enough of “me” as the narrative persona to keep that thread developing and keeping the reader connected in a more personal way. I saw my role as the conduit for the reader. I didn’t have any special connection to the Bricca murder. I remember it, as do most people on the west side of Cincinnati who are my age or older. So I was sort of “them” on the page. As for younger readers or those who weren’t living here at the time, the “me” provides a personal connection, which adds to the dramatic conflict that pushes the piece forward.

And so, in revising the piece, I cut back to the essentials, using myself only enough to maintain that connection, doing my best to select the details that were most evocative of that place and time, because the story is very much about the maturation of a culture. Beyond its sensational and sordid aspects, the Bricca murder changed the way people in that area viewed their world. I speak to that theme a few times in general terms, but I wanted to create an emotional resonance as well.

Sheila
And you do, very strongly.

The ending of your article brings us up to the present, again portraying the neighborhood and the usual normalness of it:

The Bridgetown Road that Jerry Bricca drove on his way home from Monsanto on that Sunday night no longer twists through a remote area of trees and meadows, plain little houses, and occasional rustic streets. Large “luxury communities” have sprung up all along the winding, two-lane road with reassuring names like Country Walk, Indian Walk, Legendary Ridge, High Ridge Estates, Aston Woods, and Bridgestone Sanctuary. They promise a life of comfort far from the crime and strife of the city, much like Woodhaven did 50 years ago. Beyond facile notions of conformity or prestige, these communities evoke a bucolic world of soccer games and swim meets, Saturday golf and backyard barbecues, a world where justice prevails, where hard work and clean living are rewarded, where at the end of a long day we can rise from our chairs, turn out the lights and, as the Briccas surely did hundreds of times in their cozy place on Greenway Avenue, head up to bed knowing without even thinking about it that we will sleep peacefully and we will be safe.

The murder made every family who lived there at the time feel unsafe behind the routines of their days and weeks. And now those families are replaced by new ones again creating what we all think of as safety. But you are reminding us of the dark side.

How did this ending come to you?

Jack
Good question. Endings always are difficult. The writer Rick DeMarinis said they’re “a miracle.” Given the length of the piece and all the details, I wanted to return to the tone of the opening, to provide, at least tonally, a sense of closure. Because even after all of our efforts we hadn’t, well, solved the case. I also wanted to show that progression from 1966 to today, in terms of the culture of the west side — how things have changed and, then again, in some ways have stayed the same. And I wanted to draw the reader in for one last emotional connection, to speak to that theme of safety, the primal need to protect our families and ourselves, because that need is part of why the Bricca story lives on in the area’s collective memory. As for the last line, actually the last part of the last line, it came to me at some point fairly early in the writing. I liked those staccato monosyllables — and we will be safe. It sounded like a drumbeat and had a note of finality that appealed to me. I rewrote that final paragraph at least twenty times, using those five words as a destination and working to earn them thematically as well as rhythmically.

Sheila
Thank you for that peek into the crafting and the way the writer is always at work.

What other stories haunted you from events that took place during your growing up in Cincinnati or the country or the world?  Can you tell us how this haunting has worked in helping you create article ideas and pursue them?

Jack
Though I’ve certainly used events from my childhood in fiction, I haven’t used many events of public interest or importance. The one that comes quickest to mind is the blizzard that socked the Midwest in the winter of ’77-’78. People still talk about it. The Midwest was frozen for the entire month of January. I used that event as a narrative frame in a short story some years ago. Linking well-known public events with private ones can be a great way to creatively explore ideas and emotions in fiction as well as nonfiction.

Sheila
One more question. You are quite a collaborator. You’ve worked with John in sleuthing out the details of this story and deciding that there is no conclusion yet. Last week we spoke about interviews, another kind of collaboration. You have experience ghost writing, which of course requires working with another person on a story. I have been lucky enough to have had you as my editor on books. You always helped me come through on what they promised.  To what do you attribute your skill in working collaboratively?

Jack
Interesting question. I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right. And collaboration is a form of writing that rarely is addressed. Years ago we did a short book at Writer’s Digest titled How to Write with a Collaborator. We didn’t sell many copies because aspiring writers usually don’t dream of collaborating. Still, it’s an avenue that those writers should be willing to consider.

For me, my years of experience as an editor probably prepared me for collaborative writing. I’ve worked on hundreds of projects with other writers as an editor, and so didn’t feel particularly unusual to me when I wrote with another writer. Now, I would think it very difficult to collaborate on fiction and probably on a script, because that process is much more personal, intimate, and intuitive than writing most kinds of nonfiction.

In collaborations, all parties have to agree on the goals of the project and on the roles each writer will play. And that agreement must be struck early in the process. Let’s face it, us writers tend to be a touchy bunch when it comes to our work. Our egos are involved and we’re going to be a bit sensitive. So establishing parameters is essential. Ideally, you want to draw on the strengths each writer brings to the task. To do that, writers need to be willing to objectively assess their own strengths and weaknesses.

Sheila
And that isn’t easy for us, is it? We’d all like to think we are just as good at it as the next writer in all aspects of a project we are working on.  But you can tell when a collaboration is working–there is an ease even during the hard spots; each person is using their strengths to speed up rather than impede the work of the other, even when addressing difficulties. Do you have a quick suggestion or two about what is most important to remember in collaborating on nonfiction?

Jack
The most important key to success is to focus on the goal of making the project as good as it can be, even if that involves sharing the spotlight or always getting your way. Successful collaborators are comfortable with compromise and are good communicators.

Every collaboration is unique, and so knowing the goal and the roles is essential — as is verbalizing those goals and roles. Make sure everyone sees them the same way before beginning. Picking the right collaborator also is essential. A bad match is going to mean disaster down the road. Through experience, you learn to spot issues before they become ISSUES. For example, I was contacted recently by an accomplished public speaker who wanted to write a book and already had found a publisher. I asked her to send the proposal, which she sent in a format my computer could not access. I asked her to send it in a different (and much more common) format and was quickly referred to her IT person who directed me to download the software the speaker uses, a software that could not be downloaded to my Mac. Neither the speaker nor her tech person showed any sense of wanting to work through the situation, instead putting all the responsibility on me. After a few emails back and forth, I saw that this collaborator would make the next months of my life very difficult if I took the assignment. So I didn’t.

When assessing a possible collaboration, you need to know your role and be comfortable with it, so be honest with yourself from the start. When you’re ghostwriting, for example, you’re doing the bulk of the work and getting none of the spotlight. Often your name appears nowhere in the book or is mentioned in some vague way in the acknowledgments. In most cases, the person you’re ghosting for has the final say-so on all matters. You have to ask yourself if you’re comfortable with such an arrangement.

Other types of collaborations can be much more fun. Working with writer and good friend Mark Garvey on a couple of travel pieces for the Oxford American was, for me, a pinnacle in collaboration. The pieces were a lot of fun to research and write, and we worked well together. In one case the story involved covering an event held in two places hundreds of miles apart. The parameters of that piece proved very clear.

I know writers who only write books with collaborators, preferring to share the load and needing someone else to help them meet deadlines. Collaboration isn’t the most glamorous part of the writing life, but it can be fruitful in a lot of ways.

Sheila
That said, I am very much looking forward to collaborating with you and Meg Files and all of our conference participants in our May 8-15 Writer’s Conference aboard the Rhapsody of the Seas!