Please welcome Bernard LoPinto, talking about his writing journey.
A Statement About My Writing
By
Bernard LoPinto
About 50 years ago, I started
believing I could be a writer. That is
until I showed a sample of my work to someone whose opinion I trusted, one of
my college instructors. She took two
days to read my short story and then beat it with a three-pound hammer. After pummeling me for what seemed like an
entire day—about fifteen minutes in real time—she asked, “Do you have anything
to say?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Did I have anything to say? I didn’t know. What was I supposed to say? Should I write about the war in Viet Nam,
which, at the time, was tearing this country apart? How about the intergenerational polarization
that was also a feature of the sixties, or the British Invasion, or the sexual
revolution? I asked myself—more than
once—what do I have to say? Then I
figured it out. Nothing. I had nothing to say. As a nineteen-year-old suburban kid with
nothing much going on besides my sexual prime, I hadn’t lived enough to have
anything to say. I just didn’t know it
at the time. So I decided that this
writing thing was too deep for me and turned to simply finishing college, which
for me was about all I could handle.
Life hadn’t happened to me yet.
Then life happened. Career, marriage, kids. It all happened, and it was all too busy for
me to write about. I kept a journal
sporadically, and I began to think that I actually understood the craft of
writing. But I was too busy getting my
family by to give any thought to the old question: Did I have anything to
say? Then some things happened that gave
me something to say.
Looking for the one best way, I
turned to the life of faith, committing everything to building a strict moral
compass that would get my family through any storm. I quit my job and we left our home, moving
wife, kids, the dog and cat hundreds of miles to work with people sure to save
the world for Jesus. I became a
minister, dedicating every waking hour—and every available dollar—to a check-your-brains-at-the-door
religion. We were on the true path. Then it all went bad.
When I finally came to understand the
lies, abuse, and betrayal that had been the subtext of the life of faith I
thought I was living, I had no way to get a handle on what had happened to a
decade of my life. That’s when I turned
back to writing. Now I had something to
say, and I used fiction to say it. I had
found my moral universe.
Every writer works from his or her
moral universe. Dickens, whose anger
makes him my favorite author, wrote of the immorality of a society that
exploits children in Oliver Twist, David
Copperfield, and Great Expectations. A crime writer’s moral universe might be
simply, “Crime doesn’t pay,” or “No one is above the law.” In Ayn Rand’s moral universe, the
actualization of the ego is the highest good.
Whether or not we agree with an author’s theme is not important. What is important is that the author expresses
that theme in a way the reader understands and that it’s universal.[i]
My first novel took nearly twenty
years to complete because I defined my moral universe as I wrote, and only
recently did I take the opportunity to express my beliefs in detail. Now I have it, dark as it is.
In my moral universe, nothing is as it should be. People of faith wait for God to move in their lives,
and wait, and wait, and wait. Sometimes he makes his presence known, sometimes not.
There is no divine plan, no justice, just the hope that "maybe this
time. . . ." And above all, remember, "Be careful what you ask for; you
just might get it."
I
am about one-third of the way into my next novel, tentatively titled, No Such Thing as Enough, and my moral
universe is clearer to me now than when I started. Consequently, the writing goes faster, and I
have a better idea of where the story is taking me than with my first
novel.
As
writers, we need to find our moral universe, our themes. They are our starting point. When our moral universe becomes clear to us,
we can make it clear to others, and our writing becomes real and alive.
BLURB
It’s 2026 and the United States has
fallen under the sway of an oppressive government where all citizens’ rights
have been stripped, Red shirt platoons patrol; the streets, and people die for
voicing opinions. Into this chaos step Sid and Annie Winthrop. The elderly couple
set out on a journey of revenge against the Red Shirts who murdered their son.
Red Shirt members Victor and
Brooklyn have devoted their young lives to the cause of the president in
protecting the nation. When attacks on
their home town leave dozens of Red Shirts dead, Victor must help his superiors
find the vigilante.
At their darkest moment, each couple
finds a common bond in their suffering and must decide where their loyalties
lie.
EXCERPT
The next morning, despite his patched knee, Sid went out,
pretending to shop for bread, listening for anyone talking about the carnage of
last night. He came home, threw the bread on the table, and hurried into the
bedroom, Annie following closely behind.
“Did you have any trouble?” she asked.
Sid sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands together
the way he did when he had a riddle he couldn’t figure out. Annie sat down next
to him, and he put his arm around her. “No problem, babe. It’s just that there
are so many of them. They’re all over downtown, at least one squad on every
block. They’re even on the side streets. One group is a few blocks away, coming
in this direction. That’s why I hurried home.”
“But you’ve dealt with clowns like these before.”
Sid let go of Annie and started pacing. “Not like these.
Half of them, I’ve never seen before. They have gold leaf on their helmets and
gold braid on their shirts. Their bearing is different. They’re tougher, but we
found that out last night. The troopers were searching people. I must’ve looked
too old to cause trouble because they let me pass. If they hadn’t, if they had
frisked me, I’d have been done.” He pulled the .45 out of its holster under his
coat and placed it on the bed.
“Are you going to go out tonight?”
“Not after last night. I don’t want to do that again.”
“I never expected things to go like this. Those kids don’t
know what they’re doing; they’re Rowson’s pawns, and I killed four or five with
the car.” Annie wrung her hands. “I’ve hated them for so long, but seeing them
go down last night… Is it hard for you, too? I mean after Vietnam and the
police force? Do you ever get used to it?”
“I never have, and I hope you never do. When it stops
bothering you, you’ll have lost a big piece of yourself.” Sid pulled Annie back
into his arms. “I don’t like it, but we started down this road, and there’s no
turning back. With the heat on us like this, let’s lay low for a while.”
When starting on a
journey of revenge, first dig two graves. Or in our case, three.
Bernard LoPinto draws inspiration for his stories from his
years in ministry and prisons, and creates a reality where the lines between
good and bad, right and wrong, are easily blurred. He and his wife, Jeanne,
live in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
