Featured: Ted Flanagan
Every Hidden Thing
DOSSIER: You’ve had some wild experiences as a paramedic and seen people at their worst. What’s the weirdest thing someone blurted out to you on the job?
FLANAGAN: First off, let me pitch a career in EMS as the perfect preparation for being a writer. People will admit things to you, a complete stranger, within the first 10 seconds of meeting them that they probably wouldn’t tell their priest. You wanna meet every possible kind of person? Get on an ambulance for a bit.
Other than the sleep disorders, hypertension, and the perpetual eating habits of a 14-year-old, it’s great! Not to be difficult, but I think I’d need to break this answer down into sub-categories. Like, “Weirdest thing on a psychiatric call” was the time the patient hearing voices in her head told me that now all the voices sounded like me. I’ve also treated President Kennedy, Al Capone, and several iterations of the Devil Himself.
In the “Trauma Call” division, I’d have to give it to the soot-covered guy smoking a cigarette and wearing nothing but his tightie-whities outside the blown-up remains of his small motel cabin. When I asked what happened, he said that his cabin, which contained all his worldly possessions (it was one of those places where everyone there was going through the worst year of their lives on a couple fronts) became filled with the smell of propane gas. So, he lit a cigarette to think about it and, kaboom. “Now that I think about, not a great idea.”
The winner in the “Medical Call” division came during my time as a Flight Paramedic. We’d flown to a tiny hospital in the wilds of Vermont at Zero-Dark-Thirty. When we walked into the patient’s emergency department room, I was struck by a very distinct vibe. The room was silent. None of the staff would meet our eyes and the patient, a dude in his 50s, lay on his side on the hospital bed, while his wife stood as far away from him as she could, tapping her foot and looking very miffled. All we’d been told was that he had a rectal injury and needed transport to a surgeon. I looked at the guy, and he looked at me, and he must have sensed I was a fellow Seinfeld fan, because all he said was, “it was a million to one shot, doc. Million to one.”
DOSSIER: Since truth is stranger than fiction, and since much of EVERY HIDDEN THING has stories drawn from your real-world experiences, was it difficult because you kept thinking, “Nobody’s going to believe this?”
FLANAGAN: Not so much. Only one of the stories in the book came from my direct experience (NB: if you’ve read the book, the scene with the unconscious dude in the porn theater is just as much a piece of journalism as it is fiction…sadly…) The rest were things I’d heard from other Paramedics. I truly don’t think it would be possible to write about EMS at all if we took out the real stuff that seemed unbelievable. That’s like 75 percent of the job lol.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Music/silence/back of an ambulance?)
FLANAGAN: I approach writing the same way I learned to approach sleep in the Marines: I steal the chance to do it wherever I can. My favorite time to write is the middle of the day, in my office at home, with music playing in the corner (mostly things like U2 or REM, anything that seems to occupy the part of my brain that might get distracted and draw me away from the writing). Sadly, there aren’t a lot of days like that, so I’ve conditioned myself to be able to write pretty much anywhere and anytime. I steal half an hour here and half an hour there, and eventually get a manuscript completed.
But another awesome advantage of a career in EMS is that there tends to be downtime occasionally, and I’ve definitely done some writing in between calls. Lately, though, I’ve been using that time to read. I find it’s easier to be interrupted by a call while reading and then easily get back to it later. It can be hard to get back into the writing groove after a call.
DOSSIER: If someone saw you walking down the street, they might not immediately think, “There goes a US Marine Recon dude.” First, why is that, and second, what is a US Marine supposed to look like? (The guy who runs The Dossier has some ideas having been in the US Army. Spoiler—there’s drooling and profanity.)
FLANAGAN: Hahaha I have lots of Army friends, and yeah drooling profanity is a feature! Still, love those guys, too. I definitely don’t think people who see me immediately think “Marine!”
Recon Marines come in all shapes and sizes, but the main job isn’t to hook and jab with the enemy. Instead, at least when I was in and for my particular unit, our main job was to observe and report while remaining hidden, to spend long days and weeks in the middle of nowhere, carrying 100 or 125 pound rucks over endless kilometers and some of the worst terrain imaginable. We also spent a ton of time in the water, and those muscle bound guys sank like stones lol.
I don’t know what a Marine is supposed to look like, but I know what they should think like. They need to be stubborn and relentless in their pursuit of a goal, impervious to failure and defeat, able to brush off setbacks and keep moving forward, always forward. Like any ideal, some days are better than others, but it’s what’s kept me going through life’s travails.
When I took the Recon Indoc, a daylong nightmare series of physical and mental tests, there were tons of guys who were bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter than me. But what separated me and the three other guys who succeeded that day from all the others who dropped out was the ability to simply persevere and a sense of stubbornness so pervasive that we’d drown before we’d quit. I think those are also good qualities for anyone trying to get published. The writing is the fun part, the chance to express ourselves and create art that might outlast us. Publishing, though, that’s a brutal test, and like most tests survival is more a matter of sticking with it than anything else.
DOSSIER: With all of the incredible praise for EVERY HIDDEN THING (Wiley Cash, James Ellroy) how has that guided your efforts for your follow-up book? People are dying to get their hands on your next novel, Ted.
FLANAGAN: Oh wow, I hope you’re right man! Even if that first novel had never been published, receiving praise from Wiley and Ellroy made every moment working on it worthwhile!
One thing you don’t hear a lot about is the difficulty of the sophomore novel. I struggled for a long time with the question of “what comes next?” So I didn’t dive immediately into the next novel. Instead, I spent a lot of time reading and sort of low-key scouring for something to write about.
I remember once talking to a fellow writer who, in his youth, had been tangentially affiliated with organized crime, and he pointed out that the biggest thing successful mobsters want is to be seen as legitimate guys, and for their children to have “legitimate” careers.
At the same time, I had been reading about the man who once ran the mob outpost in the city near my home in central Massachusetts. He’d done the usual mobster stuff, except he’d also won two Silver Stars for his service in the Marines in World War II, and was renowned as an incredibly honest gangster, the kind who’d have every penny owed to you waiting for you, even if you didn’t collect until after a long stay in jail.
He built the local Marine Corps League building, and was active in all sorts of community organizations. Over time, a character loosely based on this guy started barging his way into a novel I’d started, and before long I relented and made the novel about him, about an aging gangster trying to leave a legacy for his daughter even as he knows he doesn’t have much time left. It’s a noir and there’s plenty of crime in it, but I really found myself asking questions about the effects on those around us of the lives we choose. It’s currently with my agent as we revise it prior to submission.
I’m also pretty deep into a work of historical fiction about the drowning of six Marine recruits at Parris Island in 1956. It was an awful incident that damn near ended the Marine Corps. It’s one of the first things they teach you about in the first phase of Boot Camp, and it turns out that the Drill Instructor who caused it eventually retired to a house right around the corner from my own. He’s since passed, but I drive by there ten times a day, and every time I do, I can’t help but think of what’s known as The Ribbon Creek Incident.
I guess that’s what inspiration looks like sometimes, the evolution of a curiosity.
Website: TedFlanagan.com
Jeff Circle 