Janice Daugharty's Blog

What if...? by Janice Daugharty, author of "The Little Known"

Like many other writers, I often find my stories in newspaper articles. I read about a poor black boy who found a sack of bank-robbed cash in an alley and returned it to the bank. I asked myself, what if the boy decided to keep it instead? And what kind of boy would it be to risk getting caught and accused of robbing the bank himself or of being in cahoots with the robber? What would be his motivation for keeping the cash? What would his life be like? His family? So, I named the boy Knot ("just one more sorry black boy too dumb to get out of the rain") and created a dismal life for him, his only hope for the better is to get his mother, Marge, to quit drinking and cursing so that the two of them can move in with her sister, Willie, and her orderly household. One "what if" led to another and another to create characters and plot; different characters would have taken the plot in another direction. So, what if Knot had given the money back to the bank? What if...?The Little Known