Beware the Dog

Maybe you’re wondering how I took the raw material of my life and turned it into fiction? Here’s an example.

On my first reporting job with The Thomasville (NC) Times in the mid-1970s, I wrote a story about a man who was attacked by his own dog—an attack so vicious he required stitches. What made this newsworthy, I thought, was that the man loved his dog so much he kept it. I interviewed the man, got a look at the dog named Amigo, and ended up being bitten myself. This was not participatory journalism. This was rookie stupidity. I wrote a story about it and described what happened in the last few paragraphs. 

That dog bite became part of The Accident Report. The protagonist, Ronald Truluck, is stuck at a railroad crossing and thinking about his inability to get ahead in the journalism business. 

“He’d tried to show initiative. He saw an incident report about a man, Crosby Melton, who was bitten so badly by his own dog, a German Shepherd named Banjo, that twenty-two stitches were required to close the wounds. That sounded like a human interest story, for man’s best friend to turn on his owner. Ronald drove to Crosby’s house next to the fertilizer plant. When Crosby opened his front door, Banjo ran onto the porch and bit Ronald on the left shin. The man pulled the dog back inside and yelled through the screen door, ‘He’s had all his shots.’

“Ronald drove himself to the emergency room, but he didn’t need stitches, just a bandage. His editors were amused and made him write a first-person account of what happened. The headline said, ‘Reporter Sings the Blues After Being Bitten by Dog Named Banjo.’ Ronald explained that a banjo is primarily an instrument used in country and bluegrass, not the blues, but the headline stayed.”

In the novel, I changed the name of the dog from Amigo to Banjo. I made the dog bite more of a lightning strike, rather than a case of me putting myself into harm’s way. I didn’t quote the fictional dog owner as much as I did in real life. From that point onward, I was always wary when I encountered dogs on the job.