Here's one of the pitfalls in the writing process

Vintage WWII VD poster

Picture a small town along the Alaska coast where everyone recognizes everyone else, and most are at least passing acquaintances. Among these citizens a writer toils in the days before Internet and with access only to a limited library. He often has to find a local expert in something or other to confirm the accuracy of a tidbit he is writing.

A favorite source is the nurse practitioner in the town's clinic. his go-to reference for medical information. So, while involved with the intricacies of a plot involving the denizens of a harbor, he discovered one of his characters needed a venereal disease, wait, an STD in modern terminology. He chose Chlamydia as one that is barely noticeable and definitely not life-threatening. He only needed it so the character would have to face an embarrassing situation with a nurse he had met in a bar the same night the woman who gave him the disease told him about it.

Having written the sequence of discovery, anxiety. well, how about anger, bargaining, denial. depression, acceptance,  and sending the poor protagonist off to be cured by the nurse who had become the object of his affections, the author approached his friend for a medical opinion of his prose.

Within a day she came back to him, changing only one little detail and handing back his manuscript with pinched fingers as if it were somehow soiled, an affectation he barely noticed.

A week later, having progressed further into his plot he came upon a question. Instead of a phone call, that evening he approached the nurse practitioner in the bleachers of a Little League baseball game where she sat with a group of several players' mothers. Giving it little thought, he sat next to her and asked over the sound of a cheer, "If Chlamydia has no symptoms how do you know if you are cured or not?"

The cheering stopped in the same instant he realized his mistake. That instant of deadening silence was broken by his friend's almost fiendish laughter. Face flushed, his mouth hanging open and  panic in his eyes begging for understanding, he mumbled something about the scoreboard and raced away from that crowd knowing full well by morning the story of his disease would have spread all over that small town.

This may be one reason people hear of cloistered writers, at least that is what happened with me. Oops, did I say "me?" Damn. I avoided society for weeks after that incident, hoping that my friend had been able to tell the truth and perhaps at least dampen the gossip, but I never did know for sure and I would panic every time I suspected disapproval in the faces of some of the people I encountered.