When he worked at the Vancouver Police Department, James Rogers said he didn’t like writing — the various reports, proposals and training material.
But after he retired in 2010, Rogers started reading novels. While he devoured the words of Stephen King, he began to hear a voice of his own.
“I had that narrator inside saying … ‘You’ve got some stories to tell that need to get out,’ ” Rogers said. “I just sort of followed that.”
Following that voice led Rogers to fiction writing. Now, after two years of what Rogers calls an emotionally challenging process, he has finished the first book in a trilogy, “Sheridan: Breaking Ground.”
“Writing has been the most rewarding and the most challenging thing I’ve done,” he said. “The whole writing experience is kind of a bipolar one. It can have moments of euphoric creativity followed by moments of depressed frustration, and sometimes both at the same time.”
Rogers, 60, worked for about 25 years in a career he said was more on the administrative side of police work. After working in patrol, Rogers worked as training officer, was a lieutenant in the internal affairs unit and at one point helped run a precinct.
When he sat down to write, he drew from his own experience in law enforcement. The story follows a 20-something police Officer Terrence Washburn and his investigation into an elderly woman’s death.
“The main character, the rookie cop, sort of recounts my earlier experience in law enforcement,” Rogers said. “It’s obviously exaggerated, but (it includes) many of the feelings of insecurities, the struggle, the learning curve that a young officer has.”
When he started the story, Rogers said he didn’t anticipate writing a murder-mystery type story. He said in writing there are two camps: those who outline the entire plot of a story, and the “seat-of-the-pantsers,” who start writing and hope it goes somewhere good. Rogers said he’s in the latter group.
“Often times, I don’t know how it’s going to end or even why I’m writing what I’m writing,” he said. “Fortunately, it seems to work because somewhere deep in the subconscious I think it’s all planned out, even though I don’t know what it is yet.”
Deep in Rogers’ subconscious was the story set in a town he remembers fondly from childhood visits to his grandmother’s house: Sheridan, Ore. During his time at VPD, Rogers went to the federal correctional institution in Sheridan to interview someone who filed a complaint against an officer.
The trip gave him insight into the prison and years later, when he sat down to write, he set the book in 1986, when the detention center was being built.
“At that time, the community is making a transition from this logging, farming community and kind of going through hard times,” he said. “The interesting part of that is that the prison offered, or was sort of promised, to help fortify this struggling economy and replace some of the jobs that had been lost and were not going to come back.”
The tension from the prison building project acts as a backdrop to the death investigation, Rogers said. But as he wrote, Rogers found that other themes made their way into his work.
“Some of the topics I address in this are domestic violence, corruption, abuse of authority, stressors of being a police officer,” he said. “My attempt was to address some very pertinent social issues, but to do it in an entertaining, engaging way.”
Though the story switches between five major character viewpoints, the readers’ main vantage point is that of the police officer. Rogers said he hopes to give readers a glimpse into what it’s like to be the person wearing a badge and carrying a gun.
“Often police work isn’t as clear cut or clean as we’d like to think … It’s good and bad,” he said. “It’s not always spot on, the characters aren’t always fully informed and making all of the right decisions.”
Though officers and their motives can be painted with a broad brush, Rogers said, that’s not the experience he had.
“Police work is a very complex, demanding and sometimes a no-win occupation,” he said. “I’m hoping I accomplished a little bit of revealing the humanity of what occurs in (the profession).”
