People have asked me a lot over the last couple of months if I'm nervous or anxious about the contest. Sometimes I have gotten anxious. Right now I'm trying to channel that anxiety into reading mss for friends and working on Nine.
If you think about the contest like "American Idol," for example, my theory is this: I don't have to get up once a week and write a new story. My part is done. Once I entered, it was out of my hands. It's in Jake's hands now (the narrator). It's his job to engage a reader, tell a story and entertain. I'm the parent sitting in the audience biting my nails while I wait to hear what the judges say.
I have lived with some version of this story since my first undergraduate writing course in Spring 1991. The challenge was a five page story with "a setting you know," after half of us turned in our first assignment set in New York (or New Orleans), myself included. At the first class meeting after passing out our crit drafts, the professor (the marvelous Dinty Moore) asked how many of us had stories set in NYC. Easily half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many of us had been there. Maybe two people. Maybe. He said that it showed. His advice was that the setting is another character in the story, that even if it's one we invent, we have to know it as well as any other major character. When we launched our Toasted Cheese, I asked to write our first Absolute Blank article first because I had a particular one I wanted to write: "Setting Yourself Up."
So anyway...
For the assignment, I wrote a story I didn't like and took a draft in on the due date (a Tuesday). I showed him that I'd done the work and I said, "I'm not happy with it. It doesn't feel right." I'd set it in a fictionalized version of the house where I'd spent my teen years, kind of a haunted house mystery thing. I asked if I could have until Thursday to write something else. He quickly looked over what I had and said, "Do something with a wildly different setting and see how it goes."
I moved around a lot as a kid, every couple of years. One place where we actually spent more time than anywhere else was Perry, Florida. Perry has problems, like any small town, but I loved my experience there and there's something that feels very homey to me about it. There's a reason I choke up when I see spanish moss dripping out of live oaks or how easy it is to slip into a Perry (read: south Georgia/north Florida) accent. When Hawk was sick... well, dying actually... in November and I was living in the ICU waiting room, my mind was so absolutely elsewhere that I barely paid attention to what I was saying much less how I said it. Then people started asking me, "Are you from Texas?" I looked down at myself thinking, "Wha?" I say I'm not. Then I got "South Carolina" and I thought, "Why are people assuming I'm from the South?" Then I realized: I had my good ol' Perry accent going on. The very accent my brothers discouraged but my mother liked my picking up b/c it mean that I called her "Maaaa-mah." It used to come out when I got angry or excited. I don't know if it does now. In everyday speech, I'm far more Pittsburghese.
So anyway...
I wanted to write about Perry... somehow. At least about the South because I knew it and I knew it through physical setting as well as through people and my own experience.
Then I thought about a constant no matter where we lived: there was always some house in the neighborhood that we kids were forbidden to go near. It had a History and there were Secrets. I thought, "I want to write about that house."
Who's in the house? I based my character on a lady who lived next door to us in Lake Wales (central Florida by then). Very old school Southern and steel magnolia-y. Her name was Gwen so I named a character after her and the name "Baker" popped in there and voila. I needed a narrator so I made it be a little kid but the kid was an adult looking back. Way too To Kill A Mockingbird, I know. But I was 19 and I wanted to write what I wanted to write.
In the original short story -- I've forgotten the title -- in a little dust speck of a south Georgia town in 1938, Miss Baker has just died in her big red house at the end of the street. The narrator -- JD Dawson -- is trying to find out why the lady everyone vilified when she was alive is suddenly everyone's saint. His dad is a little condescending to his mother (I didn't know that at the time; I thought he was just wise) but he talks the truth to JD. The family -- JD & his parents, Wilkes and Thaddea -- go to church the following Sunday and the minister is pissed off about everyone having treated Miss Baker badly when she was alive. He's angry and ashamed about the congregation's behavior but he also doesn't expect it to change. I forget how it ends but JD's obsessed with the house & finding out who Miss Baker really was.
A couple of years later, I picked it back up and I thought, "I could write more about this." So I did. I turned in entirely too many short stories for upper level undergrad writing classes at FSU that involved this story. It became a lot about the kids and it was fun to write but really, I had no end point in mind.
A couple of years after that, I'd been laid off from the weekly newspaper I wrote for (it closed) and I thought, "I have the opportunity to write a book." So I started working on this again and studying what I'd done. I'd established that the minister (now the age of JD's parents, not the old fire and brimstone minister from the first draft) had grown up with JD's mother in a little town called "Lucy's Cotton" closer to the Florida border than where the main action is set.
I thought, "What's their relationship like?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was far more interested in the minister (Pastor Jake) than I was in JD or Miss Baker or anyone else. So I started over again and I let Jake tell me his story.
He had a lot to say. Right now it stands at 106,000 words, including Maggie Baker's diary entry. I changed Miss Baker's name for literary purposes but I kept "Gwen" for another character. I kept the big red house at the end of the street, with its Mystery and Secrets, and I kept that twisted little love letter to the flawed but beautiful little southern town that inspired it.
And thanks, Dinty, for those extra days and the assignment and the advice. It paid off.