Choices

My first writing professor told me that the act of writing was really the act of making decisions. I not only believed him, I took this lesson to heart.

After I finished writing The Bread Will Rise, I decided I wanted to write a Chamber Piece –a Chamber Piece is an old term for a story set in a single location. Why did I decide to write a Chamber Piece? Don’t know…. There is a part of this process I don’t want to investigate too closely. When I was younger I was concerned, sometimes afraid, the well of creative ideas would dry up. There are lot of stories out there that focus on blocked writers and none of them are happy. So I decided to write a Chamber Piece and I didn’t question that decision.

Next, I spent a lot time researching Chamber Pieces. I watched a bunch of movies, read a bunch of stories, and studied several plays. Yes, the work of writing is often really fun.

My second decision, which was based on my research, was to not be too rigid with my piece. The best Chamber Pieces, and I can take you through my data if you want, are the Pieces that leave the single location if the story would benefit from that shift. In the film Iron Door, the unnamed couple escape the vault the aliens put them in and the fact that we see that is good. In the film Buried, we stay with Paul even when I think the story would have benefitted from a cut to the CIA agent attempting to rescue him.

I won’t bore you with other examples, but I will say, even before I started outlining I decided that if the story needed to change location in order to maintain verisimilitude then that’s what I would do.

The next choice and decision had to then be location. What location would be interesting enough to set an entire novel in? It would have to interesting to both the characters and the audience. Or it would have to be interesting to the audience and the characters could be trapped their against their will.

While I was letting this problem marinade, I was listening to NPR (as is my general habit). That particular day a doctor was talking about how the best thing you could possibly drink after a long, hard run was chocolate milk. Chocolate milk, it turns out, has the perfect ratio of fats, sugars, and protein to feed a body that has just burned seven hundred or more calories in a relatively short amount of time.

I was uninterested in investigating this claim further, but I was very interested in the person who would drink milk after a run. I run (if you will allow a generous use of the word.) And I think milk would not go down well. Water for me please. Not too cold.

As I was listening to this NPR story I was driving to work and that drive takes me by an empty lot that is right in between a very real Wienerschnitzel and a less than clean Burger King on Highland Road in BR, La.

My first thought on this part of the drive is always how is that Wienerschnitzel still in business? I’ve been hanging around the LSU campus since I was child and I don’t know anyone who has eaten there, ever. My second thought that day, and probably other days, was a coffee shop on that vacant lot would make a killing.

I should say now that the lot in question has been vacant since the seventies despite a lot of construction on and around Highland Road. So it is probably vacant for a reason –gas line, Native American burial ground, spot of sandy soil that wouldn’t support a building. Something is very wrong with that plot of land. But I write fiction, so that didn’t matter.

I decided the setting of this piece would be a coffee shop near the LSU campus and one of the characters would drink Chocolate Milk on a regular basis.

Next, I imagined the perfect coffee shop. Or at least my perfect coffee shop. This is an exercise I use often. It comes from Plato’s Republic, a work I studied deeply in college. Plato was on the hunt for justice and he thought the best way to figure out what justice looked like was to imagine an ideal city state. Don’t worry, he said, about the practicality of forming this city state given various the political realities that existed at the time. Let’s imagine the ideal and then we’ll have a goal for which to aim. I really like that. And I imagine an ideal often.

So the Stillwater Café was born. It was named after one of my favorite children’s book heroes, who was in turn named after a Japanese Buddhist monk and teacher. The rest of the café is an amalgam of features from coffee shops around the country that I really like, plus a few features, like ‘the swamp’ that I always thought would be cool.

The café is an important, albeit silent, character in the story. As such it was generously detailed. Layouts. Finishes. Flaws that come with age. All noted before writing began.

Next I thought about my people. I decided very early on that the story would center around a couple who meets at the café for a regular ‘coffee’ date. This seemed like an easy, relatable way to keep the action situated in my one location. I quickly decided that my couple would not be a romantic couple, simply because in a good passionate romance our heroes would want to spend more time together than a weekly meeting could allow. They also might like to go on a date and stuff. So romance was out.

I decided to not make my couple the same gender for three reasons: 1) best friends lowered the general stakes unless one was dying or moving away. 2) Same gender relationships makes the entire book less relatable. I’m not saying women can’t read books about male friendship or that men would be uninterested in books about two girls chatting over coffee. I am saying, however, marketing is real. The search for an audience is real. I think selling a book written by a man that is about two women talking is a more difficult book sell than book written by a man that is about a boy and a girl talking.

To lower the romantic pressure on my couple. I decided a May, December relationship was the way to go. And to further reduce temptation I decided the December member would be the male figure and he would be deeply in love with his deceased wife.

In my experience and in my study of American fiction culture men are the more aggressive partners when it comes to introducing sex into a relationship. That is not to say women are passive and men are predatory, or that there are not a whole slew of interesting characters and stories about older women loving younger men. Again marketing is real and we in our role as writer, are allowed to use archetypes and cultural expectations to our advantage.

So older guy who is not interested in a romantic relationship. Finally to really close the door on my hero couple hooking up, I decided one of the main topics of discussion would be our heroine’s love life. If she is actively pursing a romantic relationship outside of our hero friendship, then neither character nor audience is going to expect or want our heros to hook up.

So at this point, after about six weeks of research and another week of hard thought and work I had a detailed location for my Chamber Piece and I had a very rough idea of who was going to populate it. The next step, of course, was to make some decisions about my hero couple.

For more on that process, tune in next week. Or if you’re not following along in real time, click the link at the bottom of the page.

As Garrison Keilor always says, “Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.”

Until next time,
cw