Where Does It Start?

Where it starts in the long run is a place that Editor and I agree is a good starting place, but where it starts in OurTime is like this, something that may not ever be in the final version.   The house is brick, weathered brick, with vines on it, though not all over.  The front door opened to a broad step, several steps down to a brick walk that has been sealed level, so toes and heels don’t catch on it.  At the street, there are gate posts and a metal gate with a lock. The front yard’s fence is painted black.  The landscaping of the front yard is formal: shrubs trimmed into neat rounded forms.

There is a driveway in from the street (also protected by a lockable gate)  and a side entrance to the house, under a little overhang–an old wooden door that looks, and is not, weak.    The side entrance is to the kitchen, and the kitchen/laundry/pantry are set back from the rest of the house in back.  A brick wall runs from there down to the garage.  On the other side of the brick wall is the back garden of the house, also fairly formal although a children’s playset is now on one side, with the usual worn bare areas under the swings.   A few toys–a striped ball, something stuffed under one of the swings–are near the playset.

The far end of the garden is shrubbery.

And there’s someone lurking in it.  Three someones, in fact.  They have escaped, and they’re hiding, watching.   Rain has started, and is now making it through the shrub canopy and dripping on them.  They are miserable.  And scared.  And very slightly hopeful because they recognize both women who open the back door and come out, one from media images and one they have actually met.  The taller one says “There it is!” and walks briskly across the terrace and the grass to the playset.  The other stands just outside the doorway, protected slightly by a projection of roof.

The three glance back and forth, questioning without words.  Now?   But then both women alert, the one at the door looking back inside, the one who is now holding a sodden stuffed creature–impossible to tell what it is–and a striped ball hurrying back, rain spotting her clothes.  Not now.  If pursuit has come to that house–surely it won’t come back here.

The house appeared to me without any characters at first–this is unusual.   Outdoor places appear, but houses usually don’t until someone, an actual character, walks up to them and enters.   The house was a stage set earlier: a brick front with white trim, rather a Colonial Williamsburg look.  A breakfast conversation that was originally in it was cut from COLD WELCOME, but it had no depth, no real insides, and certainly no back garden with shrubbery as rain started falling.  Now it does.  It has offered details of its doors (front, side, and back), the texture of its brick (much softer than the brick veneer of our house), enough of its insides to get from the front door up the stairs and into two of several bedrooms.   It’s furnished in a style I wouldn’t want to live with (which is fine, as long as I maintain continuity and the satin bedcovering doesn’t suddenly become a plaid wool blanket.)

The first characters to appear with the house in my head were known characters, those who were coming to the house with a right to be there.   Not particularly happy to be there, but OK with it.  They came, they went in, they went upstairs…and that was all.  That was some months ago.  In the past weeks, though, shadowy figures have started coming  into that back garden (making it easier to see…the shrubs at the back remind me of photinia, largeish, dense, dark green, with large thick shiny leaves–hard to see through the shrub to the space between it and the wall.   In one corner children had made a “cave” with an old cheap tablecloth, now crumpled on the ground and filthy.)

It took me most of a week to figure out who the three are, since they didn’t come with handy labels.   I shuffled the possibilities:  thieves, vandals, curious teenagers, assassins, arsonists, scandal reporters,  escaped criminals of a half-dozen types, runaways from an asylum, from a boarding school, from parents interfering with their love life…listening to them, prodding them to do something and show me who they were, and finally they did.  No, I’m not telling you now; they may not even be in the book later.  But they’re there now, increasingly damp and miserable, and they’ve finished the last of the food.

Rain brings out smells.   Apparently, the children not only had a “cave” back here but possibly others used the space from time to time.   Why, the three wonder, didn’t the householders trim up the shrubs, make it easier to see (they’re glad it wasn’t done, but wonder why not.)   Behind them, a tall brick wall rises to divide this back garden from the one behind.  They’ve seen that one–no shrubbery at the wall, but fruit trees espaliered against it, flower beds with graveled paths.  A small dog, far more interested in digging into one of the beds than noticing anything at the top of the wall.

The back door before them opens again; a man in uniform steps out.  The rain is falling harder now, loud on the leaves overhead; they cannot hear what, if anything, he says before stepping back inside.

12 thoughts on “Where Does It Start?

  1. It’s interesting to me to see what kinds of things make “ideas” come fully alive, ready to be written. A person, a situation…sometimes they start shadowy, vague, like “something’s alive there under the water” and sometimes they walk up and introduce themselves. Ky in her first book was immediately clear, crisp–everything around her in focus–until the point at which she was hiding something from me that I needed (psychological stuff). After that, fine.

    Once I talked these three into revealing what/who they were, they began to take more form, become more real. But right now, I need to go prep the vegetables for tonight’s stew.

  2. Oh ho, you cheerfully leave these poor starving people in the rain an go prepare dinner.

    Very interesting bit of writing – even if it does not stay in the book it is written well.

    90 up here in NH.

    1. High 90s today here; at almost 9 pm we’ve cooled down to 88. Tomorrow’s going to be cooler, they say, with a high of 90 and a small chance of a thundershower. How hot does it get in NH? Or rather, what were its summer highs 30 years ago and how are they now?

      We’ll see what the book wants. I suspect those people will be in it, but I don’t know if the scene will, and if it is, it won’t be exactly like that–it will be in POV.

  3. I sure hope it is. It better be, is maybe the way to phrase it. The Plot Daemon has wakened briefly, demanded a fried breakfast, eaten same, and handed me a scrap of paper he’d scribbled on before telling me the Number Two engine was still not “right” and I’d be getting out of the harbor and through the tricky passage between Deadman’s Point and the shoals to port on one engine.

    I inquired if maybe I should wait until Number Two was in service again but he was already down the ladder to the engine room, trailing faux Scots dialect profanity and something about going back to bed for a wee bit to let breakfast settle. So something in the file is now “alive.” Let’s hope I grab the right line the first time, this time.

    (For anyone not familiar with the terminology here: the Plot Daemon reels out plot-stuff at varying rates, and when that line goes slack resents the author’s anxious inquiry about when the engines will start up again. In my young reader past were many, many of Guy Kilpatrick’s Inchecliffe Castle stories, favorites of my mother’s, where a Scots engineer named Colin Glencannon kept the old tramp steamer going. Why a Texanized version of him then became my plot daemon, I have no idea, but there he is, installed in an engine room I’ve never seen but in fiction.

    Why plot daemon instead of Muse? Not a female in Greek draperies, doesn’t correspond to any of the traditional Muses, has a strong turn toward the earthy (and liquids I personally can’t drink) but, like any daemon in Greek philosophy, inspires the work. Differently.

    1. A precursor by decades…assuming that someone who was writing the first Star Trek shows had read the Colin Glencannon stories, which is actually quite possible. Some of them were published in The Saturday Evening Post, as well as collected into books, so it’s quite likely many writers read them. Other writers may have included Scottish engineers of steamships in their stories; the Scots were known then for their technical skills; they built steamships and also served on them.

  4. Sounds like a good topic for a thesis! As it happens, I seem to recall having written a paper on the influence of Shakespeare on the television show Star Trek for an English class a couple of decades ago. The research was fun.

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