Before reading any of the chapter blogs, please Read This
First Thing’s First
The title: Shades of Thorne Creek. Shades can be:
- variations in hue (different shades of green)
- a slang term for sunglasses (I’m trying to cover all bases, here)
- a home’s interior window coverings
- undertones or suggestions (shades of the political turmoil leading to the last war)
- (or, more obscurely) ghosts
And the winner is “ghosts”. SoTC is not a ghost story, except in a metaphorical sense. A disaster in the early 1970s took many lives in a single day, and memories among the survivors, and the resultant scars in the earth, stand like ghosts whose stories needs to be told.
Second Thing’s Second
SoTC was not intended to be a novel. It began as a writing exercise, an experiment in character development.
The plan was to have some catastrophe, and see how it affects four people: Two with a pre-existing spiritual outlook (probably Christian) and two without any clearly defined faith.
One of the faith-driven characters would grow closer to God due to the disaster, the other would lose their faith due to it.
One of the non-believing characters would find their position hardened; the other would have a spiritual awakening.
Nice, simple construct. It wouldn’t necessarily be a huge project. More than a short story, but certainly not a whole novel. But a funny thing happened on the way to the finish line. I guess it began when a very dear friend relayed a story about her mother. It made me wonder how my friend turned out so grounded, so normal. The story (just a vignette, really) seemed so sharply drawn, and such a classic example of the secret goings-on in households, that I rudely appropriated the story to be part of SoTC. I didn’t feel too bad about it; the writing exercise was never meant to be read by anyone but me.
After I realized that a novel was shaping up, I did secure her permission to use it. But the posing of the question was a rather lame move on my part; I had written the thing. What was she going to say? But I do thank her for greenlighting the scene.
I’ll have more to say about this when it comes up in Chapter Three.
The Third Thing
The final observation is how this initial chapter jelled. The story is set in 1974, and I was struggling to start it in 1974. It just wasn’t working. If I had a proper writer’s discipline, I suppose I would have just powered through. But I am one of two things: Either a lazy slug, or a long-game strategist.
I kept pondering the issue of how to start the story.
Meanwhile…. During this time I was bicycling extensively. Nothing long distance or at racing speeds—typically a half hour to an hour rout through suburban areas. Sometimes I biked alone, sometimes with my son. On one such outing (with or without my son, I can’t remember) I decided to take a rest; I rolled into a small cemetery.
Walking among the graves and reading the headstones, I began imagining very short histories of how the various people died. Maybe it was a bit morbid, but it seemed a natural enough thing to do.
Sometime later (Days? Weeks?) I was walking from my job in downtown Minneapolis to a bus stop that would take me to my Park and Ride lot, when it hit me. That was it. That was my angle, to wedge myself into the story. I would start the story in present day, speaking in first person, about biking through South Dakota. On a rest stop in an obscure country cemetery, I as the narrator would begin spinning such fictions, until I realized that one area of the cemetery had a huge number of gravestones with a single date, in 1974.
It was a mystery, a puzzlement, with ominous overtones, and it would launch me into an exploration of what had happened on that day. It worked; I was off and running with the story.