My unpublished novel, KIND OF PLAID, began as a series of “what if?” reveries I experienced riding the commuter train to and from work in Boston. I’d walk down our little tree lined block and continue down Common Street through town center to reach the platform before 6:00 a.m. and wait for the train with all the other corporate zombies. In the afternoon, the flow reversed direction and I’d squeeze into the first available vertical space and hope my revery would return. Our street and those walks to and from the train station is how this project started.
It was a quiet street and ended, unceremoniously, at a tributary of the Neponset River so there was no through traffic. Occasionally, someone would mistake our street for a shortcut to avoid the traffic light in town center, otherwise, only residents and delivery trucks drove it. Our street was so quiet that a neighbor’s Bernese Mountain Dog would nap in the shade of the maple trees in the middle of the street on summer afternoons. One day a FedEx truck honked for about five minutes before a neighbor came out and persuaded Achilles to move.
There was a house on the corner with a plaque commemorating the year it was built, 1724. Our three-story cruciform-gambrel house was built when homes were illuminated with gas lamps but was still one of the newer homes. One of our neighbors lived in what was originally built as the carriage house for a mansion on Common Street. The house next door to us was a rectory for an 18th century church that no longer exists.
My commuter revery speculated on what it might’ve been like to live on our street when the land was first opened to residential development. New England will do that to you. The town woods still bear evidence of the first mill built in 1660. King Phillip’s War raged for two years beginning in 1675, and in 1724 our town was officially recognized. What was all that like? “What if?” was a recurring question. It was a welcome distraction from the blank faces on the commuter train and encouraged me to research the history of the town, and New England in general. Actually, I once saw someone I recognized from the train in our local Stop & Shop. It was a weird experience. We made eye contact and recognized each other. Then, without acknowledging the other’s presence, we both silently went on about our business. What would we talk about? “I hate riding the train.” “Yeah, me, too.” It was better to keep the commuter world and the real world separate.
Over time, I began to imagine that the people who settled my imaginary town included a young Scottish immigrant with a mysterious past (I have no idea why). In my revery, that family today was obscenely wealthy and still lived on the land their forbears owned, at the end of our street, in a house that was built by successive generations, with additions and improvements over the course of nearly two hundred years. What if the present-day residents of that mansion were true old-money New England eccentrics? What if the death of their youngest son in a war changed their attitude about money and charity? What if the kids of the town were welcome to use all the facilities of the estate and the old couple provided coaches and mentors for them? And so on. I had built a world in my mind. Now what?
Eventually, around 2007, the characters began talking to each other in my head and, fascinated that they had personalities and things to do, I began to record these things in a journal until, finally, that turned into writing a novel, a pure stream of consciousness that ended up being over 90,000 words. It was more of a pageant than a novel, more Oberammergau than You Can’t Take It With You. There had to be a novel in there somewhere. I had an enchanting setting and energetic characters with distinct personalities. It was a world I enjoyed visiting but it wasn’t a book.
What was the essential conflict of the story? I had a hero and a hero needs a dragon to slay.
What Then? 