In college a friend and I were taking the same short story writing course, and I remember her asking me, "Where do you get your ideas?" Knowing she was a good writer, she assumed she could compose a decent story, if only she could figure out what to write about. She hoped there would be a trick, but for me, at least, there isn't. Instead, there's a lot of thinking.
Drowning Ruth started out with my thinking about a Boo Radleyish neighbor we had when I was growing up. She was a recluse and lived in a big house, kept two white German Shepherds and a white cat, and surrounded her yard with a chain link fence-unheard of along the lake where everyone cut a cross each other's lawns as a matter of course. The only way to get past her house without walking up and down two long, steep hills or literally swimming was to scramble over the boulders she'd piled between her fence and the water. One afternoon, as I stood on the edge of her property line poised to run, the people immediately next door warned me that she'd shot at some other kids from her window with a bb gun. I was quick, though, and mostly timed my crossings for the minutes when she was riding away from the lake on her mower. I only saw her face to face once, when she yelled at my brother and me from her vintage car to "get off this private road"-the road we lived on, which, by the way, wasn't private.
My great aunt had known her, though, years before, and she told me stories about how this woman used to sit in the car and wait while her husband went to parties in Milwaukee. The poor lady was probably only agoraphobic, but I'm glad that at the time I had no notion of such a prosaic explanation because whenever I passed her house-especially when I trudged up and down those endless hills--I romanticized the tragic life that had made her want to shut herself away and imagined her days alone in her mansion.
Later, when I hoped, like my friend, that I might be able to write something, if only I could think of something to write about, I realized that the idea of this woman and the atmosphere I'd attached to her had stuck with me. For years, the opening scene of my novel, which I was then calling The Recluse, was an old woman watching from her window and reaching for her bb gun, as a little boy crept toward her house on a dare. But as I delved into her past-or rather made up things about her past--Amanda and Ruth emerged, and in their vividness, they pushed that woman aside. There's really no one like her in Drowning Ruth She was a pinch of starter dough, but was so subsumed by the new loaf that I could start an entirely different novel with her today.
Once I had the characters-Imogene came along very early, as did Carl, although he was quite different at first, and Clement and Theresa Owens weren't far behind--they seemed so rich and interesting that I knew there had to be a story associated with them. Other scraps of my childhood helped me envision scenes from their lives-the creak of the ice expanding, the sting of raw wind, the smell of manure all around the schoolyard, the slipperiness of my little sister as she clung to me when she was learning to swim, my fear of my first grade teacher, my brother's black tooth, the tedious slowness of our old four horsepower motor-as did snippets I'd heard from my great aunts and grandparents and parents about card clubs, business college, and nursing school, the time my great grandfather put geese in the car, the parade in which my other great grandfather had been marching when he met my great grandmother, the dances at the lakeside pavilion and the bands you could hear all around the lake.
Finally, I had a whole world, like a great, gorgeous bolt of fabric, but still I didn't have a story, not one focused sequence of events that engaged these characters from the beginning of the book to the end. And although these imagined people and their surroundings and accoutrements alone were satisfying to me as a habitual daydreamer, I recognized that this was no way to run a novel. I had to think what they might do, and how that might involve the others, and how what they'd done in the beginning would make them behave at the end. So I had to cut up that fabric, rearrange the pieces and sew them back together. And then when one arm turned out too long or the bodice was on backwards, I had to do it again. I had to do that over and over, before I found a pattern that seemed true to those characters and to me. I don't recommend it, but that's how I got the idea.
Get more resources on Drowning Ruth, an Oprah's Book Club selection.
View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Drowning Ruth started out with my thinking about a Boo Radleyish neighbor we had when I was growing up. She was a recluse and lived in a big house, kept two white German Shepherds and a white cat, and surrounded her yard with a chain link fence-unheard of along the lake where everyone cut a cross each other's lawns as a matter of course. The only way to get past her house without walking up and down two long, steep hills or literally swimming was to scramble over the boulders she'd piled between her fence and the water. One afternoon, as I stood on the edge of her property line poised to run, the people immediately next door warned me that she'd shot at some other kids from her window with a bb gun. I was quick, though, and mostly timed my crossings for the minutes when she was riding away from the lake on her mower. I only saw her face to face once, when she yelled at my brother and me from her vintage car to "get off this private road"-the road we lived on, which, by the way, wasn't private.
My great aunt had known her, though, years before, and she told me stories about how this woman used to sit in the car and wait while her husband went to parties in Milwaukee. The poor lady was probably only agoraphobic, but I'm glad that at the time I had no notion of such a prosaic explanation because whenever I passed her house-especially when I trudged up and down those endless hills--I romanticized the tragic life that had made her want to shut herself away and imagined her days alone in her mansion.
Later, when I hoped, like my friend, that I might be able to write something, if only I could think of something to write about, I realized that the idea of this woman and the atmosphere I'd attached to her had stuck with me. For years, the opening scene of my novel, which I was then calling The Recluse, was an old woman watching from her window and reaching for her bb gun, as a little boy crept toward her house on a dare. But as I delved into her past-or rather made up things about her past--Amanda and Ruth emerged, and in their vividness, they pushed that woman aside. There's really no one like her in Drowning Ruth She was a pinch of starter dough, but was so subsumed by the new loaf that I could start an entirely different novel with her today.
Once I had the characters-Imogene came along very early, as did Carl, although he was quite different at first, and Clement and Theresa Owens weren't far behind--they seemed so rich and interesting that I knew there had to be a story associated with them. Other scraps of my childhood helped me envision scenes from their lives-the creak of the ice expanding, the sting of raw wind, the smell of manure all around the schoolyard, the slipperiness of my little sister as she clung to me when she was learning to swim, my fear of my first grade teacher, my brother's black tooth, the tedious slowness of our old four horsepower motor-as did snippets I'd heard from my great aunts and grandparents and parents about card clubs, business college, and nursing school, the time my great grandfather put geese in the car, the parade in which my other great grandfather had been marching when he met my great grandmother, the dances at the lakeside pavilion and the bands you could hear all around the lake.
Finally, I had a whole world, like a great, gorgeous bolt of fabric, but still I didn't have a story, not one focused sequence of events that engaged these characters from the beginning of the book to the end. And although these imagined people and their surroundings and accoutrements alone were satisfying to me as a habitual daydreamer, I recognized that this was no way to run a novel. I had to think what they might do, and how that might involve the others, and how what they'd done in the beginning would make them behave at the end. So I had to cut up that fabric, rearrange the pieces and sew them back together. And then when one arm turned out too long or the bodice was on backwards, I had to do it again. I had to do that over and over, before I found a pattern that seemed true to those characters and to me. I don't recommend it, but that's how I got the idea.
Get more resources on Drowning Ruth, an Oprah's Book Club selection.View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Published 09/27/2000
