2. Writing Doc and The Man

How writing the second story for stage led to several new characters and an amazing coincidence. Or was it? And gets me thinking of writing a novel.

This is a story of how one of the main characters in Hiram Falls arose from a typo. Really.

But first the background. My first story, Carrie, was presented on stage to several thousand people in seven performances. The audience response was exhilarating. (If you ever have had your work read aloud on stage you know it is an incredible experience.) Vermont Stage Co. was happy, too, and asked me to write a new story each year for the annual Winter Tales production. 

My next story was Doc.

It is often difficult for a writer to know (or remember) how they came up with a character or an idea. And I really can’t tell you how Doc Fowler crept into my brain. Certainly some of it seeped in from my own life — my Dad and his partners were country doctors in the truest sense: They made house calls; they worked every day; and until Medicare/Medicaid most of their patients didn’t get a bill and paid in barter. We had a town telephone operator and whenever my Mom and Dad would go out someplace for dinner, say, he’d let the operator know where he was.

I made a conscious decision to move the story forward to 1947, a time closer to my own lifespan. While I was intrigued with the 1890s (Carrie), I felt my stories would ring truer — and be more fun to write — if the stories drew from my own experience and life knowledge than from pure research about a time long ago.

My first draft of Doc was pretty stodgy. Most of my backstories are; I tend to get into the minutia of a character. I explore how the character sounds, how they walk, talk, what they like and don’t, what relationships they have, their history. I was also interested in Doc’s relationship with his wife, Flo. I saw them as near opposites.

On the second “draft” I started crafting a story. To create the arc, I drew on the old saw — get your main character out of the house and into a jam. 

So I did. I had him make a house call in the middle of the night, in the middle of a blizzard in his two-horse sleigh instead of his car (a Nash). 

This also allowed me to build a connection to the town — it is the town operator, Vera, who calls Doc to say he is needed — and to use dialog to reveal the relationship between Doc and Flo. 

(Semi-cool Tangent: I love dialog. One exercise I do, and sometimes have my writing groups do, is to write a dialog between two characters without names, ages, genders or information about their relationship. The aim is to see if you can tell all those things just from the dialog.)

Here’s am excerpt (David, by the way, is their young son):

“Vera called. She said Ernest Eastman went to the Emersons’ house to say Carrie was real sick and could they get a call to me.”

“Good God, it’s howling out there,” Flo says. “He walked all the way down to Emersons’?”

“I know.” Doc says. “Must not be good. I need to head up there. The Nash will never make it; I’m gonna take the sleigh.”

“It’s not a night fit for horses either,” she says. She mutters something under her breath, but he doesn’t hear it, too busy getting on his wool pants and shirt. Flo puts on her robe and slippers and heads downstairs. Muttering.

“Damn fool,” she says.

“I heard that.”

“Well, you are,” she whispers back up to him. “And be quiet. We don’t want to wake up David.”

Then I imagined Doc’s journey and, it being in the middle of the night and Doc is exhausted and lulled by the rhythm of the sleigh, I had him fall asleep, at the reins, if you will. 

Simple enough. 

But now what?

Even while I was writing, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I really didn’t. But I was in a good place — uninterrupted, focused, comfortable. I was just writing. Almost watching myself write. I had Doc awaken. I had him realize that the horses had stopped and wasn’t sure where he was and then… 

My intention was to have the lead horse do something, like turn, but instead of writing “her” (the horses, I knew, were mares) it came out as “him.”  Who is him? I wondered. But only for a second. I kept going, I went with it. I was curious. Who IS he? Here’s how the paragraph came out:

“Doc opens his eyes with a start. The sleigh has stopped. Snow swirls around the horses. Wide awake, alarmed, he snaps the reins, but the horses stay put. And then he sees it, sees him, a stranger standing between the two horses, stroking the snow off the brown mare’s eyelids. He turns and looks right at Doc. The sleigh lights flicker on his face: a young man of 25 or so, black hair, no hat, no gloves, a hint of a smile. There is something vaguely familiar about him.

Doc is perplexed. ‘Who are you?’ Doc asks, out loud.”

And from there, the rest of the story developed. The mysterious man disappeared, and then, at the end, reappeared in town. 

The experience taught me how important it is to find that space between the conscious and unconscious, that time when you are as close as possible to what your brain is thinking and your fingers are going along for the ride. 

And it is important that when a surprise comes, don’t edit; just keep going.

I also learned that sometimes it’s OK not to explain. Because I did not explain who the stranger was. And the people who spoke to me after seeing the story performed told me they were glad I didn’t explain who he was or how he happened to appear. They liked coming up with their own theories.

(I won’t give much more detail here, either, because I don’t want to give too much away.) 

The character captivated me though, and for many months, I let my brain do the walking while I did other things. Sometimes I spent time thinking about him, but mostly I let him settle in. I thought about making him the center of a story, or, perhaps, the frame around a much larger story. At this point, the town was coming to life and more characters were beginning to percolate in my mind…

By the time I did come back to writing about the man, I had decided a few things: he was an outsider in the community; few people knew him — had even seen him for that matter and he was indigenous, an Abenaki. (I will talk later about my internal conflict about a white man writing about an indigenous person.)

Cool tangent: Jumping ahead in the writing chronology here, a remarkable thing happened with this character. 

As with all my characters, I wrote out his backstory. In the man’s case, I decided he was living in a cave that was distinctive in three ways: the opening was very hard to spot unless you were looking at a certain angle; that it was formed from waves of a prehistoric lake created by glacial melt; and that it had a crack in the ceiling in the northwest corner.

Flash forward three years. 

To research the Abenaki, I enlisted the help of a dozen Abenaki elders. On my first visit, I met with six, three of whom had at one time been their tribe’s chief. We met for nearly four hours. It was an emotional experience. They told of their childhoods, of sometimes not being allowed to ride the bus to school, of people dumping boxes of old clothes in their driveways, of being made fun of, of having to live by foraging and hunting, of being indescribably poor. 

All six, at one point or another, broke down in the telling. 

They told me about customs and foraging and even about “ancestors” — which they told me is how they refer to what we call ghosts.

On my way home, one of them called me to say that after I left they talked and realized they hadn’t had a session like that in a long time and, further, they had never done that in front of a white man. 

“I hope you understood the story we were telling you,” he said.

What story did he mean?

“That what you saw today was how we have survived all these generations — by the love and support  and encouragement we give each other. Our resilience. That’s the story that is never told.”

The man also invited me to come up again and spend the day; they wanted to show me some of their special places. I did.

The very last place they took me to, up near the Canadian border, was a cave. It had an entrance just as I had written — the opening was impossible to see unless you looked at it from a certain direction. When we entered it, I saw the cave’s interior was carved out by the action of waves from the edge of the glacial lake that covered much of Vermont. And up in the northwest corner was a crack. 

The oldest gentleman, sitting on a rock in the cave, told me that his grandmother had lived in the cave for a while and that over the years it was a refuge for many a tribal member who needed it.

“This is so weird,” I said to the man. 

“What’s weird?”

I told him I had written about this cave and that it was almost exactly how I’d seen it. 

“That’s not weird,” he responded. “The ancestors are speaking to you.”

Perhaps.

But it remains the most unusual form of affirmation I have ever received. It was further encouragement to not question what you initially write but to keep going, to push on and see where you end up. 

Hard to do. But, somehow, I had done it.

Further, they gave me their assent to write the man’s story.

Next: A photograph and brief conversation at an agricultural fair leads to my third staged story and the decision to write the novel.