Story Behind the Story: Funny How Things Change

Like most of what I write--and I suspect what most writers write--I wrote this book because I had to. It was an idea that wouldn't go away. More than that, Remy was a character who wouldn't leave me alone, whose story I wanted to tell.

But the story really started with this: a water tank. Fascinating, no?

The water tank is on a ridge overlooking the town of Welch in southern West Virginia, where my husband's father grew up and where we visit every other year for the Wyatt family reunion. And I have to admit now that the first time I saw Welch, I couldn't figure out why anyone would stop there in the first place and in the second place, why they would stay. I'd have been all "Okay, let's keep going. There has to be something else on the other side of these mountains." I am not a mountain kind of a girl. I grew up in rolling hills. I need a little more horizon around me. Welch, tucked deep in the close folds of the Appalachian Plateau, made me feel claustrophobic. I remember the first time we drove up out of those mountains, there was the sense of surfacing from deep water. I wasn't really looking forward to going back. (Sorry, Jack. Sorry, Welch.)

But go back we did, and year after year, as I got to know the people who lived there, I started to wonder what kept them there, what made my father-in-law homesick. Why did they love this place? It had to be more than just an affinity for the place you had always known. Being born and raised in a place doesn't always create a deep connection, but extreme landscapes tend to make extreme impressions. And I love extremes. Well, not in my own life. In my own life, I like calm and quiet. But I like thinking about the extremes in other people's lives. Where there are extremes, there are interesting stories and the back of my mind started piecing together a story set in the Appalachian Plateau.

The thing about the back of the mind is that the front of the mind doesn't always know what's going on there until it's too late to do anything about it. And that's what happened about four years ago, when we headed back to Welch for the next reunion. Driving along the ridge over the town, we noticed a man painting this mural on the water tank. Another man was leaning on the scaffolding, talking to him. Every time we passed the water tank that weekend, a different person was there, talking to the painter.

Big deal, you're thinking. I know. But it was a detail that the story started to hang itself on. The painter became a girl and the person leaning on the scaffolding was a boy. The girl was an outsider. She was painting her idea of the mountains, an idea that maybe wasn't true. The boy was an insider, a mountain man. He knew what was true. They had things to tell each other and hear from each other.

All that weekend, details piled up. I wasn't even thinking of the story in the front of my mind, but the back of my mind was storing up details. There had been a flood--a bad flood a few months before the reunion and the region was still cleaning up. The pile of soaked and ruined books from the library in the novel was a real pile of soaked and ruined books. Details build a world. Details build a story. You learn to pay attention to the details that stay in your mind.

On the long drive home, those details started to line themselves up into a story and by the time we were back in York, I had notes for a new novel. A novel about why someone would stay in a place that other people maybe wouldn't even slow down in.

Okay, so I don't always do things the easy way. My first novel was about a guy who didn't want something when the prevailing wisdom is that when you write a novel, your main character has to want something. Now I was going to write a book about a seventeen-year-old guy who wants to stay in one place when the general consensus is that you should get up and out of your crummy little town. Odds were a twenty-first century George Bailey wasn't going to go over all that well. But sometimes, you have to write what you have to write.

As of this writing, I still don't know how Remy and his story are going to go over, but I'll always be glad I paid attention. And I even kind of like the mountains now.