Tag: Hurricane Baby

Writing The Story

Long story short–these characters have been alive in my mind for quite some time. The story has undergone many, many permutations since I completed that first story draft. In 2010, in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina fifth anniversary. I took the story and adapted it to a stage play, which is when the title went from “Still Waters” to “Hurricane Baby”. That stage play won third place in the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, where a stage reading was performed on May 1, 2010.

I kept working at it and revising on it until I wondered if I had taken it as far as I could. I finally gave up on fiction almost entirely and started concentrating on blogging, setting up a blog about my life with bipolar disorder in 2014. In 2015, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women, concentrating on nonfiction. But even with that as my concentration, I kept flirting with fiction stories.

I took two semesters to write in fiction classes under Mary Miller, an up-and-coming short story and novel writer from Oxford, and Diana Spechler, a writer based in Mexico City. I wrote new fiction in their classes and experimented a great deal with flash fiction, discovering a had a knack for compressing a story down to its bare bones.

Characters

I did not plot out the novel and follow a script to write it. I simply kept asking the question: What happens next? I didn’t even ask why? that something would happen. I never told why! that something had happened. I tried to make sure each twist of the story was organic to the first characters as I had conceived them.

Wendy Magnum was a tough-as-nails working-class Southern woman. She worked part-time in a daycare taking care of three-year-olds because she seemed to not be able to have children, although she desperately wanted them, and worked her off days in Ray’s shop. She and Ray began dating when she was fourteen, not long after she lost her daddy in a drunk-driving accident and had married right when she finished high school. They had been married ten years when Katrina came through Hattiesburg. She loved the men in her life and knew how to handle guns but could not handle herself when she thought she was going to die in the hurricane without Ray to protect her, as he had throughout their life together.

Judd McKay was a wild one from Mandeville, Louisiana. He had gone to LSU and had lived and worked in Hattiesburg until his father died, leaving him his childhood home. He moved back home and began working as a traveling salesman selling first chainsaws, then generators, for Jackson Equipment Company. He and Ray had known each other for years. He had been married for three years to Laine McKay, who matched him in wildness and meanness, recognizing what he could do for her as well as what he couldn’t. He never had any sense when it came to a good-looking woman–something that had been his undoing more than once in his life.

Ray Magnum was four or five years older than Wendy and had been a baseball player in high school with blond hair and brown eyes. He owned his own business, Magnum Hardware, with his partner, Tommy Cade, and also worked as a professional firefighter to have a steady income. He was a stoic man who was capable of great love, moving into his mama’s house with Wendy to take care of his mama until she died. But working at the firehouse forty-eight hours on and seventy-two hours off at the shop, he could only do so much–when Wendy needed more.

They were a combustible mix–and I keep lighting fuses.

Even So

In fact, Judd and Wendy, along with Ray Magnum, and Rosie and Lee Oswalt. and Laine McKay, became so real to me that even after I let Judd McKay have his say about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the entire cast of characters decided they wanted to take ten pages each to decipher their emotions, too. I started several weeks later writing about how Ray, Wendy’s husband, suffered from PTSD from being on a firetruck after the storm. I talked about his struggles with increased alcohol use and survivor’s guilt.

By this time, I had started counseling for my own feelings of desperation and anxiety that overwhelmed me after the power came back on and the damage was cleared from my neighborhood, which had experienced Katrina as a Category 1 hurricane over 120 miles inland.

I had let my writing friend Lori read the original story, and I sent her this next ten-page installment from Ray after I finished it. She wrote an in an email back to me that she could see how I was “processing” my own feelings about the hurricane through Ray and thought I needed to talk about his actions, rather than his thoughts. I called her up.

She and I talked for a while, and she crystallized a sentiment for me that I took to heart as I continued to write: This story was not about how people attempted to learn to cope. It was about people who had been destroyed inside by what they had faced. Her exact words (as I remember them) were, “This story is not about Ray’s struggles and victories in AA.”

So I ditched those ten pages and instead wrote instead about Judd and Laine McKay’s meeting with a lawyer to finalize their divorce. Again, I let these characters hurt each other and say hateful things they truly meant. I didn’t get into their heads–I let their actions speak instead. Slowly but surely, I was developing this storm story into a novel that would consume my life for the better part of five months.

Where It Went

I drafted the first short story feverishly in my notebooks until I finished it, then I started typing it into our computer. I revised as I went, tossing in twists of the knife at every point I could find to heighten the dramatic tension. The final scene that took five minutes of story time turned into three days of wondering how to end it and get Wendy and Judd apart again. I went through draft after draft, trying to make it sound “honest” to my concept of the characters.

When I finally solved it, I felt spent. It had taken we two weeks to finish it (I think). But I had a ten-page short story, all told from Wendy’s point of view. But while I thought I was finished with Still Waters, it was not finished with me.

I let my husband read it, and if he wondered about why I had written it, he didn’t ask. He only asked why I had them sleep together. I told him that I was trying to show how far fear could take somebody. I sent it to a few of my writing friends. My friend Christine Parisen said, “Wow! I had to smoke a cigarette after this one!”

But Judd McKay wasn’t finished talking. I kept thinking about that character, and he wanted his ten-page say about the events of the story. So I wrote how he came back to Hattiesburg and discovered Wendy was pregnant, and how he became convinced it was his child. Another month of one gut-wrenching scene after another. I had never written fiction like this, where the characters became much more than thinly-disguised people I knew. Judd McKay and Wendy Magnum became real people in my mind, and they had a greater story they wanted to tell.