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First Reading ReportJanuary 13, 2009 Tonight I did my first Mud reading, at the Vineyard Haven library. The turnout was disappointing -- eight people, most of whom I already knew -- but I read well, sold two books to the library, and had a great conversation afterward with Betty, the library's programming person, partly about the Vineyard and partly about book publishing and promotion: her husband's second book, The Pains, was featured in last week's Vineyard Gazette. The better-known of the island's bookstores has been less than supportive, never mind that he's a longtime resident and his first book has sold more than 5,000 copies mostly via the Web. Not only that -- it's science fiction! I read the opening sequence from chapter 1, which lays out a key part of the backstory -- Jay's car gets shot at one night on the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road -- and most of chapter 2, in which Leslie covers a house fire. They both read well, and the combined length is about half an hour. I introduced them by saying that although none of the events in Mud of the Place did happen, nearly all of them could happen. What demands a major suspension of disbelief is that in the book all these problems surface and are solved within two weeks. On Martha's Vineyard as we know it, two years would be more plausible, but I didn't want a long-drawn-out chronology. How to accelerate the action? Have one character get shot at and another character's house burn down. Works pretty well. Thinking further -- it dawned on me years ago that the key ingredient for creating community is need. What motivates us to get out of our shells and interact with people we have little in common with and may not especially like? Need. If I've started making a challah and discover I'm out of eggs, I don't care a good goddamn if my nearest neighbor backed a different horse in the last election. The tendrils of community are the lending of eggs, the repayment (maybe in eggs, maybe in sugar, maybe in something completely different, like a ride into town to pick up your car when the mechanic is done with it), the "keeping an eye on" dogs or kids, the sharing of extra vegetables or bread or soup. When people can jump into the car at almost any hour and drive to town for more eggs, and especially if that seems preferable to knocking on a neighbor's door, then those tendrils never cross the fallow space between one human shell and another. What drives the action in Mud of the Place is usually need: what people need, or think they need. Needs can lie dormant for a long time, or go unacknowledged, or be put on a back burner. Rouse the needs and people start to move. Tickle the needs or tease them and the needs will make people do stuff they wouldn't do otherwise -- stuff that's braver or stupider or (not infrequently) both than they do under less pressing circumstances. My job as novelist was to up the ante, turn up the heat, get a bunch of sluggish or stationary bodies into motion. Once they're in motion, they start careening into each other, and some start seeing possibilities that didn't occur to them before: Leslie wants another prize-winning story, Wayne wants his ex-wife back, Dr. Jerome Turner wants to get rid of a pesky subordinate. Once people start acting on these needs -- "desires" might be a better word, because they aren't needs the way water, food, and shelter are needs -- interesting things start to happen. No wonder murder is such a popular plot device!
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