Putting “Why It Matters” on Page One

By Julie Castillo

Author, Long Man’s Pillow

When gentle friends tell me they’re going to read my novel, I’m tempted to tell them to skip the first scene. Someone dies of thirst, literally on the first page, and it’s not pretty. Maybe the book should have come with a disclaimer. Why in the heck did I write something so ghastly?

I cringe at the thought of putting readers through that awful moment. But the choice was deliberate. I didn’t make it lightly, and certainly not for cheap thrills or gratuitous horror. 

The book deals with a real-world situation that has serious consequences, and I felt that the reader needed to know that, really know it, from the start. Between the opening scene and the moment catastrophe strikes, protagonist Vicki Truax makes friends, gets a dog, eats persimmon pudding, and enjoys a number of lovely, light-hearted experiences that could make it seem as though the calamity is never going to happen, which is exactly how too many people in the real world are dealing with this subject.

The story is set in the near future, at a time when a devastating drought has struck the mid-Atlantic states. This region has long been hailed as a climate change sweet spot, since it’s suffered comparatively few effects of global warming. So far.

I can’t help adding that this is precisely where Washington DC is located, home to the legislators in charge of national climate policy, and unfortunately, a fairly easy place to be a climate change denier.

Americans have been blessed for so long with such a stable and abundant life that we have a difficult time imagining dire scarcity and life-threatening want, conditions that people in many other parts of the world know all too well. Being numb to our abundance makes it harder for us to empathize with those who live in scarcity. We’ve developed a mindset that “it can’t happen here.” Writing a story in which it does happen here meant that I had to try to find ways to make the experience feel real to them, right down to the throbbing dehydration headache and the rawhide throat.

Several of my beta readers complained that a deadly drought in the MD/DC/VA area seemed unbelievable: look how much water we’ve got! I did a little research, though, and according to organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indeed it can happen here, and sometime within the next hundred years, it probably will.

Hence the reason poor Mr. Rosen had to die of thirst on page one. Well, technically, we don’t see him actually dying. We see Vicki lying on a mattress in her apartment, having just gotten the news of her next-door neighbor’s death, and trying to imagine what his final moments must have been like.

I didn’t start out writing specifically about climate change; the novel just took a turn that way because I was trying to write about life-threatening scarcity. I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, not because I hate humanity, but because I like seeing what emerges from the human psyche when characters are placed in life-or-death situations. I love novels like The Road, Station Eleven, and The Handmaid’s Tale because they show us that the best of humankind can still shine forth even in the face of no hope.

Most post-apocalyptic stories begin some years after the civilization-ending catastrophe has struck, or they have the event occur suddenly and sweepingly. I wanted to write what I think may be a more likely scenario, that a calamity of that magnitude could just as easily be slow and creeping, and it would gradually dawn on the people of a doomed society that they weren’t going to be able to come back from this one.

The first fatalities in a situation like that probably would be among the elderly and frail; their deaths would be shocking. They would force people to realize that things had gotten serious, by which time it would be too late. Just when the frog realizes he’s boiling, he’s too boiled to do anything about it.

If you were to ask me if the character of Mr. Rosen was inspired by a real person, the answer would be yes. He was based on someone I knew a long time ago, when I was a college freshman. That man was also elderly and wheelchair-bound, a quadriplegic holocaust survivor with an encyclopedic memory, who knew every Gershwin tune by heart and kept hard candies in his bucket hat in case he happened to meet up with any kiddos. 

He died in precisely the same manner as the character in the book, and because I was his friend and wasn’t checking on him as regularly as I should have, I did feel responsible, and I put myself through the same guilt-ridden visualization as Vicki does in the novel. The friend who died doesn’t deserve to be remembered just for dying, though, because his life was extraordinary, a tale that most certainly must be told one day.

But that’s a story for another time.

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Julie Castillo is a professional writer, editor, and story coach with more than 25 years’ experience in the writing and publishing industry. She has ghost-written more than a dozen books, fiction and nonfiction, including two New York Times Bestsellers. Her professional work includes writing nonfiction books, novels, nonfiction book proposals, press kits, back jacket copy, cover letters, synopses, and screenplay coverage. She is a published author and currently teaches creative writing.

LONG MAN’S PILLOW

As a catastrophic drought plagues the United States, Vicki Truax, a lonely Baltimorean, inherits land outside a remote Appalachian town. Amid the quirky townsfolk, she finds herself at home for the first time in her life. Vicki meets and befriends Alaric, an eccentric local who supplies townsfolk and moonshiners alike from his own meager water source. But danger lurks; a merciless businessman with a lucrative well attempts to seize her land, and water thieves roam her land at night, attempting to tap an aquifer. When Vicki discovers a small spring on her land, fears of a water war force her to keep the knowledge to herself. But Alaric’ s source runs dry, and a poorly planned raid ends in the collapse of Steen’ s well. Now Vicki’ s land is the only source of water, and she’ s left to decide who gets water and who dies.

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Category: On Writing