Old friends & new stories

After seven years, Holland Road—my novel—is done. Almost done, if I can ever pry myself away from tweaking it endlessly. (I’ll have more news on the publication front very soon, so please stick around if that’s something you’re interested in!) For about a year I’ve dipped into other projects, trying to find the next story that would stick as I also prepped HR to go out into the world. It turns out, though, that when you’ve obsessively focused on one story and one narrator for so many years, it’s hard to let that go. I flitted from story idea to story idea, all of which I loved, but none of which stuck it out past a few thousand words. Until Mattie.

If I’ve foisted bits of Holland Road upon you to read, or if you have any familiarity with its cast, you already know Mattie. I’ve said before that writing HR felt less like crafting a story out of my own mind and more like pulling up a chair on a big front porch on a summer night at dusk, surrounded by friends (although considering what I’ve put them through, it’s a wonder they still trust me), listening to that story being told by those who lived it. They were already there on that porch, waiting on me to arrive. Mattie is a supporting character in HR, and although writing him in that role came so naturally, I was a little skeptical of giving him his own novel.

Richard, narrator of HR, is a bit neurotic, prone to anxiety, a naturally restless soul. Descriptive, easily distracted, falling down philosophical rabbit holes as often as he breathes. But Mattie is my wild child who’d rather raise his fists than talk it out. He’s the friend you don’t entirely trust because you’re not sure where you’ll end up in the morning. He spends most of HR as comic relief, a foil for Richard’s straight-man shtick. They make no sense and also complete sense as best friends. I just wasn’t convinced that he could carry a story on his own—but I knew he had a lot of story of his own to tell.

In the late summer and early fall of this year his story began to come to me. At first I didn’t pay close attention; it didn’t seem like enough for a novel. Then more and more of it fell into place. I was telling a close friend about the disparate ideas I had for it, and she said something along the lines of, “You keep saying you don’t have enough of a plot for Mattie, but yet you’re telling me a whole novel.” That clicked everything into place. I had even less of a plot when I started out with Richard, but all he needed was my trust. That gamble turned out all right. I decided Mattie deserved the same chance, and besides, I always believe in writing the story that is actively developing rather than trying to force yourself to write what you think you should be writing.

Mattie’s story centers on a nearly-forgotten pocket of American history (maybe not so forgotten, depending on your heritage) that is not my own but that I find fascinating. He’s not 100% the live-wire personality he was in HR that makes you a little concerned about his safety, because that’s not sustainable for a first-person narrator for the length of a novel. But he’s still himself, that same charmer, that same maker of questionable life choices that endeared me to him so much when he walked into HR and made himself at home there.

When I finished the main draft of HR in 2021, the feeling of accomplishment that was four years in coming was quickly overcome by a sense of dread and even grief that I was nearly at the end of that story. That I was one step closer to letting it go, to it no longer being mine. I felt that I was losing those characters and with them such an important part of my life. But time helps, as do countless hours of revising and editing and rereading. I’m finally relaxing my grip on Richard’s story—I’m ready for it to be read. And the beautiful thing about writing is that no story world is ever really closed to any of us: I’m sure that Mattie’s novel is not the last one I’ll tell in the Caspar universe. When you find a set of fictional friends, whether your own creation or someone else’s, they never age or move away or forget about you. In this sense I believe we all truly can go home again.

I’ve found the next story. While it’s daunting to write something new for the first time in seven years, these characters welcoming me back eases that feeling a little. They’re familiar. They’re home. I can’t wait for you to meet them.