“You are the god of the world of your novel” — one of my brilliant teachers at the Loft Literary Center

I’m doing as all authors must, musing on who I need in the world of my new novel to bring it to life. I know there is a family—two parents, three kids, an estranged father, an unmarried second cousin—and a few strangers who are the instruments of the family members getting themselves into trouble. Simple, but where to go from there?

My minds skips to a pre-feminist white-centric childhood and …

• … jumping rope: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy.” The novel’s set in the Depression and war is coming, so there are lots of possibilities here. And it’s set in South Dakota, so certainly there will be an Indian (although likely not a chief).
• …watching Sesame Street: “Who is a person in my neighborhood?” A postman is a person that I meet each day. And he knows things about you that you might not want anyone else to know.
• …watching Mr. Rogers: I wonder if Henrietta Pussycat and Daniel Striped Tiger would starve in a time when people are going hungry. But maybe Henrietta’s a good rat catcher (and I don’t just mean rodents). And a tiger, even a shy one, could live on the bloody entrails of conflict.

I’m on to literary inspiration. Should I craft a sprawling Dickens novel or Waiting for Godot? Perhaps a Lord of the Flies devolution (but that’s more males). This list is certainly lacking in estrogen, so I look to Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others. Or if I’m willing to be menopausal, The Golden Girls.

What I know is that the world of which I am the god must be more than the false front of a Saturday matinee Western. There must be a place for people to play and pray, to buy and sell (even if it’s only their souls). I need Germans and Norwegians (jah, you betcha) but also Sioux and English and an Irish woman with enviable red hair. There must be truth and lies, and a secret keeper and a gossip. One narcissist and one Christian martyr (or perhaps two of the latter engaged in out-martyring each other). A straight talker. A person on the verge of death (fueled by either desire for or fear of that death). Someone must be handy (if not downright mechanical) and someone helpless. Sex must be a new excitement, an old comfort, a distant memory and a future dream. People must love food and song and art and nature. Or hate them. Knees and backs and hearts must ache. Someone will hide six toes. There must be logic and imagination. I need FDR and that devil Hitler and a petty despot of a mayor (oh, my!). On the western and eastern horizons—both so visible on the flatness of the eastern South Dakota prairie—the shadow of the Great War is falling while the next war rises as a gathering storm. There must be ghosts and longed-for future lovers and the consequential children (wanted or not).

I hear voices in my head. That’s either Mary Shelley speaking of galvinism or Frau Blücher’s violin. My fingers itch to rob a few graves, stitch some parts together, throw the switch, and scream “It’s alive!”