Parker M. Wilcox

Baybury Shores Massachusetts

Baybury Shores is a fictional town on the west side of the Metacomet River in southeastern Massachusetts, across from the city of Hope Falls. It was settled in the mid-1600s by unruly European folk who were neither suitably devout nor upstanding enough to be allowed to remain with the Pilgrims in their village near Plymouth Rock. In 1779, it broke off from Hope Falls and incorporated as a separate town over differences about clam chowder. I live in the general vicinity and am in the process of writing a mystery novel set there.

News from Baybury Shores is sometimes posted on my Facebook page. If you are bored at the moment, you may look at it here: Greetings from Baybury Shores. If you are frequently bored, you can "like" it and see future updates.

There is also a Baybury Shores, Massachusetts website.

Building A Town

In the summer of 1984, while working in the art department for the publisher of three weekly newspapers in Massachusetts, I started creating a fictional town, inspired by Garrison Keillor’s weekly “News from Lake Wobegon” broadcasts on public radio. I pitched the idea of a weekly column to the editors of the company’s three newspapers, to feature humorous stories about the quirky inhabitants of a little New England seaside town. Copies of five sample columns were included with my cover letter. Two of the editors agreed to run them and, on July 5, 1984, I became a published fiction writer with an audience of thousands of readers in four towns. Over the course of the next two and a half years, I would write more than 110 installments about the intertwined lives of nearly 200 characters of all ages, about two dozen of whom became regularly appearing cast members.

The world I built in those two years ended up including the title town, the neighboring city, and a couple of nearby communities, filled with businesses, civic and social organizations, government officials, roads, and parks. It had a history dating back to the time when the Pilgrims landed over in the next county.

After leaving that newspaper job in 1987, the column stopped running. My fictional town sat idle for about 13 years. In 2001, my wife and I started a local monthly publication. From the start, the earliest plans for that enterprise included bringing the fictional town back to life. The new publication would not have the same audience the earlier newspaper columns had, but I wanted continuity. So the younger characters from the original columns were aged in real time. Teenagers from 1985 were in their early thirties when the town was rebooted. A lot of the well-developed older characters were not aged realistically, though, because I didn’t want them to die off too soon. Our personal foray into publishing last more than nine years. In that time, I penned 100 more stories set in the little town by the bay.

Twice I started writing full-length books about the town and both attempts stalled. More recently, after reading a new-to-me series of mystery novels, I decided to try again. My current work in progress is a murder mystery set in a small New England town full of offbeat, old-fashioned fashioned folk. It falls more or less into the “cozy” genre of mystery stories.

Rather than use the old town as the setting, a new one, Baybury Shores, MA, is being created from scratch. It’s in the same universe, though. I thought this “world building” would be easy, because for 37 years I’d had the old town in my brain, full blown and bustling with activity. I had not thought about how gradually that had been built, character by character, setting by setting, small bits and pieces added each week. The very first installment of the 1980s newspaper column named just three characters and had passing references to a few more. One of those three named characters never appeared again. One of them eventually moved away, but his daughter reappeared many years later. The third not only remained a major character throughout the entire series, but I have appropriated her, with a name change, into my new town.

My plan was to do more of that for the book—steal old characters, rename them, and put them to use in the new town. But that hasn’t happened. Baybury Shores is home to different people, connected in different ways. So more or less everything needs to be developed, as one might create a spinoff of an existing television series. Right now, that’s being done as chapters are written, people and places are being added as required in the story. Sometimes this means putting the writing aside to fashion a character, working up a brief sketch of their background, or to come up with the name and location of a business that is the setting of a scene.

In future posts, I’ll explain some of the research and development that is going on behind the scenes. For now, though, I have a chapter to finish writing.

Naming Names

Three chapters and 13,300+ words into my book, I just changed the names of three characters. They don’t play major roles in the story, but two of them live in the town of Baybury Shores and they appear as recurring characters in the mini stories I post on my Baybury Shores blog and Facebook page. Whether a person appears just a couple of times in a story or is a main character, though, getting the name right is important.

I spend a lot of time on creating names because in some cases I’ve written about the same characters in many stories over a period of nearly forty years. I have lived with these folks for a long time. I plan to live with the new ones for some years to come.

The changes in my current work in progress are because I forgot about some of my own rules for creating good names.

A name should have a clear pronunciation and should easily trip off the tongue.

Oliver Twist, Spenser, the Grinch, Miss Marple, Zaphod Beeblebrox. Long or short, domestic or alien, a name must scan easily. Readers must know how it sounds when spoken aloud. Two of the character names I changed had spellings that could cause confusion and didn’t flow naturally in ways that were pleasant to the ear. I try to void difficult and clumsy sounding names.

A name should reflect its time and place of origin.

To sound true to the character, a fair amount of thought should be given to when and where the person was named, as well as who named them. When a writer names a character, the writer is acting in the place of that character’s parents. Popular names, and even unpopular ones, vary through history. Perennial favorites endure simply because so many people have them, from family and friends to well-known celebrities. Mary, Elizabeth, Matthew, and John are not only Biblical but also the names of Queens and Popes, movie stars, aunts and uncles. But many names come and go out of fashion over decades and centuries.

Today you won’t find many people in their twenties or thirties who are named Chester or Eunice. Likewise, you wouldn’t have found any Kaylees or Jaydens roaming the streets in the 1920s. And both given names and surnames can reflect particular regions or countries of origin. A lot of Norwegian immigrants wound up in Minnesota and many Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Hawaiian people have a Portuguese heritage. A good number of New England names date back to English colonists beginning with the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620. Some traditional Black American names evolved from the days when slaves were given or adopted names of their owners or were inspired by influential Christian leaders.

Names might be subtle or not so subtle plays on common words and phrases.

Since my fiction has always been what might be classified as “cozy” and humorous, I personally love offbeat names that involve wordplay. Olive Drabbe is a pun and is descriptive. Josephine F. Buxom is, in fact, buxom, though I’ve never actually written a physical description of her. The Pawsock family came about because one of them was a baseball fan who played softball, which reminded me of the Pawtucket Red Sox, known as the PawSox. To me, Micky Pawsock sounds like a guy you would hear announced as the next batter in the lineup. I have yet to create a Ford Harrison, but that’s not outside the realm of possibility for me.

The editor/publisher of the town newspaper was one of the characters whose name I just changed. She was Gladys Macoun, because originally I had apple names stuck in my head for some unknown reason—Liz McIntosh, Marge Braeburn, Carla Pink-Crisp. So Gladys Macoun started reporting the news in Baybury Shores. But was that pronounced Ma-cown, Ma-cow-an, or Macoon? Even I didn’t know. And wouldn’t it be a better handle for the owner of a cider mill than for a journalist? Gladys wasn’t bad as a given name, but it didn’t have the right ring for that character I was imagining. The more I saw Gladys Macoun on the page, the more I felt the need to change her name. I started thinking of women’s names from the ’30s and ’40s, which was when she would have been born. And then I thought of the antique gray manual typewriter I have stored in my cellar. The editor of the Bay Current is now Doris Underwood. (She cruises around town on a red Vespa motor scooter, but that’s beside the point.)

One character’s name should not be easily confused with another’s.

Another change in my book came about because I had a guy called Theo Rove. And that was perfectly fine as far as it went. However, another important character was named Eugene Rye and a supporting character named Theodora Borden. (Her name I will never, ever change in a million years.) But having a Theodora and a Theo in the same book wasn’t a great idea. And Rye and Rove where too close in my mind. As the story progressed, I found that Rove’s wife was going to be a Portuguese woman who reads fortunes at the Renaissance faire where they are both cast members. They come from East Providence, RI. Theo Rove is now Alberto Lima. His name won’t get mixed up with anybody else. An added benefit is he now has a richer cultural background.

Readers should not get mixed up about who’s who. There probably shouldn’t be a Maryjane and a Marianne in the same book, nor a John and a Jonathan and a Johann in close proximity. In one instance, it took me a while to realize, because the characters had been mentioned so far apart, that police officer Wally Pollock worked under Chief Walter Boggs Jr., putting too many Wallys in the cramped police station. The chief, a minor character at this point, is now Chester Boggs Jr.

Be careful of stereotypes.

Yes, I know, in his 1965 children’s book Busy Busy World, Richard Scarry created a panda character and named him Ah-Choo of Hong Kong. We should strive not to do things like that today.

Previously, I mentioned places of origin and parents. When creating characters of different ethnic, racial, or cultural backgrounds, it is important to research authentic names that real parents have given to their children in specific places and times. It’s best to mix and match actual given names and surnames. Completely making things up can result in regrettable, insulting monikers. Care must be taken that “clever” or “humorous” names will not be interpreted as being disrespectful. Naming an Irish person Brian O’Brien would simply be having some fun, but making up a comical name for the chief of an Indigenous tribe would be insensitive, at the very least.

I have been guilty of poor judgement myself when attempted humor resulted in a character name which may have seemed more acceptable years ago when I wrote it but which my awareness today would never allow me to use.

It’s work, but it’s worth it.

Character names do not have to be unique to your book. But remember, you will never see a Boo Radley, Huckleberry Finn, Arly Hanks, or Sam Gamgee outside of their respective books. Outstanding characters have names that stand out.

The town I’m currently creating does not have a large population yet, so I’ll be having fun creating new people and giving them names for some time to come.

Historical research to add details

The book I'm working on is set in the mid-1970s. I was in high school then, but I have found I've had to do quite a bit or research to make sure all the background details are correct. It is a piece of fiction, set in a made-up town, but its southeastern Massachusetts location is real enough. Louis Tiant and Bill Lee were pitching for the Red Sox; Carlton Fisk was catching; Yaz was at first base. The diet soda of choice was TaB. The summer blockbuster Jaws opened in theaters the day before my story begins. Most telephones were still rotary dial. One could still get food from Howdy Beefburgers and Burger Chef. Pong was a popular video game played on home television sets. Arcade games Space Invaders and Pac-Man had not been developed yet.

This particular entry is about one specific historical tidbit I dug up to add dimension to one of my main characters, Maggie Hathaway. She grew up in Wellington Notch, New Hampshire, where her mother taught dance and gymnastics at local summer camps. Maggie developed a love for musical theater. She played Marian Paroo the librarian in the 1964 Wellington Notch High School production of The Music Man. Later, in a summer stock group, Maggie was Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun at the Grafton County Playhouse.

All of those details about Maggie were already in my manuscript a couple of weeks ago when, in an online mystery writers group I belong to, a Mystery Writers Question of the Day was: if our main characters won free concert tickets, who would they see? This question actually broke down into three parts in my mind. What kind of music do they like? Who were the popular performers in 1975? Which performers were specifically touring then, with appearances relatively close to either Wellington Notch, NH, or Baybury Shores, MA?

The internet being a wonderful place to research, I found a list of concerts that took place in Providence, RI, in the '70s, either at the Providence Civic Center of The Providence Performing Arts Center. There wasn't much of anything that either Maggie or my male main character would have been very interested in. It was much harder to search for 1970s concerts in Boston, because there are just so many venues and I was looking for historical accuracy. I did not want to say Maggie saw a particular concert when some stickler for history could point out that the person or group in question was on tour in Europe then.

Then, I got the idea that maybe there was a way to look up Boston Pops concerts in the '70s. The male character had until recently been dating a woman who plays trombone, so they might see the Pops. And Maggie liked Broadway musicals and sometimes the Pops concerts featured the tunes of Broadway composers or performances by Broadway stars. Sure enough, Google located a very comprehensive list of all the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including the Boston Pops series. Scanning through the list of concerts, I found that on Friday, May 2, 1975, two months before by story begins and one month before Maggie moved from Wellington Notch to Baybury Shores, Ethel Merman was the special guest of the Boston Pops. For those of you who aren't Broadway savvy, Ethel Merman was the original Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, and one of the greatest Broadway actresses of all time. Maggie Hathaway most certainly would have taken a bus from Wellinton Notch to Boston to see that concert.

I decided that was a thing I wanted to have Maggie mention in the book. So I added it in a very appropriate place story.

May 2, 1975, Boston Pops program (click to enlarge)

But there's more. A few nights ago, wanting to double check the date of the Ethel Merman concert to make sure I had it right, I stumbled on an amazing internet find. Internet Archive had a complete scanned collection of the 1975 Boston Pops concert program books. (In my attic I have a couple of these booklets myself, because in high school I was a band kid and every spring we took a bus trip to a Pops concert.) Flipping through the digital copies page by page, I found it. The actual program for the May 2, 1975, appearance by Ethel Merman, including the list of songs she sang. It was the very concert Maggie Hathaway would have seen, were she not actually a fictional character I made up.

This whole rabbit's hole of research, which sucked up hours of my time on a couple of different nights, only amounts to a passing, two sentence long reference in my book. But I learned something about my character Maggie that adds depth and realism to her. I know more about her. That will help me as I continue writing about her. And when the book is published some detail freak like me asks, "Did Ethel Merman really sing with the Boston Pops in 1975?" Hah! It's true. You can look it up.