Parker M. Wilcox: 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.