resources. I was daunted by the prospect of creating an entire community (I had done such a thing in two novels, 'Salem's Lot and Needful Things, and it's an enormous challenge), but enticed by the possibilities. I also knew I had reached the point where I must write or lose my chance. Ideas that are more complete the majority of them, in other words will keep a fair length of time, but a story that rises from a single image, one that exists mostly as potential, seems to be a much more perishable item.
I thought the chances that Storm of the Century would collapse of its own weight were fairly high, but in December of 1996 I began to
write, anyway. The final impetus was provided by the realization that if I set my story on Little Tall Island, I had a chance to say some interesting and provocative things about the very nature of community . . . because there is no community in America as tightly knit as the island communities off the coast of Maine. The people in them are bound together by situation, tradition, common interests, common religious practices, and work that is difficult and sometimes dangerous. They are also blood-bound and clannish, the populations of most islands composed of half a dozen old families that overlap at the cousins and nephews and inlaws like patchwork quilts.* If you're a tourist (or one of the "summah people"), they will be friendly to you, but you mustn't expect to see inside their lives. You can come back to your cottage on the headland overlooking the reach for sixty years, and you will still be an outsider. Because life on the island is different.
I write about small towns because I'm a small-town boy (although not an island boy, I hasten to add; when I write about Little Tall, I write as an outsider), and most of my small-town tales those of Jerusalem's Lot, those of Castle Rock, those of Little Tall Island owe a debt to Mark Twain ("The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg") and Nathaniel Hawthorne ("Young Goodman Brown"). Yet all of them, it seemed to me, had a certain unexamined postulate at their center: that a malevolent encroachment must always shatter the community, driving the individuals apart and turning them into enemies. But that has been my experience more as a reader than as a community member; as a community member, I've seen towns pull together every time disaster strikes.1
Still the question remains: is the result of pulling together always the common good? Does the idea of "community" always warm the cockles of the heart, or does it on occasion chill the blood? It was at
*In eastern Maine, basketball teams play their season-ending tourney at the Bangor Auditorium, and normal life comes pretty much to a complete stop as folks all over the region listen to the radio broadcasts. One year when the Jonesport-Beals girls' team was in the Class D (Small School) tourney, the radio announcers referred to all five of the starters by their first names. They had to, because all the girls were either sisters or cousins. Every one was a Beals.
1 In the ice storm of January 1998, for instance, when some communities went without power for two weeks or more.
that point that I imagined Mike Anderson's wife hugging him, and at the same moment whispering, "Make [Linoge] have an accident" in his ear. Man, what a chill that gave me! And I knew I would have to at least try to write the story.
The question of form remained to be answered. I don't worry about it, ever no more than I worry about the question of voice. The voice of a story (usually third person, sometimes first person) always comes with the package. So does the form an idea will take. I feel most comfortable writing novels, but I also write short stories, screenplays, and the occasional poem. The idea always dictates the form. You can't make a novel be a short story, you can't make a short story be a poem, and you can't stop a short story that decides it wants to be a novel instead (unless you want to kill it, that is).
I assumed that if I wrote Storm of the Century, it would be a novel. Yet as I prepared to sit down to it, the idea kept insisting that it was a movie. Every image of the story seemed to be a movie image rather than a book