Forest and Breadcrumbs: Chapter 2
How to situate readers and give them a path forward
When I was writing COMMUNITY DAY, I came up with a term for a key task of the early chapters. I called it “forest and breadcrumbs.”
I needed to 1. describe the key aspects of the setting (the here-and-now essential to what’s to come), and 2. leave clues about the developments ahead.
The “forest” is the former. Quickly situate the reader in a time and place. Describe the important locations so readers feel grounded and can envision events.1
The “breadcrumbs” are the clues. Clues take lots of forms. Symbols (e.g., I used clocks and watches to emphasize the theme of time). Literary allusions. Vague statements. Pregnant pauses. Unanswered questions. Breadcrumbs guide the reader. They suggest that there is a path, that the path is important, that the destination is still unknown, etc.
The “forest” and “breadcrumbs” aren’t just good for the reader: They’re invaluable guides to the author. If you’re going to describe the novel’s important locations during the early chapters, you need to know which locations are going to be important in the rest of the novel. You also need to think about which details to provide straightaway and which to delay.
And if you’re not ready to provide breadcrumbs, you don’t know your story well enough yet. To hint at big developments, you need to know what those developments are going to be.
Forest, Breadcrumbs, and the Prequel
As I’ve discussed in the previous two columns, I have a sense of how the prequel would start, including which characters to introduce first. I also know where the novel would be set (it would be in a particular state capital in about 1989-1990).
But the forest concept has me thinking about which elements of the location I need to introduce first. The two main characters meet on a bridge, which overlooks a river and a town. I eventually need to explain where the two characters are coming from (literally and figuratively). I need to explain why the river is important. I also need to describe the town. That’s where most of the action is set.
In this early chapter, would I focus on the main characters’ places of work—where they go after they leave the bridge? Do I talk about the college campus and church that become important later? Do I instead just follow their paths from the bridge to work, describing the key sites along the way (like a restaurant, a post office, and a coffee shop))?
And how much do I say about the lives and events surrounding these places? That is, do I just describe the church or go into detail about what it means for the town and its people?
And this leads to questions about breadcrumbs.
Because I haven’t fleshed out the big events of the novel yet, it’s hard to know how to hint at them. So, for example, I know I want a bunch of important (though seemingly spontaneous) conversations to happen at a particular restaurant. But I’m not sure which conversations. I know I want a recurring secret meeting to happen at the church. But I’m not sure who will be part of those meetings. I know some shady stuff happens at this post office, but I’m not sure exactly how.
So most of the breadcrumbs are TBD.
But I know a big event is going to happen in a different state’s capital in the first third of the book. I have to hint at that somehow early on.
Forest and COMMUNITY DAY
Here are a few examples of how I describe COMMUNITY DAY’s setting in Chapter 2 in order to push the story along.
The narrator begins the chapter with, “If I’m going to tell you about Community Day 2020, you need to understand our area.” This is the narrator’s thesis—the events of the terrible day are a consequence of what’s happened to the region.
He begins by describing the rural, remote nature of his county. He lives outside “a lightly populated town that’s nevertheless the largest in the county.” I suggest that it feels isolated and under-resourced: “There are no office parks or even big shopping centers around, and the nearest major city is 90 minutes away, assuming no harvester has other plans for your schedule.”
The area is culturally conservative: “Most folks believe in law and order, faith and family, tradition and morals, big trucks and small government.” It’s also depressed. The locals now “generally work for the prison,” a handful of struggling farms, or a few “industries extracting what’s remaining in the hills to the south.”
To underscore the economic plight of the region, I refer to a”sprawling consignment shop that settled in the space Best Buy abandoned a few years after taking over the lease of the shuttered Ames.” What’s sadder than a shop selling secondhand goods in a location deserted by two struggling chains?
I also provide extensive details about the park. Several important scenes occur at the park later in the novel, and it is where the horrible events of Community Day take place.
I wanted to make the park seem like a colosseum or stage—the central location of the action. “The park is carved into a six-acre clearing in the otherwise undeveloped wooded area in the center of our neighborhood.”
Big things later take place inside the park’s gazebo, so I focus on that. “On the park’s west side, not far from the street, is an octagonal gazebo. It has bench seating along the sides and a circular oak table in the center.” I wanted to emphasize the role of Covid in the story: “The gazebo can hold 16 people during non-pandemic times; six when viral loads are on the mind.”
Breadcrumbs and Community Day
Throughout Chapter 2, I (or the narrator) hint at what’s to come.2 Here are just a few examples.
Grangerford: The town’s name is one of the warring families in Huckleberry Finn. This is meant to suggest that the narrator is taking liberties with his tale and/or that community conflict is coming. To reward the close reader, I refer later in the chapter to “blossoming intergenerational feuds”—showing that the Grangerford reference is purposeful.
“The vast swampy wastelands of the nymph-departed Ohunka river”: This is the narrator’s first literary allusion. He is referring to the famous poem The Waste Land by TS Eliot, a poem about war and devastation. The narrator’s use of “nymph-departed” is meant to be startling to the reader. If you look it up, you’ll find this line from the poem: “The nymphs are departed.” If you wonder if the narrator is actually alluding to the poem The Waste Land, the sentence confirms that by using the term “wastelands.”
“He was wearing a Screaming Trees concert t-shirt”: Pith is a key character in the novel. He represents the region’s goodness and deterioration. I wanted his attire to reflect his relaxed style and the struggles of the land. I could’ve picked any band name from his era—Pearl Jam, Nirvana, RHCP, Smashing Pumpkins. But what band name evokes environmental pain? Screaming Trees.
“Some of that started to change in 2016 with the fluke election of that vile county executive.” The narrator says this offhandedly and moves on. It is the first of several references to his antipathy for the county executive, which is key to the novel’s climax.
Ohunka: The narrator claims the name of the county’s river is Ohunka, which is actually the Sioux word for “false” or “untrue.” I (or the narrator) use this to underscore the unreliability of events.
“Its roof was also recently re-shingled; some other time I’ll tell you about the three teenage boys with the ladder and fireworks who necessitated that project.” The narrator does in fact return to the boys and the fireworks in the novel’s last scene. It is part of the final battle at the park.
Obviously, a forest is dense and extraordinarily complex, so I couldn’t possibly describe everything, and I shouldn’t describe too much initially: The progress of the story should act as an exploration of the forest—as that marsh becomes important, I’ll describe it; as we stumble upon those orchids, I’ll describe them.
A longer discussion is needed about when something in the novel is coming from me (the author) or the narrator. The narrator is a fabulist so some of his explanations and descriptions are wild or fabricated. There is sometimes significant distance between what actually happened (the domain of the author) and what the narrator claims (the domain of the in-story storyteller).