I’m sometimes asked how I choose what to write about. There’s no easy answer. Sometimes I choose a character, sometimes a story, sometimes a place. Sometimes a story chooses me. Take Absolution, for example. The spark for this novel began years ago with a single word that I typed on a blank page in Microsoft Word. Trains.

Now if you’ve read the book, you know there are no trains in it, apart from subways and Maggie’s dream where she wanders along railroad tracks. So what happened?

First, I’ll tell you why I began with trains. You see, I have had a lifelong love of trains. My father went to work for the railroads when he was seventeen, riding in baggage cars and handling packages and mail. Later, he shipped race horses to and from Hialeah and spent his career working for Railway Express. When I was a child I loved to walk beside him through the Miami shipping terminal checking out the dogs and cats, alone and lonely in freight cartons and quite happy to see me. (photo: the old Miami FEC station and railyard with the REA terminal at arrow) Once my whole family went down to the terminal to peer into the crate of an African gnu on its way to a zoo. Because of my father’s job, I rode trains on passes, most of the time in coach, watching out the window and sleeping in my seat. I rode back and forth to college and crossed the country twice, once traveling over two mountain ranges, through two deserts and winding along California’s Feather River Canyon, another time from D.C. to St. Louis and across Texas to Nuevo Laredo and through the darkest night I have ever seen (no lights outside the windows for miles) to Mexico City.

Not only did I ride trains, I have almost always lived near trains. I felt the windows rattle in my childhood home in Miami as a train roared through the night a half block away. I could see a slow freight lumbering on the hill a short distance from my house in northern Virginia, when I was a teenager. And freight and passenger trains came through my college campus. In New York City, the subway was visible from my apartment window when it became an elevated at 125th Street.

So in the late ‘90s, I decided to write a novel that involved trains. After writing eighty pages that included some scenes I loved but a story that wouldn’t cohere, I quit work on it, leaving behind a widow with a son, a cotton farm they had come back to in southern Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, the place they had come there from – Boston – and a guy named Baird who had been the widow's college love.

Several years later, I tried turning the unfinished novel into a play. That’s when Richard showed up. And an unnamed Vietnamese kid who had encountered him during a drugstore robbery. Two very excellent drama professionals – my adult children – helped convince me that the play might work better as a novel. That’s when Absolution was truly born. Through a number of drafts, I tried to keep the train scenes intact. But on the final draft, I reluctantly cut the last such scene from the novel. That’s part of this writing business too – and one of the most difficult parts. But usually the work as a whole is better for it. In my next blog, I’ll show you the scene I cut and talk about why I decided it didn’t belong. Let's just call it “Plot Wars.”