The Prologue was written. I started to write the first chapter, in which my heroine Emma leaves her home in Kentucky to go to Chicago and take the California Zephyr to San Francisco. I had the original train schedule from 1949. I knew my characters. I knew where the story started.

What I didn’t have was the clear mental picture I needed to write the descriptions of the setting.

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Some writers, I understand, plot things tightly from the very beginning. They know everything that will happen in the story before they start. They know their characters intimately; they know their histories. They outline. They write timelines and calendars and lists of events.

Some writers sit down at computer or typewriter or pen and paper, open a secret door in the shadowy back hall of their minds and write down the story as it walks out of the unlit room where it lives, knowing nothing about it until it presents itself to be documented.

I lean more toward the second type. I sat down early in November 2010 with pen and notebook (I write better in longhand), the bare bones of the novel in mind, and wrote the Prologue to the story, The Trunk, which you can read right here. (Go on, if you like. I’ll wait.)

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The bones of the story begin to show themselves now, coalescing from a fog in the back of my mind made up of family memories, 30+ years of quilting experience, and my recent research on trains.

I now know my story will center around the trip from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr. The train’s inaugural journey took place in March of 1949, but I don’t want to put it too early. The trip itself needs to be faultless and there are always service bobbles at the beginning of any new venture. Let’s set it late in 1949, near Christmas. Maybe she’s happy to get away from midwestern ice and snow, heading for California’s Mediterranean climate.

Midwest? She’s not a city girl, not from Chicago. But her home must be reasonably near, somewhere within a believable distance to start her trip from Chicago. Hmmm…..

My own family has roots in northern Kentucky. My great-grandmother, Eva Chaffin Burton, lived in Greenup County in northeastern Kentucky, the bump in the state where the Ohio River bends from northwest to southwest and Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia all come together. She was a prolific quiltmaker whose skill with the needle provided for her family during the Depression of the 1930s. I remember vivid stories my father told about her, about his boyhood visits to the farm, her quilt frame in the parlor on pulleys so it could be raised to the ceiling when the room was needed for other purposes. Although she died before I was born, I felt I knew Gramma Burton. Yes, she was one of my characters. She would be the quiltmaker and my heroine, traveling to California to meet her fiancé, is her granddaughter.

The quilt at the center of the story’s framework would be a wedding quilt, a gift from grandmother to favorite grandchild. It would relate to the journey: twelve blocks, since I needed one block per month for a year to make my block-of-the-month program. No, wait — what about the tradition of a dowry of quilts?

Established quilting tradition says that Southern girls were expected to bring a dowry of thirteen quilts to their marriage, quilts that they had made during their childhood and courting years. She was to make the first twelve quilts in any pattern she liked, but the thirteenth, made only after a proposal of marriage was offered and accepted, was to be in the Wedding Ring pattern. If she made her Wedding Ring before becoming engaged, though, that would indicate arrogant pride in her own marriageability and she would never land a husband.

I couldn’t find a definite historical citation for this tradition, but I had a feeling that it was a very old idea, 19th century or even older. This would fit with the grandmother character, who would have been born in the late 1800s, better than the up-to-date post-war granddaughter. Our grandmother will make thirteen quilts for the dowry and send them to her as a wedding gift.

But where does the mystery part of the story come in — the mystery for my block-of-the-month quilter/reader, who will create each block without knowing what the finished product looks like? Could Grandmother send letters to Heroine, describing each quilt as she makes it?

I could write this as an epistolary novel, told through the granddaughter’s cross-country diary and the grandmother’s letters.

A trunk in the attic! I suddenly had a frame for my story. There would be a trunk containing the diary and the letters, and I would tell the story through documents. A scrapbook, perhaps? With the pieces and clues to the quilt blocks? And a daughter or granddaughter of my plucky heroine to discover this treasure trove and piece together the story of the trip, the wedding, and the quilts.

The fog in my mind was beginning to dissipate. The bones of the story had revealed themselves, clear and connected. Now to begin putting some flesh on them.

Next: The first quilt and the trunk in the attic.

We’ve decided that she’s going to San Francisco by train, our plucky needle-toting heroine. But which train? From where? What’s our time frame? Right now my notes just say “turn of the century.”

A little Google research on the history of passenger trains in the US showed me that service to the Bay Area was spotty until the mid-1930s. This was the beginning of the streamliner era of comfortable passenger trains with Pullman car sleeping accommodations. Although these were the years of the Great Depression, there was still a need for convenient, comfortable travel cross-country, and the railroads were beginning to see the rising competition from automobiles.

The first regular service to the Bay Area was the Union Pacific Railroad’s City of San Francisco (beginning in 1936). Competing trains came a bit later: the California Zephyr beginning in 1949, and the San Francisco Chief in 1954. Although they took different routes based on the rails and rights of way owned by their parent railroads, all three trains ran from Chicago to Oakland, with ferry service across the Bay at the end of the journey.

Based on these three options, I now knew that my heroine would be traveling from Chicago and that the time frame would have to be later than I’d originally thought: mid-century instead of early 1900s.

The first two trains (1930s-1940s) fit my half-formed story better, I thought. By the mid-1950s, when the Santa Fe’s San Francisco Chief began running, quiltmaking had fallen out of favor as one of those necessary frugal things people had to do during the Depression. Young women of the post-World War II years were happy to be able to afford new, factory-made bedding from Montgomery Ward or Sears. I remember my own mother, who married in 1948, ridiculing quilts made by my great-grandmother as “those old home-made rags” and eventually throwing them away in favor of up-to-date chenille bedspreads.

(Pause here for a moment of silence to remember the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt, similar to this one, that graced my bed when I was a child. I’m sorry I didn’t know enough to rescue it, Gramma Burton.)

I began to see the glimmer of a different story now… What if my heroine was the the modern young post-war woman and the quilter was an older relative? Her mother or grandmother? How would that change my story?

Oh, wait, we were deciding on trains. Choose that first, and that will determine the story’s time setting.

With a little more investigation, the choice between the City of San Francisco and the California Zephyr became very clear. The Zephyr’s route had been specifically chosen for scenic beauty across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, while the City’s route was chosen for transit speed. The Zephyr’s schedule was set deliberately so that the best scenery occurred during the daytime, with the comparatively uninteresting prairie and desert crossed at night. The City, on the other hand, was designed to get you there as fast as possible in luxurious comfort, but without the regard for stunning scenery.

In addition, the Zephyr has a huge and very active following of fans even now. The stainless steel VistaDome cars that were its hallmark were specially designed and built for it, and it was the first train to carry onboard hostesses, the Zephyrettes. There is an immense amount of historical and railfan material still available, from memoirs to blueprints and floor plans of the Budd railroad cars. Advertising material, menus from the dining cars, even pieces of the china and silver can be found on eBay. From a practical research standpoint as well as the possibility of describing a scenic journey, it was obvious that the Zephyr was the train to choose.

And a special bonus — there is still a train called the California Zephyr, now operated by Amtrak, that runs most of the original route, on the same schedule optimized for scenic viewing.

Hey — maybe once I write this book and sell it, we could take the trip on the California Zephyr ourselves!

Next: Setting the story’s time and place of origin. The characters begin to show themselves.

How “Silver Road to California” came to be

In the beginning there was a question: why don’t quilt mysteries come with a story?

A quilt mystery, of course, is a kind of quilt pattern that was invented by Judy Hopkins in the 1990s. Instead of having all the pieces and diagrams of the quilt at the beginning and moving toward a known final project, the quilter is given information a bit at a time: first the fabric colors, then the pieces to cut, then the assembly of the pieces. She doesn’t know what the quilt will look like until it’s finished.

This can be lots of fun in a workshop or guild setting with other people, but for those working at home from an pattern purchased online, the concept seemed uninteresting. It needs a story, I thought, something to keep a stitcher’s interest from week to week (or month to month) as the quilt takes shape.

This was during the summer of 2010, and I was thinking about creating a block of the month program for 2011. Why not combine the two? Do twelve blocks, each in quilt mystery fashion, and weave a story to tie them into a whole? Sounded like fun to me!

So… a journey? A diary quilt to record the travels? Maybe the quiltmaker is moving across America… a pioneer in a covered wagon? No. That’s too much a cliché. But the story does need to be a slow trip, something to give her time to make twelve blocks and keep a diary. It can’t be a coast-to-coast hop on a jet.

A train. Of course.

In my very first draft notes, my heroine/quiltmaker would travel by train to southern California in the early 1900s to join her husband-to-be, who owned a farm in the fertile valley near what is now Los Angeles. But as I worked with the idea, it became clear that I just didn’t know enough about that area or the time to write a credible story. I’ve never been to Los Angeles. My mental storehouse of details was empty, and it was important to me that the historical details be accurate.

More critically, I felt no enthusiasm for researching that time or place. It sounded charming when M F K Fisher wrote about it in The Art of Eating, but it wasn’t my time or place. No.

Still, we need to think in terms of cross-country journeys. I have been to San Francisco and love that place. In the early 1900s San Francisco was a thriving (if not terribly civilized) place. Colorful. There is a long written history to draw on for background, and I have vivid memories to help flesh out the details. Perfect.

Now — is there a train that goes across the country to San Francisco, a journey for us to share with our plucky needle-toting heroine?

Next: the search for the perfect train.