Dwyer Murphy Explains How to Build a House (in Your Novel)
“I needed to know about houses—big and rambling houses, and how they alter people.”
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.
I don’t know much about houses—building or maintaining them. This reality dawned on me a couple years ago when I set out to write a particular kind of book, a modern gothic novel about a group of friends convening at a coastal house after a long separation: The Big Chill, with more bodies. A story like that needs a distinctive setting. The atmosphere, the suspense, all of it would live or die on the floorplan; I needed to be able to describe that house in detail, down to its bones.
(The book is now called The House on Buzzards Bay, and it comes out next month.)
There was a time, not too long ago, when I might have gone to family the help I needed. My grandfather, by the time he was forty, had built three houses from the ground up in Braintree, Massachusetts, on down time from jobs at the Fore River Shipyard, Otis Elevators, and helping to raise eleven kids. But my grandfather’s gone, and I’m a smooth-palmed writer with no shipyard experience to speak of, so I went to a library instead. Specifically, I went to the library in my hometown, the Spinney Memorial Library in Onset, Massachusetts, pretending I was going to read instructive volumes about local architecture and land use, but knowing, in my heart of hearts, eventually I would end up immersed in stories about the village’s unusual history.
Onset was settled as a summer camp for Spiritualists, down from Boston for cool bay breezes and the opportunity to commune with the spectral and the dead. They put up a lot of interesting structures around town: gingerbread cottages, parks, gabled roofs on dramatic and sprawling seaside homes. Mainly their work was around the campground, where they built the “On-i-Set Wigwam.” It’s made of wood and has eight sides, with a steep-pitched roof hanging over a totem pole. It was built in 1894, but there are still mediums who use the site. After the library visits, I went walking around: by the campground, up the bluffs, over the stone bridge, around the salt marshes. I took notes on houses I saw and thought about what, exactly, I was looking for here.
Again, I needed to know about houses—big and rambling houses, and how they alter people.
Since I was going for a distinctly gothic approach to my fictional house, I had ample fiction to consult, across time periods. I started with Henry James and Bly Manor, in The Turn of the Screw. Then to Manderley, in Daphne de Maurier’s Rebecca. I kept reading and re-reading a haunting story by Joyce Carol Oates, “The Doll,” first published in 1978. It’s about a woman who chances upon a house with an odd and meaningful connection to her childhood, but I won’t say more than that, since I borrowed a version of the woman’s disturbing discovery for one of my own characters. I also checked in with Megan Abbott’s recent Beware the Woman, the best modern gothic novel I could think of, and spent some time trying to figure out just how she conjured up that house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and how she managed to make it feel as though the walls were closing in on her characters, just as the woods outside seemed to be coming alive.
Finally, I returned to a book that isn’t gothic or fiction at all, but is much beloved in the region, George Howe Colt’s The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home. Or rather, I didn’t quite return to it. The Big House is a wonderful memoir of a family home on Wing’s Neck, a small peninsula jutting off the coast of Bourne, Massachusetts, into Buzzards Bay. This is the second time I’ve introduced some elements of Colt’s house into a novel (in an earlier book, The Stolen Coast, I used some aspects as a setting for a heist), but for some reason, I never actually read the book again. I read it twice, decades ago, after my father gifted it to me, and I prefer the details of the house as they’ve lingered in my imagination, perhaps wrongly. The portrait is purely impressionistic at this point. It’s mingled up in memory with another house I used to visit as a child not too far away from Wing’s Neck, in Little Harbor: an old New England home, belonging to an old New England family, full of dark rooms spilling one into another and elderly Havisham-like relatives wandering the grounds and—I remember this vividly—deer that used to emerge from the woods onto the beach at low tide to lick salt from the rocks.
I suppose any author who needs to design a house probably turns to some combination of books and visits and memories. Or maybe there are writers out there who have actually tried the thing with their own hands. I hope they go about the job whimsically. I think often about my grandfather’s last house, in Sandwich, Massachusetts. He built an extension onto the small original structure and filled the house with these peculiar little notes: a dumbwaiter that passed between floors and was big enough for a child to travel inside; a woodstove with custom chimneys that snaked through the floorboards, so you could throw something into the fire and run to a distant upstairs bedroom to smell it burning. That must have been a fire hazard, right? It worked out fine for him. I hope he doesn’t mind me stealing some of those details—or inviting in the ghosts.
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The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy is available via Viking.
