Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Laura Leigh Morris writes about The Stone Catchers from University Press of Kentucky.
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On Writing Community Tragedy
The night after receiving mass shooter training at my university, I woke from a dream of four people attacking a shooter who’d breached the door of their classroom. They grabbed his arms and legs, as I’d been taught in training. Someone else sunk their fingers into his eyes, as I’d been taught. But it didn’t stop there. They continued to pummel him even after he was disarmed, even once he was on the ground, and they continued until long after he’d stopped fighting back.
I ran from my bedroom and transcribed the scene as faithfully as I could on a sheet of looseleaf notebook paper. This dream violence became the starting point of my new novel, The Stone Catchers.
When I returned to my notes fully awake and ready to tackle the novel that had begun in my sleep, I realized I had a problem: I wanted to find a way into a community’s mourning, but I didn’t know where to begin. Novels can contain worlds, but my writing tends to lean into intense characterization, the larger world (for better or worse) a distant backdrop. I knew I wanted to keep the closeness that I find so compelling in my favorite fiction, but I also wanted to bring something greater to bear on the situation. After all, mass shootings don’t just affect the people in the room—they affect entire communities.
To achieve the expansiveness I wanted, I realized my best way forward would be to tell the story through multiple characters, all of whom took part in the final confrontation with the shooter. Moving forward with this idea in mind, The Stone Catchers became a story that follows four characters who kill a young man armed with an assault rifle after he breaks through a barricade protecting their classroom. Long after the cameras have lost interest in the tragedy at Brickton Community College, this story explores the emotional trauma of four survivors who have been christened both saviors and murderers.
While I could have used an omniscient narrator to tell the characters’ stories, I decided that alternating chapters between the characters would allow me to immerse myself (and my readers) into each person’s story more fully, showing how their lives have become inextricably connected at the same time they each have their own methods of dealing with the trauma. One of my first tasks was to figure out who my four characters were, what connected them, and maybe more importantly, what separated them.
I began with Donetta Freeman, the class instructor. I knew right away that she was a mother to two young children. I wanted to explore how one person’s emotional upheaval can affect their families, but I didn’t realize until after writing multiple drafts how pivotal her role as both mother and teacher would be.
Next, I moved on to Miller James, a character who arrived fully formed in my mind. Laid off from the coal mines, as so many are in the story’s setting of north central West Virginia, he has returned to college to find a new direction in his life. His initial response to the tragedy is anger, an overwhelming rage that transforms into violence even past the classroom, allowing me to ask why sometimes violence is deemed acceptable, while at other times we deplore it.
Charlie Folger was slower to develop. I knew he’d known the shooter before the rampage, but I had no clue how well he’d known him or how that would affect him, especially how guilt might transform his life after the shooting. I had to write my way into his character, letting him tell me who he was as the story took shape.
Priscilla Silver was the most difficult character of all. I knew she was a teenager and a single mother. I also knew she spoke to every camera she could find, but I couldn’t figure out why. What would make a trauma survivor seek out cameras? It took multiple drafts and lots of brainstorming before I discovered Priscilla’s full story. (My favorite moment with her was when I drove down a snowy road in rural West Virginia while holding a conversation with her—me performing both sets of dialogue, hands waving around the car’s cabin—before I truly began to understand who she was.)
Once I had my four characters, I still needed to understand the roles each of them played in the larger story. As I wrote, I kept two questions in mind:
What is each person’s personal arc through the tragedy?
And, how does each individual arc interact with the arcs of the three others?
Answering these questions involved drafting and revising and revising some more until I found patterns in the story. Then, I saw it: the story’s most striking moments were those times the characters came together as a group—during the shooting, at the memorial service, when the media begins to die down, and in the end. These scenes felt like touchstones for the book, turning points for everyone involved in the larger arc of the tragedy. Once I recognized these moments for what they were, I was able to move forward with more certainty, understanding that my characters were forever connected, whether they wanted to be or not. Because that’s the key to communal trauma: no matter whether you like each other or not, you’re stuck with one other.
And this realization was, for me, the key to writing communal tragedy, the connections that feel quite similar to those we all have with our given families. Whether we love our families or hate them, we must find a way forward with them (at least for a while). And the characters in The Stone Catchers wouldn’t be the same without the fraught relationships they have with one another, as the interpersonal connections that grow from the tragedy are both the impetus for the story and the key to where each character ends up in the final scene. We are a communal species, and when tragedy hits, we reach for and lash out at one another. In the pages of The Stone Catchers, Donetta, Miller, Charlie, and Priscilla do exactly that.
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Laura Leigh Morris is the author of two books, The Stone Catchers: A Novel (2024) and Jaws of Life: Stories (2018). She’s previously published short fiction in STORY Magazine, North American Review, Redivider, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Furman University in Greenville, SC. To learn more, visit www.lauraleighmorris.com.