A Caddo jar? A calico cat? An encounter with a water moccasin? What in the world do these three things have to do with one another, and how did they find themselves together in a single story?

Let me tell you about crows. One day I was sitting at my desk when my little cat, Jazzmyn, sitting idly by the window, started twitching her tail. I got up to see what it was that had caught her attention. There, just a few feet away, was a crow, resting on a branch in the large post oak just outside my studio window. While Jazz and I stood there, the crow flitted back and forth from the ground to her nest. Of course, I thought, she's building a nest. The oak is home to lots of birds. It's a huge tree, sturdy and serene.

Because crows are notorious for finding shiny objects, I picked up a pair of binoculars to see if could find the nest, and further, to see what she had put there. Sure enough, there was string, gum wrappers, and best of all, a bottle cap. I could understand the string and the paper, but what about the bottle cap? Did she want it only to decorate her nest? Hard to tell.

I believe that writers are like crows. We find shiny objects and take them back to our desks and weave them into a story. The crow builds a nest, the writer builds a story. Some things are necessary: the elements that hold the story together, like the string and the paper might hold the nest together. Some things are there for reasons of beauty: a bottle cap for instance.

Whenever I sit down to write, I try to bring as many shiny objects to the page as I can and then try to figure out how I can weave these together in a way that makes sense. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

What makes an element work in a story is whether or not it taps into these emotions: love and fear. I call these the great twins of motivation. Love and Fear. Opposites. Required. You can't really have one without the other.

When I was a girl, around ten years old, a calico cat wandered into our garage in the middle of Houston. She walked right up to our big hound, Sam, and invited herself to share his food. My sisters and I couldn't believe that Sam allowed this. He had never before liked cats. But here she was, small, petite, and not at all afraid of Sam. She lived in our garage for a couple of weeks, and then gave birth to four kittens. We named them after the seasons—Summer, Spring, Autumn, and Winter. Then, when the babies were just a few weeks old, the calico cat was hit by a car and killed. Sam took over as resident parent. Here was a story of love.

Years later, when my own son, Jacob, was just a baby, I went to visit my father, who lived along the Apalachicola River in Florida, a dense, swampy area not so different from the region in East Texas where The Underneath takes place. We went out one day in his small fishing boat. I sat in the back of the boat, Jacob in my arms. Dad was pulling the boat along with a pair of long oars. There was no motor that I recall. For some reason I looked over my shoulder, and only ten feet behind us was a huge water moccasin, the largest I'd ever seen, swimming just behind us. Her cottonmouth was wide open as if she were charging us, coming right toward us. I thought she might jump into the boat, but at the last minute, she ducked beneath the water and I never saw her again. It was a terrifying moment for me, my baby in my arms, the enormous snake just feet away. Here was fear, bright and hard.

Then, years ago, I saw a photo of a beautiful jar, made by a Caddo artist, Jerilyn Redcorn. The jar had the etching of a snake on it. It was both beautiful and powerful all at once. It seemed to tell a story all its own. A useful jar, yes, but a jar for simply admiring, too.

All three— the cat, the snake, the jar—made an impression upon me. Love and Fear. They were there, present in each.

The Underneath, then, began with a question: How can I bring these three things together to make a single story? As I wrote, I learned things about cats and snakes and the Caddo. While the crow built her nest, I built my story. And all the while, the oak beside my window stood there for both of us, holding on to the nest, offering up a story.

Copyright © 2008 by Kathi Appelt. All rights reserved.