Writing a Novel

I never read fiction nor have I ever written fiction, but Matthew suggested I try writing it. Well, the dictionary has become my newest best friend. The old adage, “Write what is within your own realm of experience,” seems to apply, and I have begun a novel. 

Just for fun – here is the first chapter. It is a short read.

Your opinion is sincerely appreciated.

 Chapter One: A Silent Secret

The projects were stark and unfriendly.  Babies cried through thin walls, radios blared—soul on one side, gospel on the other—while men shouted down stairwells thick with cigarette smoke. In summer, heat rose off the cracked pavement like steam rising from a kitchen pot. In winter, the stairwells turned into gray tunnels, heavy with the bitter chill of cement and ice.

Christopher Nolan was ten the summer he decided he would leave. Not just the projects—he had already left them in his mind a hundred times—but the city, the country. He had never seen a passport. He had never ridden in a plane. But he dreamed of a place, glamorous and distant—Paris.

He had no reason to know Paris, except that his mother collected magazines people left on buses. She’d smooth their wrinkled pages and set them on the kitchen table as though they’d been delivered by subscription. Christopher read them cover to cover: movie stars dazzling at premieres, models posed in beautiful gowns, expensive cars. Sometimes a caption would say Paris, and the word stuck. Paris was everything the projects were not. Paris was chandeliers instead of bare bulbs, velvet instead of vinyl. Freedom.

The courtyard outside his window had its own life. Boys traded insults back and forth, shouted them until they turned into fights. Girls’ screaming with laughter rose above the noise. The sound was constant, something Christopher could never escape.

“Chris!” his mother’s voice snapped him out of his daydream. “Stop reading those damned magazines. Get ready for school. Pants on—now. And keep off anything dirty; I just washed them.”

They weren’t good pants—just patched and ironed within an inch of their lives. He never argued with her; she was already carrying too much. Two jobs, a stack of bills, and a son who didn’t fit the neighborhood mold.

She appeared in the doorway, hair pinned back with bobby pins, a smudge of mascara beneath one eye, cigarette burns in her chenille bathrobe. She had the same gray eyes as Christopher, though hers had hardened into something sharp from years of double shifts. She pressed her palm against his cheek. “You’re a dreamer,” she said. “That’s trouble here.”

Christopher knew she was right. Trouble was everywhere—on the stairwell steps, in the alleys behind the building, in the boys who laughed too hard when he fumbled a ball. He had learned the art of silence early, the kind that made him invisible. But inside, he secretly enjoyed being different, wanting something else.

That summer, the library became his sanctuary. It wasn’t far—three bus stops away—but it felt like another country. The building had cold marble floors and smelled of old books and dust. Nobody cared about the way he looked or his accent leaked of street-talk. He discovered a stack of books on France, heavy with photographs of bridges and cathedrals, cafés filled with smoke and laughter.

One photo stopped him cold: the Eiffel Tower at night, lit like a jeweled crown. He traced its outline with his finger, imagining what it might feel like to stand beneath it.  

“Checking that one out?” the librarian asked. She was an older woman with silver hair pulled into a bun so tight it looked painful.

“Yes,” Christopher said, hugging the book to his chest.

She peered at him over her glasses. “You going to France?”

“One day,” he whispered.

She smiled, not unkindly. “Dream big, boy. Books’ll get you there faster than buses.”

Back in the projects, dreams were a liability. The boys who swaggered with baseball bats called him “Lil’ Professor” because he always carried a book. They didn’t mean it nicely.

One afternoon, a boy named Frankie cornered him against the stairwell wall. Frankie was taller, older, his fists already marked with scars.

“What you reading, Lil’ Professor?” Frankie sneered, snatching the book from Christopher’s hands. He flipped it open, squinting at the French words. “This some kind of code?”

“It’s a dictionary,” Christopher muttered. “French.”

“French?” Frankie barked a laugh. “Man, nobody speaks French around here. You think you’re better than us?”

Christopher shook his head quickly. “No. I just—”

But Frankie didn’t let him finish. He shoved the book back against Christopher so hard it knocked him off balance. “Don’t bring that fancy shit here,” Frankie said. “We’re real guys around here.”

For days afterward, Christopher was careful about where he read his books—unseen on a park bench, in the safety of the apartment, always in secret. But the humiliation didn’t cure the hunger. If anything, it sharpened it. He learned words the way other boys learned curse phrases. Bonjour. Merci. Liberté. He whispered them, each one alive with possibility.

On Sundays, the projects slowed down. Mothers clutched Bibles, their hats blooming like gardens. Men sat on steps, shining shoes already polished. Christopher sat at the window and watched the parade. He thought of Parisian boulevards, where people walked not because they had to, but because they wanted to.

His mother worked the Sunday morning shift at a diner, leaving him with his grandmother. She was a woman of few words and many rules. “Sit straight,” she barked when he slouched. “Don’t let the world see weakness.”

It was advice Christopher tried to follow, though the outside world always seemed to see more than he wanted it to see.

That afternoon, when his grandmother dozed in her chair, he crept to the window again. The sun dipped low, painting the buildings orange. Somewhere a radio played Sam Cooke. Christopher pressed his forehead against the glass and whispered, One day, I’ll get out. One day, I’ll see Paris.

The words weren’t a wish anymore. They were a promise.

Night in the projects was a different beast. Sirens wailed. Arguments flared from half-open windows. Shadows shifted on the walls like ghosts. Christopher lay awake, the Eiffel Tower glowing behind his eyelids. He pictured himself riding its elevator to the top, higher and higher, until the whole city spread out below him like a map.

Sleep came in fragments, broken by shouts from the courtyard outside, sirens blaring in the distance, and the clatter of trash cans overturned by stray cats. Still, when he closed his eyes again, he carried Paris with him—bright, unreachable, yet somehow his.