NaNoMo Postscript

I tried this this year - not officially, just in word. I did all right - I hit 40,000 words, more or less, a pretty decent showing, writing nights and weekends (and rather intermittently at that), taking a week off for Thanksgiving. I suppose the results are full of the problems you'd expect - rambling and repetitive and discontinuous, and bogged down by endless dialogue scenes, that would put Quentin Tarantino to sleep - but not too terrible. I tried to give myself a decent chance of getting to 50K - using very familiar material, running out a simple, but loose-limbed plot line - accomplished by shamelessly rifling all the things I've played with, written about, what have you, for the last 40 years. A mashup of the Hardy Boys, D&D, west figures, every western movie with ranchers fighting farmers and sometimes each other - which is about 95% of them - plus Deadwood, with locations imagined from real places (gram's house in Vermont, the hill behind our old house, the hill behind the house now) or swiped from books (got a "Witch's Hollow", imported directly from The Screeching Owl Mystery!) I hoped it would write itself - that if I could come up with a reasonable plot line, that gave me an idea what was going to happen, and where people would be, and what they would be doing, I could just start and go until I stopped. I knew all the characters before I started - Hardy Boys stand-ins, West Figures, D&D characters, though those three things overlap extensively; knew the settings - the physical layouts were stolen from real places, the general lay of the land worked out in D&D games through the years, the towns - Waynesburg, Hillsburg, as expected... it worked, reasonable well.

It's an appealing project. It has that one great advantage - a clear target, 50,000 words in 30 days - which gives the blessing to not stop - just keep typing, leave anything that works at all alone, and move on. It's a license not to over think the story, not to keep doubling back and refining things, not to worry over the words for any length of time. Just make the green lines go away. And add words. That's my difficulty usually - second guessing myself, constantly doubling back, changing things, revising... I know, of course, that writing is rewriting - that real novels (any kind of real writing) is made in editing - but that's not the problem I mean. You need to get the material down before you can refine it - and all my attempts at fiction bog down on the stories and people, and never come close to being in a place where I can think about the words, or the structure and form of the tale. I am pleased to see that this scheme did a pretty good job of overcoming that.



The results, of course, are, in story terms, nothing resembling finished - those 40k words get me - I don't know - half a story in... When I left it, Freddy Archer was riding fast to find Johnny West's crew, somewhere on the open range - thus touching off a long bout of exposition regarding Johnny West, and bringing Johnny and company into the story for the first time - Johnny being, presumably, one of the figures near the center of any broad conception of the plot... but that's okay. I might try to keep it going - it will be hard, I suspect, to maintain the same momentum, the same forward motion even - but I can hope. And, freed from the demands of those 50,000 words, the story can migrate to other media, other formats - that might improve things, actually. All this, this idea particularly, is rooted firmly in my youth - I quite deliberately tried to come up with a story like the kinds of things I made up on the fly when I was a kid with those toys - chases and searches and gun fights with Sparky West and his Mexicans in the rocks and hills of the wilderness... That stuff was always more than just stories - it was tactile - objects in space - visual - it was closer to film or comics or theater than to prose, and this stuff might do better in those media as well. It might make a good radio show - "When last we left them, Freddy and the sheriff were anxiously awaiting news from Heidrich's Strike!"



Anyway - the story itself, for what it is worth: set against a range war, between Johnny West, a big rancher, and George and Bruce Carter (played by my two general Custers), owners of an even bigger ranch. They are fighting each other, and the farmers and small ranchers of their valley - the railroad is coming, and the Carters want complete control. Against this, two kids, Frank and Josie, are kidnapped by the gunfighting son of one of the farmers - everyone starts looking for them. That's basically it, actually - once the kids disappear, the other characters start reacting, and things sort of roll along, with the forward motion of the kidnap plot augmented by the flashbacks, and wider scope of the fights over the land.