Who Let the Dawgs Out

On a whim I started a new crime novel, Who Let the Dawgs Out? (tentative title), but had to shelve it mostly because I didn't have it planned out carefully enough. What I am finding is that in order to follow all the way through with a long novel, I need careful planning and several different levels of motivation. In this case I had the motivation to document the evolving Carbondale Halloween riots, which were different throughout several decades including the two I was there, and the motivation to write a good crime thriller, which I want to write just for experience.

But I got caught up because I didn't have any overall message - and also because I didn't really map out the plot. I am still working on these, as there are several possibilities, but one of the things that caught me up was that I am really standing on the fence between fiction and non-fiction.

Having done the true stories of several ancestors, I find myself fascinated by the effort to make a gripping story out of absolute truth. And I find that everyday lives are as good a way to do this as anything. I go in there, find out what I can, lay it all out on the table, and the reader can make a gripping interpretation of it, just as I did, constructed totally on absolute truth.

Now my first novel, which turns out to be a roman-a-clef (this is a fictionalized memoir - I didn't know it at the time I wrote it, but that's what I wrote) straddles the two genres, but I find that a little unappealing now. For that one I really needed to document the vegetarian restaurant and the actualist poetry movement, and I did, and I changed a lot of facts and basically told a personal story of growing up. All fine and good, and the motivation was complete enough that I actually finished, first time in forty-five years. The lesson in it for me is that if the motivation is there, I can do it.

On the non-fiction side I finished my third family book, in the same month, telling the story of a single ancestor who rode a stagecoach 1600 miles from Maine to Illinois. My story telling needs some work in non-fiction, I admit it. These books are not my best writing, though the motivation, to put everything I found in one place, is sound. I've got what I need and can do #4 and possibly a biography of Frank after that. So I'm on a kind of roll with this family non-fiction and, though I'm not crazy about the writing itself, it doesn't matter as much because only my family is reading it.

But the process of rustling up true facts and documents from that era is really exhilarating and fascinating. Also, to be done and say, it's all true to the best of my knowledge, I like that too. I find myself being pulled into non-fiction and I have a yen to move everything over there, and just do that for a while.

With the biography of Frank, that's still a whole 'nother genre, and I'm not even sure how to approach it. It was while documenting Frank that I found enough information about the other two: his father and grandfather, the grandfather being my own great-great-great grandfather. I have enough to make a good story, for sure.

I don't know what to do; I'm just putting this out there. And, for the moment, writing a play about Nixon.