.
On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.
About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.
Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.
I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.
The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.
I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.
