Pigs Is Pigs?
Smooth sailing on The Crumbler today. Got a nice chunk of it fleshed out. I am far enough along that dialogue has ceased to be a barrier. I know the characters well enough now that they are starting to say what’s on their minds in their own voices. That’s always a wonderful place to hit. The fact that the story takes place in the here and now makes this easier.
I’m going to try and never just gut out such a skeleton for a first draft again. I’m running into pages where I have no clue what I meant by the notes and cues I left. I’m thinking these may be the places where my traitorous brain, bored with novel writing, wandered off into various other short fictions that I have since cut out and assigned their own place in the mental and digital file cabinet. Then again, they could just be where I started falling asleep and began babbling.
I also did a little work on a fragment I ran across this morning. Two Hundred Head Of Pig. I don’t know how long of a story it will be, just that it’s a tale of revolution in near future America in which a spreading number of small towns begin to rebel against increasingly Draconian DEA, FBI and BATF actions to confront ‘domestic terrorism’. Of course, as we can extrapolate from today’s news reports, ‘terrorism’ in the near future can be whatever such agencies deem it to be. In the story, it’s slapped on everything from growing cannabis to selling your neighbor a shotgun.
There’s a fine line to writing such a story. I hate to generalize and depict black and white conflict. When it comes down to the wire, I want clear individual decisions to be the crux of the action. Simply being a cop or an agent is not enough to make a character a ‘bad guy’ in my fiction. That’s sloppy and lazy, in my opinion. Cops and agents have their choices to make as well. Orders can be refused, allegiances changed.
In other words, it’s not a matter of ‘pigs is pigs’. People who act like pigs are pigs. People who act like people are people.
It all comes down to that choice.
