Assignment #1 The protagonist’s mission: Solve a vicious attempted murder while keeping the badly wounded victim alive and hidden from his anonymous enemies while he tries to make up for his own past mistakes.
Assignment #2: Some of the antagonists are drawn from ordinary life: an overbearing father, a manipulative friend, an irresponsible brother. They cause all kinds of trouble, but their motives are intelligible. The two most dangerous antagonists are driven by greed, envy and sheer indifference to the lives of others. They are able to mask their motives and induce weaker characters to commit horrific acts. I have drawn the “bad guys” as vividly and believably as possible, so a shrewd reader will be able to spot potential villains before they begin to reveal themselves. However, it’s not until near the end of the novel that the main protagonist, Zada, proves to her own satisfaction who is ultimately responsible for the mayhem inflicted on her friends and neighbors. The lone local sheriff, racing to keep up with the onslaught of inexplicable but shockingly violent crimes, is in a similar fix: he has lots of evidence and a slew of suspects—but no conclusive proof until it’s very nearly too late, even the save himself. Only the two primary antagonists, puppeteers who direct the actions of their stooges, remain cool in the face of imminent discovery.
Assignment #3: "The Hanging Offense" (current working title). Other titles I’ve entertained: "The Last Witness" and "Rules of Deceit." I like The Hanging Offense because it contains a triple entendre: "Offense" as a crime, "Offense" as a behavior, and "Offence" as the two protagonists, Zada and Alan, turn the tables on the criminals.
Assignment #4:
Lily King because of her attention to detail and her exquisite writing.
Ann Patchett (Thinking now of Bel Canto) because of her ability to embed a believable fictional story in a factually accurate historical framework.
And, although she is anything but a contemporary writer, I admire Sarah Orne Jewett. Particularly in The Country of Pointed Firs, she writes real people - relatable, admirable, flawed, easy to care about. Nobody is better than Jewett at creating characters. She is also a master of summoning up vividly textured settings.
Assignment #5:
Hook line/ core wounds: Zada is a young woman caught between her own intelligence and ambitions and other peoples' expectations of who she is and who she should be.
This goes for everyone in the novel she encounters, including her closest ally Alan, to his wife whom she admires, to her own mother and siblings, and to everyone in her town. But none of these conflicts is as profound as that she has with her father, Davis, who is also her employer in the profession she aspires to: investigative journalist. He owns and runs one of the local papers, the more successful one, and he is happy to have her on staff as his assistant, typesetter and fluff-piece writer. On the one hand he won’t allow her to do the kind of in-depth, investigative and insightful writing she wants to do. On the other hand, he is a man who does believe in the intellectual equality of the genders, and so his refusal to extend that point of view to her, his own daughter, causes her to do things she would rather not have to do. But do them she must.
Assignment #6 inner conflict / secondary conflict
Zada is driven to lie and deceive, first in order to remain true to herself, and later to protect the people she loves. When any person of essentially good character is forced to carry out the levels of subterfuge that she ultimately must, it is going to cause inner turmoil. However, Zada doesn’t expect life to be fair or easy, so she wastes little time brooding. She just makes the best decision she can in the immediate circumstances and lives with the consequences, which sometimes go far beyond anything she imagined.
One early scenario from The Hanging Offense that illustrates that trait is when Zada takes a secret job at The Arcadia Crier, a rival local newspaper that is so understaffed and underfunded that it cannot compete with her father’s newspaper, The Northern Star. Her father (Davis) is a fair-minded man, but he finds it hard to acknowledge that his daughter's talents for observation and writing should permit her to do more at his paper than write puff-pieces about the social goings-on in town—while she’s also in charge of running the press and delivering newspapers. Zada believes that at the The Arcadia Crier she will be able to do the kinds of investigating and writing that she longs to do. The only problem (but it’s a doozy) is that she has to keep this second job secret. It’s not that she’s unwilling to defy her father when necessary, but if he finds out what she’s up to, he might very well fire her—and so deprive himself of his skilled assistant. Nobody within a hundred miles of their small town knows enough to do her job. Added to that, her father’s right hand was so badly damaged during a Civil War Battle that he is physically unable to do much of the literal hands-on work of turning out a newspaper. So Zada chooses to hide what she’s doing, hoping she can do what she wants while protecting Davis from his own hair trigger temper.
The crisis that comes out of this secondary conflict takes place at a wedding. Just about everybody is invited, so there are many witnesses. Her father and the local preacher - two men who agree on nothing and dislike each other intensely--get into a terrible argument at the wedding breakfast, during which the preacher reveals what he knows about Zada's activities at both papers. Adding actual injury to insult, Davis is so incensed by what he believes to be the preacher's lies that he goes to strike the man, only to seriously reinjure his damaged right hand. Zada finds herself in that moment exposed to everyone in town. Worse, she knows she has crushed her father's trust in her and, as his wound festers, put his life in danger.
Zada’s penchant for butting in where nobody expects to find a respectable young lady ultimately puts her smack into the middle of the chaos surrounding the attempted murder that is at the center of the book. She does whatever it takes to save the victim, but it is her talent for writing believable fiction that will make a life-or-death difference to the badly injured man she is hiding. Her principles tell her to publish a truthful account of the attempted murder, but the dire circumstances require her to carry on a reckless deception, both in the accounts she writes for the newspaper, and in how she behaves in her day-to-day life. All the while, she is trying to figure out who was involved in the attack. What she learns along the way about one of the people she looks up to might get her killed—or worse, break her spirit.
Setting: back of beyond
The Hanging Offense is nearly finished. Most of the novel is set in Wyoming Territory in 1888, late summer into fall. The settings range from the streets and businesses of a small town (livery stable, bars, church, newspaper office, etc.) to the river that feeds the town and surrounding ranches, to the windswept plains and ultimately to the mountain hideaway of one of Nate Reade. I thought the best way to address the issue of settings might be to include a snippet from the scene where Nate, having been attacked and left for dead, is discovered by three of his friends. The narrator, Zada, is about to come upon the scene of the attack.
--The pines gave way to a maze of spindly aspens, yellow leaves aflutter, trunks scarred from the gnawing of animals. Scattered on the ground among the trees were lengths of rope, cut haphazardly, and an empty Gold Medal flour sack. The longest piece wound through a jumble of decaying leaves and branches to a tree even more frail than its brothers. Mud and blood stained the paper bark at its base. The jagged stump of a freshly broken branch jutted from the trunk about ten feet up. There were a dozen sturdier trees within a hundred paces, but the gang had chosen to hang Nathan Reade from a quaking aspen that would never take his weight.
I brushed at the leaf litter until I found the near end of the hanging rope. The slip knot that formed the noose was intact, but the loop that went around the neck had been cut.
A gust passed overhead, clouds flew by, aspen leaves rattled. It was instantly much colder.
I left the site of the hanging and followed the sound of sobs to a clearing. The first I saw was Alan, arms crossed over his head, keening despair over a brownish, man-sized lump on the ground. Martha, hands on hips, was glaring down at a firepit. A goodly pile of branches waited nearby. A blackened pot rested on a rock, and a brown bottle lay on the ground nearby. This Martha kicked into the woods. “Those damned sons o’bitches had themselves a grand time while—” Suddenly she squatted, pulled off one of her gloves, and plunged her bare hand into the ash, only to snatch it out again. “It’s still hot! I knew it! They were just here!” She jumped up and ran to the creek, shouting, “Hush now, so I can hear them coming.”
