Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

How the Manny Hardin Series of Vignettes Evolved

How the Manny Harden Series of Vignettes Evolved.

I got to thinking this morning about a thought that spun off a blog comment. It had to do with scary dreams and characters you encounter in them. For me I have a problem remembering my dreams and they must feed into extremely short term memory because If I don’t jot them down when I wake up, they are soon gone….If it was a nightmare,. I used to say, “Good Riddance” but these days I take a different view. Bad Guys and Gals are hard to write about and some of the men and women I encounter in my dreams definitely qualify for the label. So after awakening from a Nightmare I quick jot down a sketch of who I interfaced with and what it was about the encounter I found troubling.

One of the scary characters that sprang from a dream is Manny Harden. He’s a thug, working for Organized Crime as a recruiter. He recruits women for an activity so sensitive I’m afraid to write about what it is… I’m more than afraid actually, I’m totally in the dark. I haven’t figured out yet what it really encompasses… only that it’s real bad… So I needed this bad guy for the role and I signed up Manny for the part. His job is to take a female intern and find ways to make her quit the program. The idea is that the syndicate wants women in this field who are tough enough to take the heat if they ever get picked up by the federal authorities.

Now concurrently with this series I was writing for a flash fiction contest called the “Weekly Quickie” which solicits vignettes of 869 words or less that meet the “Excitement” criteria. The challenge is to engage the reader and give them a twinge of sensual excitement at the same time. This is not an easy thing to do in 869 words and the contestants really struggle with the word constraint. The ideal entry tells a story, has a sensual prose theme, and excites the reader. Now anybody who writes a good submission really has to think about structure…devoting each precious word to achieving the structure of the story telling model, while meeting the tingle criteria.

In the process of sharpening my skills in this contest, and not doing very well (by the way), I wrote a series of vignettes about Manny Harden. In the contest there are prompts and you can imagine what I came up with (Or read the evidence… Car builder and Real Estate Agent) when confronted with mild bondage, seedy locations, role playing, fairy tales and those sorts of things. What emerged was a series of stand alone stories that were wrapped into the context of the Manny Harden recruitment enterprise, and his efforts to get his candidates to quit their internship by putting them in these awkward, sexually exploitive situations.

In the process Manny emerged as the central character (CC) but he was not always seen as such. Initially the CC was a car builder, then a female real estate agent and finally Mr. Harden who stole the show. The criteria I used for evaluating the characters was "Views." When Manny was involved in one Views went way up.

While I didn’t intend for this to be “Exploratory” writing, that's what it turned out to be and I had an opportunity of really get a good look into the character of Manny, his girls and the supporting cast. Still, despite the over arching umbrella of the back story, the vignettes were a loose collection of incidents that did not conform to the story telling model.

As a consequence writing the extended story will require that I sift through all the vignettes and draw out the thread and build the model as I know it needs to be put together. In the process many of the bizarre sexual exploits that have animated the parts will be removed but ….and here is the point I want to make….I suspect the story will remain animated even after most of the titillating details will be edited out. I could explain why I think this will happen but that will get into some "Unmainstream" ideas about what makes a story exciting.

So in this quest, I started with a contest….wrote some vignettes, and tried out some of the different characters that began to emerge. This constituted the exploratory writing phase of the novel. Now it remains to take the thread, and put it into an outline. Then take the outline and add the story telling ingredients…I.e. The CC, a life changing event, a want need or desire, a resolve to act, a series of crisis, a climax and a cooling off and closure with the reader.

I thought I’d share this because I know that many of my readers who have only seen the individual parts might not realize that it has all been part of a process that has a grander purpose and seems to be working for me.