NaNoWriMo 2023: The Naked Stranger
Clearly I don't know when to quit. This could be exhibited by the fact that I keep taking appointments for stuff that I'm not sure I can follow up on, but usually do, or by this project in particular. This novel is the product of a throwaway joke done early this year, which led to me writing a genre I'm not particularly interested in, for nobody in particular, where I could reasonably have written a follow-up on the The Cloud Skimmer, which I still want to do. I mentioned at the wrap up of the previous year's NaNoWriMo, that I didn't want to subject myself to writing a full 50000 words a month again, and this remains true. I entered November with 20000 already written, but no clear cut outline that was instrumental for making last year's deadline. I remain of the persuasion that a good planning phase would have made for a better process, but it happens that this time I was supposed to write a mystery, but somehow couldn't be bothered to do the legwork for it, so I more or less pantsed it.
I don't even much remember the joke at this point, but a friend and I came up with the title "The Naked Stranger" and one of us said that it would have made for an interesting title for a mystery novel. I don't much read those, mostly because I find the setting and characters for most of them decidedly un-fun. Still, we went back and forth for a minute or so, about what the mystery was, and what some of the story beats might be - never what actually happened behind the scenes - and so I decided to draft a first chapter that week, and went as far as two chapters into it, before I let it lie. Most of the writing I did afterwards was for editing (and at some point rewriting) a project I never seem to finish, and that I think could still use another pass, and so The Naked Stranger ended up resting in the back of my mind until maybe the end of summer where I finished a pass of editing and decided that if I didn't want to have 45000 words to write in November I'd better get going.
There are a few reasons I can articulate as to why I tend not to write stories like these. Whenever I feature law-enforcement in any of my stories, they'll fill a very minor role, one that could be filled by other members of the cast. Their role as law enforcement is - in a way - incidental. That's because as a concept I'm not actually very big on law-enforcement, structurally. I'm what one would call "police abolitionist". The mystery genre is difficult to decouple from what's more recently been referred to as "copaganda", that is media glorifying police, either as a structural feature of "the correct sort of society" or as an individual able and willing to supersede the barriers that are designed to keep law enforcement in check. I say that as a fan of the Noir aesthetic, if not the genre as a whole. I'm not aiming to ever live off my writing, so I don't see it as necessary to write anything I don't believe, so that leaves me at a point where I have to make a choice as to what part police is supposed to be involved in this story.
I didn't want this story to be about police abolitionism. Frankly, I just wanted this story to be not unlike the last: About nothing in particular, theme-wise, so I'll have to work with what is already in the pop-media consciousness of an "apolitical" reader. Part of the joke for most of the work is supposed to be that the investigation methods that go beyond very simple application of school-level knowledge, are incredibly invasive, though legal (with one or two exceptions). Having police involved in the process not only would give them (or a representative of some kind) more credit than I think they deserve, but also drown this point in the fact that police methods are inherently invasive. Suffice to say, I think I found a solution that keeps things consistent while surprising nobody. In this case, I'm hoping that it's a good thing.
Still, writing without a plan, but with some constraints in mind, wasn't really something I'm used to. I like having at least a road-map, and if I don't have a deadline I can first write whatever comes naturally, and trim it down to the good bits later. Not so in NaNoWriMo. It's got a deadline, so I'll have to be a little careful with how I construct the story queues. For me, it's got some similarities with chaining commands in an RTS game. A mystery story consists mostly out of leads and their payoffs. Some will turn out useful, others less so. Whenever a lead is introduced, I'll start a timer, make sure to have them lead into one another, or introduce new ones quickly enough to never leave the reader without something to think about, meaning, something that's not completely explained. I'm not writing a locked-room mystery, so I don't think introducing the culprit from the beginning is a good option, since it'll give away the game too quickly.
I'm a middlingly adequate author at best - especially in the first few drafts - so pantsing the mystery has had me fretting about the finale a fair few times, which I coped with by swiftly doing something else, or going to sleep, a tried and true family tradition. It wasn't always fun, since I didn't have the freedom of jumping around between the scenes and writing what I liked to write at that moment. I had to figure out where the case was evolving as I wrote it, which is somewhat stressful when it has a real chance to turn out as a garbled mess. Still, with the head start I gave myself helped me finish around the 20th, and left time to revise, which I only made sparing use of, since I also had other stuff going on. Generally, if I weren't pushing myself to write a genre I tend not to touch myself, this would have probably be a refreshing exercise. That should give me ample strategy for that sequel to the Cloud Skimmer hopefully coming next year. Unless somebody makes another joke that I find really funny in the moment. Like last time, pdf and epub attached below.