The Notebook That Wouldn't Be Quiet

And the novel that finally grew up

Note: neither of the notebooks pictured is the notebook in question.

This month marks four years since the publication of Land of Hills and Valleys. The story, however, is much older than that: fifteen years at least, if you count from the time I first outlined the idea through eleven off-and-on years of fiddling with it a little, shoving it aside for months or years, and then pulling it out again for more.

In 2011, still quite early in that process, I wrote this about it in a blog post:

The one significant literary thing that happened to me over the weekend was the resurrection of a certain notebook—a pink fifty-cent notebook with a crease down the cover, almost full of scrambled notes for what was my NaNoWriMo 2009 project, a murder mystery set in rural Wyoming circa 1930. I made the 50K word goal that year, but I typed the manuscript and did it out of order, so all I ended up with was fragments. Overwhelmed by the mess, I put it aside and haven't added to it since...but every once in a while, usually after reading a mystery, some instinct prompts me to pull out that notebook and add something. And believe it or not, it's developed. Since 2009 I've totally reworked the outline (I don't think it's giving anything away to say that I've changed the identity of the criminal twice since my first tentative sketch of the idea several years ago), cut certain plot elements, cut out an important character and then put him back in again, added more red herrings and changed the significance of certain events...all without writing one single word in the actual manuscript.

It's a book that won't leave me alone. My instinct is telling me that there must be a story hidden in that mess if I can only find it. It feels a little like Michelangelo's theory of releasing the hidden sculpture. It's not often that I get a "feeling" about something I've written, and I don't know how much stock to put in it, but I'm certainly not going to ignore it. This time when the notebook calls, I'm going to see if I can apply the practical lessons I've learned since that NaNo attempt to chipping away at the mass of notes and bringing the essence of the story out into the open. I don't know how long it will take, but I can't help that feeling that something will come out of it someday.

The outline and notes eventually filled a pair of those pink notebooks. I’m a little sad to say that when the book was finally in print, I ended up destroying them—I think from a combination of being rather tired of the sight of them after all those years of labor, embarrassment at the sheer cringeworthiness of the earliest teenage notes in the opening pages, and what I now feel was a misguided notion that the notebooks no longer served any purpose and were just taking up space. Sometimes I wish I had them back.

But my instinct about the story proved to be true. I still don’t know if it was because of something in the story itself, or simply because I stuck to it and wouldn’t give up on it. Maybe a bit of both. Maybe I was so fond of the story that I couldn’t give up on it whether I wanted to or not. (I can only hope this also proves true of approximately four half-finished novel manuscripts currently tangled around my heartstrings.)

Marion Post Wolcott

The turning point in Land of Hills and Valleys’ maturation was an inspiration to marry the Western setting with a romantic-suspense narrative style, but the original concept of the story was heavily influenced by the Roy Rogers movies that I grew up with from about age ten. To this day, few things feel as cozily nostalgic to me as does the delightfully illogical, cheesy, flat-out fun combination of gangsters, gunfights, telephones and radios, horseback chases, fistfights, comic gags, and genuinely good cowboy music that is the 1930s-1940s Republic Pictures B-Western.

Consequently, the final few years of work on the Land of Hills and Valleys manuscript involved trying to comb out a lot of the B-Western influence, sifting through which elements were fit for a serious 1930s historical novel and which were not so plausible outside the Republic backlot. In hindsight, I think I succeeded. But last year when I started a nostalgic trip through re-watching those old Roy Rogers movies, it seemed that every movie made my eyes pop at least once with the amazed recognition of just how deep their influence on my imagination runs. When the opening scene of Sons of the Pioneers (which I regret to say is not in the least about the Sons of the Pioneers) presented a party scene with a pretty blonde Eastern-transplant heroine celebrating a year of ranching, I nearly fell off my chair.

In my Twitter thread of tongue-in-cheek commentary on Sons of the Pioneers, I removed tongue from cheek briefly to observe:

I think the fact that I have [a] picture of [lead actress] Maris Wrixon…on my Pinterest board for Land of Hills and Valleys to this day testifies to just how determined I was to mold that inspiration into a grown-up story worthy of the aesthetic.

Sometimes it's not beautiful, polished art that inspires you to rush off and create your own, but creaky art with random flashes of what-might-have-been and some quirk that appeals to your tastes.

Land of Hills and Valleys grew up with me, you might say, but those happy childhood influences run deep. These days I’m as interested in the real West of the 1930s and ’40s as I am nostalgically fond of the old B-Westerns. There’s room for both.

If it really was a sentimental attachment to that vintage B-Western aesthetic that kept me loyal to the manuscript of Land of Hills and Valleys all those years, I guess I have one more thing to thank good old Republic Pictures for.

---

An update regarding subscriptions!

Up till now, paid subscriptions to The Second Sentence have been an entirely optional choice for anyone who wants to support my work. From here on out, however, I will be adding some content exclusive to paid subscribers!

Here is the updated breakdown of what free and paid subscribers will receive:

• Free Subscribers have access to all nonfiction posts, including the monthly Round-Up, and flash fiction.

• Paid Subscribers get all this plus occasional longer fiction posts (i.e. short stories and anything upwards), and quarterly Snippets posts featuring excerpts from my works-in-progress/upcoming books. (And as a thank-you gift, paid subscribers also get to download free ePub copies of three of my books.)