The Story of Appleknockers

There it is. The last page of the thesis. Ladies and gentlemen this soon to be edited version of Appleknockers clocks in at 263pages, and 77,498 words. When I started out writing this, I thought it would be around 190 pages when it was all said and done. I missed my estimate a little. Anyway, the monster is wounded, I can see the dragon's gold, so to mark this occasion, let me give you the backstory of this story.

Appleknockers started out while I was in Carbondale. While bopping around campus, when I got a partial idea for a story. Something that clearly needed more stuff added to it, but I had this thought of some good old boy from the country coming on the SIUC campus with a .22 to hunt squirrels. To understand that is to know that the squirrels on the SIUC campus are like fat house cats. Generations of squirrels there have been living off cigarette buts and pizza. The squirrels cannot perform the way nature intends them. I didn't think the idea was enough with just the guy, so I gave him a friend. He had to be younger and impressionable. So I thought "hey, what if the friend has Down's syndrome!" Seemed pretty golden. Still didn't know what to do about it though.

Flash forward to the last day of a graduate level "forms of fiction" class I had with Magnuson. Our final assignment was to give a reading to the class of some piece of fiction. I didn't want to read anything old, which I had very little in the first place, so I checked back in with my hillbilly friends and that wasn't working out. Emily & I went for a drive through some of the hillbilly byways around Carbondale for inspiration. And we drove past Cobden, Illinois, some podunk town with a good bar (I never went, but I heard things). What struck me was that Cobden's nickname was "Appleknockers" and that cracked me up. I thought it was fantastic.

And on the drive, we also went by Alto Pass, Illinois, home of a giant cross called the Bald Knob Cross. I've seen the cross before on a trip to Alto Pass' root beer saloon. So Emily and I took a breather on our trip to check out the cross, take in the view from there and it all dawned on me what I needed to write for some reason.

I first imagined this story as some kind of hillbilly Waiting for Godot, with meth being the Godot that never shows. So what I drafted out was, essentially, two rednecks at night at the viewing station for the Bald Knob Cross, drinking, talking about how badly they need a pig farm to make meth, with their one of the hillbilly's truck idling behind them with the lights on. The truck suddenly dies just after the conversation dries up and then they coast into down on the dead truck. That was what I read for class my Magnuson assignment, and after I read it, I'll always remember (but not very clearly) because I don't know if he was being sincere or a dick, he said "You're going to be a superstar."

Fast forward to my screenwriting class my first semester here at MNSU. I tried and failed to write what I wanted. I talked about this before, but I wanted to write a steam of consciousness movie, like Catch-22. My story didn't have enough meat for that kind of treatment, and it was too hard to pull off. So, to write my screenplay for the class, I retreated to the Appleknockers idea. I flushed it out. The second redneck became Burnett, who at the time I imagined as this shaggy-haired kid who used to be on these annoying Midas commercials. Burnett got a girlfriend named Shelly. My main redneck was named Hoss, as he always had been. Hoss got an obese wife named Tegan based off a former student of mine. The biggest difference from the screenplay to the novel...there was a villain in the screenplay. It was a classic "stranger comes to town" story which sets these hillbillies on the meth path, Wade gets killed (blowed up but good in a meth lab explosion). Terry loved the screenplay for a first draft. I liked it too, and because I knew I wanted to write a novel, I figured I could use the screenplay as an outline to the novel. Terry encouraged me to do so.

I took to writing the novel then and turned in some parts for workshop. The notes were helpful, for sure, because I never had a clear POV, and I had a little "darling" problem in writing then too (now I think it's the opposite where I have no darlings...it's a field of middle children). Also it thankfully scrubbed that "superstar" idea out of my head, though it gave me soem confidence. But the whole workshop experience helped me get straightened out some. Then, as I was writing, I noticed that having a villain, as I did, was stupid. Works fine for a movie, but I could have a much more interesting bad guy than a bad guy if I turn it into a novel...and that rendered most of the screenplay useless since a lot of the action centered around the bad guy. Now, there are similarities between the two versions...they are more like half-brothers...they got the same daddy, but they don't talk to each other too well.

Also, as I was making this new villainless version of Appleknockers, the town changed. I was just calling it Cobden, even though the town was more like an Alto Pass/Cobden combo. So, with Emily's help, I renamed the town Weimar (pronounced Wee-mer, and not Vy-mar, like you should in the German...it's an Illilnois tradition to mispronounce towns like that).

And that's pretty much it, with other missteps and corrections along the way, but they're minor in comparison to removing the keystone of the entire story and still fighting to make it work.

Now I'm here. One typed thesis. Still got to work at it though. Here's to me not being a tinkerhound starting tomorrow.

viva el mustache

ps...holy god am I exhausted right now too by the way.