Exactly when you decide to venture a draft of your story no one can predict. Some people start at the end and work backwards. Others take the more traditional path and determine a beginning. It’s best to know your ending before you start. I knew my story was a ten year account of my character’s early career as an attorney. My story was about how such a young attorney became a congressman in such a short time. It took a while for me to see how he made his living and acquired wealth. Almost immediately after arriving in NM he became the territory’s most successful lawyer. He had an engaging personality, was better and more recently educated. He learned the Spanish language so quickly most people were amazed. His most important asset, aside from these, was his mentors, men whose advice he sought and followed judiciously. He made friends easily and helped others who cooperated with him, partnering with several on various projects.
I wrote many drafts of my story. I can only laugh at the early attempts now. I had very little to follow since most stories of the West of this period are of the Indian wars and personal accounts of “gunslingers” and outlaws.
The greatest difficulty I had in writing my book was in merging all of the information I’d gathered. I finally hung chronologies of my central character’s personal life, the progress of the Maxwell Grant, progress of the Sangre de Cristo, the major political events of the Republican Party, the advance of the Maxwell Grant’s survey, the conflict between my character and each of his adversaries (Chaves’ surrogates), and a chain of events related to NM’s land grants on the wall. I then used cards to form a storyboard of scenes. Through these I established a draft that provided a reasonable continuum until I could begin to reduce the mass to the pattern of fiction. You may start with an outline, most writers do. My goal was perhaps too ambitious and thereby too complex, but it represents what I wanted to know.
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