Genesis Reflections

[Robbie C.]

I actually finished Genesis somewhat out of order, so I sat on the chapters and just posted the finished product all at once.

Well, I learned a few things from Genesis. Like all my Vice projects, this was something of an extended writing exercise. My first big takeaway? Don’t re-read Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy before starting something like this. I had to continually fight the urge to sprawl and introduce new angles and characters to the narrative.

Second, integrating the series into an extended novel is hard. Vice played very loose with time (as we know), both in terms of what happened during a season as well as what happened during an episode. Try putting that stuff on a timeline and see where you get! In the end I had to reshuffle episodes within seasons (but I never jumped an episode to a different season…although I was tempted at times) and decide which ones to mention and which ones to omit. And then I had to work what was going on with both OCB AND the Mendoza brothers around those events. Oh, and I also had to factor in my own stories as well. It got kind of hectic at times, and I’m sure I dropped the ball a time or two during the whole thing.

Genesis covers exactly eight years, staring in April-May 1982 and ending in April-May 1990 (and that was totally unplanned…it was just how the narrative unfolded). We start with Sonny and Scotty Wheeler working as partners for Lieutenant Rodriguez and end with Pete and Castillo discussing the start of the Task Force. The word count for this one is a bit under 175,000, which is longer than anything I’ve done here (the previous record holder was No Good Deed if you’re keeping track). On the whole the thing divides more or less neatly (sometimes more, sometimes less) into four chapters or so per “era” of Vice. But that’s a rough division. Seasons 2 and 3 are heavily-represented, while Season 1 (and prior) aren’t as much and I also jumped through most of Season 5. Part of that had to do with where the two narratives were intersecting: the Mendozas were just starting out during Season 1, and Vice was focused on people like Calderone as well. As Vice’s narrative flow started to fragment, it was easier to work in the Mendozas from time to time, or fade OCB out as they chased off after some new master criminal leaving the field clear for the brothers to do their thing.

I had to make a few choices with this one, and one of those was how to develop Tiffy and Holly. In the end I went the Vice route, making them more background than actual characters, Not my first choice, but I also had to consider just how many characters I wanted to confuse everyone with. And if you look at it, Vice tended to treat many female characters as secondary or even window dressing (there are, of course, major exceptions to this). That’s not my normal preference, but it was a writing choice I had to make. Holly in particular has potential as a deep character.

How did it turn out? As an exercise it was great. Most of my writing covers at most a couple of months, and spanning eight years was an eye-opener in terms of the kind of stuff you have to do to make that work. Or did I make it work? Only the readers can really answer that. I know this is a different Vice novel compared to my other stuff.