Rewriting has begun for my Script Frenzy script: I want to get it buttoned up so I'll have a fully realized story for Three-Day Novel Contest in September.

My story is about a werewolf that changes into various different ones based on his emotions. First thing I've purged out of the story was an unnecessary, exposition-heavy subplot involving a secret werewolf brotherhood called the Lupine Order. They really distracted from what I wanted the story to be.

Their role, as it turned out, was to tell the protagonist relevant information that stretched too long, disappear, and then reappear for arbitrary revelations and conflicts that could have easily been done without setting up a whole werewolf mafia thing. One of the first things that they do was tell the protagonist how to turn himself into a werewolf (his normal werewolf form, not one of the emotion ones), now I'm rewriting it so that the protagonist does that himself.

One way I'm thinking of doing it is that he smokes a joint after he's had a hard night of eating people, and while he's high, he accidentally changes by himself. It at least gives him more of a reason than sudden epiphany, but I'm worried that smoking pot is kind of a silly thing for him to do. It's kind of a genre-specific thing to do in a movie, and viewers might think it was the pot that made him change, and I'd have to explain that it wasn't. But a stoned werewolf seems like too funny an image to pass up...

Does it sound like a decent idea? What else could I do to let the protagonist come across this information? One of the themes about this movie is that the protagonist's body is kind of working against him; it's going through all these changes and he has to keep up.

ANY idea can be very silly depending on the treatment. On the flip side, even the silliest ideas can be elevated to a higher stature with the right treatment. However...

Healthy or not, illegal or not, people who smoke (whatever substance) do so to alleviate some type of stress in their lives. I would certainly think a werewolf going through these inadvertent changes would have a LOT of stress and would conceivably acquire a taste for some substance which he believes may help him calm his nerves.

Also, I wouldn't discount your idea of a werewolf mafia entirely. Maybe you don't need to set up the entire Order for this particular volume, but having it exist and make a few "cameos" would engender that sense of continuity within a story leading to those objects of Hollywood's desire - the sequel.

Ironically enough, my character used to be an alcoholic, but werewolves can't get drunk because their livers break down alcohol too quickly. So he tried downing half a bottle of scotch, and when that didn't work, he sniffed out some dope. :p

My character gets embroiled into some weird stuff while he's trying to cure his problem, like with drug dealers and strange meetings and things, so I'll probably mention the Lupine Order in some capacity, but they won't be instrumental. I already have an idea for a sequel to this, though, we'll see how the Order plays into it later.

NaNoWriMo 2007:
WHIZ-BANG FANTASTIC - 51,296 words (and counting!)