On a Hunch at a Tangent

Dearest K.,

I am writing to ask you put your thinker to use and help me fill in the following narrative hole: I have let's say 12 characters in a small town called Kolob, Utah. It's the kind of place you have to choose to be, not the kind of place you stop to get gas or take a telemarketing job. People are drawn here by what draws people along, but these are mostly people who are more powerfully drawn than others, or who are such fuckups out there in the culture that they go looking for something else. What draws them is a sense that things could be better, that something is missing, etc. Some find some satisfaction for a while in religion, or sex, or love, or alcohol, or working with their hands, or leading wayward under-age thugs around the desert, or some combination of these things, but they are still drawn on, always with the sense that they might get to the center of things. So how do I dramatize this unseen-but-sensed center? I've had the vague idea that these people end up in the canyon, but what is the story that propels them there? I mean, I don't think I can have all of them, especially the rancher Ferral Young, just up and follow their hunches until they end up in the canyon. Maybe the hippies would do that. There's got to be some kind of backbone or direction, or something going on that organizes what would otherwise be a bunch of first-person ramblings about feelings, which I can't abide writing. Bolano has the quest of the Savage Detectives for Cesarea Tinajero, which almost seems like an excuse of a plot, the real action being in the daily scrapes along the way; Mathiessen has the overwhelming fact of E.J.Watson's tragedy, to which everything points like to Achilles' death. Tolkien has that Wagner rip-off ring squeezing through the chinks in the ramparts of evil. I gotta have something, even though what I suspect is at the center is nothing except our human nature that can't abide stasis or a vacuum.