We Are the Night, We Are the Day

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My initial inspiration for the story was a poem by Stuart Dischell

The second source was "Sharp Teeth" by Toby Barlow, which is a novel-length poem about werewolves

Earlier drafts were first person, with the pack mentality as a secondary dimension

The final published story was first person plural, leaning into the power of a wolf pack

One of my first published pieces was a flash-fiction story about police officer werewolves.

The starting point for this story was primarily about language, as Stuart Dischell's poem "Days of Me" really played with unusual use of verbs and nouns. (Read the full poem here: https://poets.org/poem/days-me.) The language of the story is highly stylized, something I felt I could sustain for a short distance.

I'd been wanting to do a werewolf story for a long time and the book "Sharp Teeth" by Toby Barlow is a novel-length poem about werewolves who are surfers. That gave me the idea to give my protagonists unusual employment and give myself room to explore how the nature of werewolves would align with police work.

Primarily because our first writerly instinct is to use a first-person narrator, I started the piece as an "I" narrator--one amongst many others, but as I worked with the content more the distinction of a main character became moot, since what I was exploring in the narrative wasn't character, but the alignment of mystical creature to real-world employment.

Read the full story here: https://syntaxandsalt.com/2016/10/30/we-are-the-night-we-are-the-day-by-renee-bibby/