The Grand Writing Adventures of Victor Chang

Minot, ND was a massive labor of love that inspired me to create this website.

I envision this show as a Hulu miniseries. It’s written as 9 episodes of television. The thing is, the most that anyone ever read was 1 episode. No one found out what happened to the main characters or the mystery or anything. And that’s why I decided that was a shame and went ahead and published them here.

When I was writing “The Last Five Days” in summer 2018, I wasn’t in a good mood. The story was taking too long. I had just failed my PE for the first time. And I was just not creatively taking off. I then had a radical idea: a multi generational story of trauma that took place in North Dakota. It would take place in 2016 and 1980. Why? Honestly, no idea, but 2016 was significant because the US election really flipped things on its head and that year just stuck with me. I quickly outlined the barebones of the story and even color-coded it to keep the alternating storylines straight.

But I was still finishing “The Last Five Days”, so this remained on my backburner.

In the meantime, 2019 continues. I go to visit a friend in Minneapolis and I take the time to travel to near Minot itself… you know, for “research.” I even asked some people about Minot on Reddit but that got creepy real fast. When I started writing the story, I wanted it to be in the middle of nowhere, but not too famous like Fargo. That’s why I settled on Minot, the next biggest city near Fargo. However, when I was traveling there, I realized Minot was too far away, so I didn’t end up going there, only Fargo (fun fact: the most popular thing to do in Fargo on TripAdvisor is the visitor center!). However, I did end up hitting a few key cities in my story, namely St. Cloud, Minnesota.

The end of 2019 rolls around. I finish “The Last Five Days.” Around this time, as I became more ingrained with my Gotham Writer friends, I realized from feedback (and my own personal style) that I love dialogue. So I became obsessed with dialogue and plays, so I wrote “The Third Roommate” for my friends. More on that in that post. But “Minot, ND” remained on the backburner.

And then, the pandemic hit.

It’s April 2020. Our read through of “The Third Roommate” was not happening, since no one was meeting in person. And what happened then?

I took Minot, ND off the backburner. I had time. Finally!

But not so fast. I thought I wrote a good outline. But when I started to really dig deep and fill in the blanks, there was so much more story bursting from the seams. I had so many ideas. I expanded my color-coded outlined and it was a true work of art. Keeping track of motivations, characters, time periods, the mystery, it was a lot. But it was so fun. I had never felt more fulfilled, at least creatively.

Here be spoilers!

For the first third of this story (below are the first 3 episodes), I was focused on setting up the mystery of where Molly went.

The foundation: it’s 1980, and Molly Kingsley is a bad mom, a druggie, who is trying to care of her 10-year old daughter Erin. She has some friends who want to help her but she needs to help herself first. She then meets Dan, a good guy, but then falls victim to his brother Tim, a drug dealer, and they begin to date. It’s not looking good for Molly.

The foundation, part 2: it’s 2016, and John Kingsley, Molly’s son, finds out his mom is missing. He goes to find her and enlists the help of her assistant, Kelly, again my stereotypically manic pixie dream girl. They go to the police, find out she went to Dan for help, and then reverse track a license plate on a car that mysterious visited her. They go on a road trip. Side note: John is haunted by his sister’s mysterious death. Erin died sometime in 1980, interestingly the same year that the other timeline is occurring. Hmm…

I think the mystery box of where is Molly was always intended to be solved in Episode 3. I always knew that Molly was okay and looking for Erin. I also wanted to introduce a surprise new timeline in 1998, where it’s revealed that Erin is indeed alive. I wanted to leave Episode 3 with a cliffhanger, leaving the readers wondering what happened to Erin? Is she really alive? You’ll have to keep reading to find out.

I’m proud of this foundation. I think it’s too long, and I think I got overly ambitious, but man, I think it’s great. I want everyone to read this one.