Assignment 1- Story Statement:
In the quiet of her apartment, a woman coped with trauma by disappearing from her own life until one day she realized merely existing wasn’t enough. So she left everything behind, traveled the world, and began to face her grief and embrace life fully.
Assignment 2-Antagonist:
The antagonist is not one individual; rather, it’s the system itself that doesn’t know how to respond to women who have been assaulted and instead chooses to silence them. The NYPD decided that she was lying about being raped before the investigation even began. Police reports were falsified, a proper investigation was never undertaken, and evidence disappeared.
The District Attorney’s office was more concerned about a black eye to their offices than about preventing the rapist from assaulting other women, and so chose to do nothing. But worst of all, the woman’s husband and parents reacted poorly. Without properly understanding how it is best to respond, they instead allowed their own religious beliefs, their fears, and feelings of inadequacy over not protecting her to dissolve into blame, withdrawal, silence around the subject, and eventually abandonment through divorce and disownment.
Assignment 3- Conjuring your breakout title:
Running and Falling
You’re Never Lost If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going
Living Outside of Google
Assignment 4- Comprables
Running & Falling is a memoir about embracing life, living life fully and figuring out who you are. It’s a journey of strength. Similar memoirs in style or theme would be:
Wild by Cheryl Strayed & Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Both memoirs deal with themes of travel as a path of self discovery and processing grieff after traumatic events.
A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
This is another memoir about dealing with grief and loss. Stylistically the spare style in the description of grief is similar.
Assignment 5- Core Wound and the Primary Conflict:
After surviving multiple sexual assaults, the loss of her father through both disownment and death, and the collapse of her marriage, a woman retreats into isolation, working obsessively from her New York apartment to feel safe from a world that has only hurt her. But over the next decade, she chooses risk over numbness: launching a company, traveling across continents, and ultimately discovering not just love, but herself and her voice.
Assignment 6- Other Matters of Conflict:
Internal Conflict:
The protagonist, Lisa, feels incredibly betrayed by the entire world after she is sexually assaulted in two different circumstances where she is not believed and is told by those that should love her the most that her best recourse is to remain silent. Because of this, she feels that she is unsafe anywhere and with anyone, not just physically but also emotionally.
A scene that triggers the antagonist
She is lying on a bed in the hospital, fully exposed in a hospital gown and her feet in the stirrups as the nurse performs a rape kit and she overhears the nurse speaking with the police officer who explains that they are not planning to investigate as the lead detective decided upon seeing her that she was lying and she wasn’t assaulted at all but instead was trying to cover up an affair. Exposed in every way, she crumples inwardly, understanding in that moment that she will never be seen or heard.
Secondary Conflict:
While trying to establish a life for herself and move on, she hopes to find love but what she realizes is that the man she is in love with and wants to start a family with is not feeling the same in turn.
A scene that triggers the protagonist:
She knows she’s always anticipating rejection, because of everything she’s already been through, but instinctively, she feels her boyfriend pulling away. One day, he invites her to go sailing with him. He’d been studying sailing for the past few months and needed the practice. She reluctantly accepts, nervous about the cold weather and how inexperienced both he and the crew are.
Once on the boat, she quickly notices the chemistry between him and another sailor. Watching the way he interacts with this woman brings up a kind of jealousy and insecurity she isn’t used to feeling. In that moment, she knows she needs to end things, not because she believes he’s cheated, but because of how little she likes herself, and the insecure person she’s becoming.
Assignment 7: Setting
The book begins in the cold, worn offices of the District Attorney of New York City. While New York is home to the protagonist and where she has hidden away for safety, it also becomes a cold barren place that she feels she must leave in order to save herself.
After leaving New York City, she travels to the sunny beaches of California and then over the course of the next three years she travels through several countries, with vivid descriptions of each place she passes through, including the beaches of Montezuma, Costa Rica; the mountains and strawberry fields of Chiang Mai, Thailand; the rice paddies of Sa Pa, Vietnam; the bustling city of Buenos Aires; the varied terrain of Patagonia, Chile; the bubbling sulfur pools in Rotorua, New Zealand; and the cobblestone streets of Valencia, Spain, and Split, Croatia. It also explores the olive trees and Mediterranean Sea of Monaco, the Italian and French Riviera, as well as the diverse cities of London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Auckland, and Kuala Lumpur.
While she recognizes that traveling to new places doesn’t extinguish her problems or change her need to process her grief and trauma, it serves as an illustration of how she is able to fully see and relate to a place, finally living in her present, not her past or her stresses about the future. In fact, each place has such a strong impact on her that she forms a unique relationship with each which is written in the form of love letters to place, intimate reflections on what each place offered, held, or healed.
