FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement.
We meet the narrator on a homeward bound flight, making her way to attend to her mother, who has been hospitalized following an accidental fall. This event has forced the narrator into suspending a solitary life abroad, where she has embraced the luxury of an unexamined life. Once she inhabits the rooms of her childhood, she idly begins to explore her balky adolescent self in the pages of journals she abandoned when she pursued other places, other dreams. She investigates the traces of herself in her recordings of her family’s story, fragranced by her limited perspective of the events that marked her passage from infancy through adolescence and adulthood. Opening her heart and mind to confronting an uncontaminated reality and embracing the truth is essential if she is to awaken and evolve into the person she is meant to be.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT: sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force.
The narrator, a 30-something woman, is her own antagonist. As she tells her story from the narrow perceptions of her six-year-old self, her sixteen-year-old self, and now her adult self, she is revealed to be in a permanent state of a difficult adolescence. She was not, and is still not, capable of the insight required to comprehend the forces that conspired to fragment her family, which included her parent’s broken marriage and her brothers’ maladaptive responses to events beyond their control. She consigns all of the blame squarely on her mother, uncritically adhering to a distillation of childish misjudgments and partial truths. While not especially likeable, the narrator is a tragic figure, blind to the richness of her life and, more importantly, her mother’s deep and abiding love for her.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title.
Heart’s Rain
My Unraveled Self
A Figment of Family
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Develop two smart comparables.
This is a fictional memoir, of which I could find no comparables. It is a coming-of-age story of someone in her 30s, well past the expected age for that struggle. Her journey is an unrecognized and ongoing battle, fighting psychological and emotional growth every step of the way.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above.
A 30-something woman is steadfast in her unquestioning allegiance to living in fabrications and false narratives. Her gain is the short-term ease of being comfortable, but the question is whether it is actually comfortable. Accepting reality comes at a price, but in terms of expense, it is the cheaper option in a quest to understand, and to be understood.
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment.
The primary conflict is the relationship between the protagonist/antagonist and her mother. An event fueling that dissonance is her brother’s suicide, and her mother’s response, that occurred when she was six years old. Her take-away from that seminal incident is that her mother and the women of her mother’s family are uncaring. She observes their stoicism, or, as she identifies it, lack of feeling, at his burial, concluding that they are untouched by the tragedy. This is in direct contrast to her paternal grandmother, who, at the same event, “was crying enough for everyone, crying the way a little kid cries, in front of everyone and as loud as she wanted”. The narrator picks her side at this episode, choosing to stand with her father at the graveside service. This is a metaphor of her life. No matter what evidence she may or may not have to the contrary, she selects for the fictions and facades presented by her father and his family.
A secondary conflict in the telling of the story is the push-me, pull-me nature of the narrator’s relationship with a boy, now grown and gently trying to edge his way back into her life. The narrator is too broken, too blinded by her version of truths, to engage in a functioning romantic relationship. The boy, now a man, makes his best efforts to connect with her, doggedly keeping the tiny flame of his adolescent infatuation alive. Despite encouragement and some manipulation by her close sister-friends, the narrator is determined to remain permanently alone, sadly unaware that she has made a commitment to a solitary life.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail.
Set in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood near downtown Houston, the action is centered in the 100-year-old house in which the narrator grew up. It is on an unusually large tract of land in a city that grew around it. The residence is an oasis of charm, a generously proportioned, restrained Victorian, complete with a wrap-around veranda. It is surrounded by thriving gardens, lovingly tended by the narrator’s mother, in which some of the more festive action takes place.
The neighborhood itself is a wildly eclectic mix of fine restaurants and thrift shops, gay bars and straight bars, prosperous residents and homeless wanderers. Freedom to be who and what you are peacefully coexist with the values of an earlier, gentler age, when people fully inhabited their neighborhoods. They all look after each other in their way, while respecting the invisible boundaries of privacy. It is a sheltered zone of live and let live, a safe harbor for all.
