Developing Story Ideas Page 10

  Painful early memories often include sensations of guilt, shame, or extreme isolation. Generally their turning points are the mysteriously vicious moments at which the child realizes what is forbidden, what one must never do.

  For all its outward neutrality, this single-scene story has disturbing overtones. Highly visual, the piece withholds all mention of feelings, which only heightens its tension and horror. Nobody understands the boyish foreign girl, but—looking for acceptance?—she organizes a peepshow for her peers. The experiment aborts when their gullible victim spins into a self-destructive paroxysm. A whiff of brimstone attaches to the children’s sexual curiosity, which results in injury to the obliging boy, and the central character is left in isolation. It is mysterious that divine retribution strikes the boy victim rather than the perpetrators. Knowing they have broken a taboo, the guilty melt away from the crime. The scene is made surreal by unfolding without language or mention of sound until the boy breaks out screaming in pain. This violent awakening is clearly the dramatic crisis of the scene.

  Example 2 (Alex Meillier)

  Like most of the class, this writer was so gripped by his childhood memory that he overlooked the remainder of the assignment.

  Nine years old. I avoided my weekly baths like the plague. Perhaps I had a near-death experience in the infant swimming program buried somewhere in my subconscious, but I dreaded the bath. My parents would send me upstairs to bathe, and when I was finished my mother would smell me to see if I was clean. Sometimes I would splash water on my hair and come downstairs to try to fool her, but she would smell me and send me back upstairs to finish my bath.

  One day I decided to impress my parents. I went into the cupboard under the sink to smell the bottles to find the prettiest smelling product. I found a bottle of Pine Sol, and poured all of it into my bath. I climbed in and washed myself thoroughly. I came downstairs and my mother smelled me. She looked at me perplexed, smelled me again, then yelled across the house for my father.

  “Steven, come over here!”

  My father rushed over; I was confused. I don’t remember what my mother told him, but he grabbed me under my arms, swinging me off the ground, and rushed me back upstairs. I was crying and screaming because I couldn’t understand what was going wrong. He brought me up to the bathroom, undressed me hurriedly, ran the shower, and got undressed himself. He grabbed a scouring brush from under the sink and brought me into the shower with him.

  He started to scrub my flesh pink and I screamed and screamed. After a while I stopped screaming because the scrubbing was pleasurable. I remember his penis, big and hairy, right in front of my face, jiggling with the aggressive scrubbing motion. I compared mine to my father’s, then I took a pee in the shower and he scolded me, but I just laughed, and then he laughed too. When the shower was over he took out a big towel and dried me off thoroughly.

  That night I had a bad dream, and I yelled for my dad instead of my mom. He came into my room. I told him I was scared because the hemen gemens that lived in the carpet was climbing into my bed and biting me. He got out a sleeping bag and laid it in the hall right outside of my parents’ room. He closed the door to his room and I slept outside of my parents’ door feeling safe and loved.

  Told in the first person, past tense, the first act sets up what was normal, then shows us a child trying to do something new that touches off a terrifying frenzy in his parents. In the complications of the second act, his mother tosses him away from herself and into the enraged grasp of his father. But in a turnaround moment (or plot point) the boy realizes that his “punishment” is actually his father’s frantic will to save him.

  A plot point happens when the story unexpectedly veers off in a new direction. Plot points are powerful because they redirect a story that had appeared predictable. The storyteller’s art always tries to maintain tension by keeping us guessing.

  When the story direction suddenly changes from transgression and punishment to feverish lifesaving, it turns on its heel, so to speak, and sets off in a significantly new direction. This, in dramatic parlance, is a plot point. When credible, plot points are invariably effective. This one I would designate as the story crisis.

  During the exorcism, the boy notes his father’s sexual likeness to himself, but with a difference in scale. His father overlooks a taboo (urinating in the shower), and the decontamination ritual concludes with the child lovingly enfolded by his father. The third act is at night when, revisited by fears, the boy calls out, and some may designate this as the main story crisis. Because his father confirms his goodwill by responding tenderly, the boy can rest secure in the knowledge he is cherished. And this of course is the story’s resolution.

  All good drama poses interesting questions. The boy’s problem articulates a fundamental question of childhood: Am I lovable and do my parents love me? In the throes of danger, he urgently needs answers. Will someone save me? Seemingly repudiated or abandoned by his mother, the boy expects angry punishment from his father, but finds he is scared rather than angry. The colossus loves him dearly, and on the second test (calling out at night) his father proves it beyond a doubt.

  Notice how Alex learns not from anything anyone says but from what his parents do. Unlike words, actions are absolute. They really do speak louder than words—something to remember whenever you long to write an earnest dialogue exchange. The silent cinema was revolutionary because it could only speak through actions and had to develop a new language of visuals and behavior.

  Example 3 (Chris Darner)

  The morning was damp. It was still dark outside. The house was quiet. A shuffling coming from his parents’ room. Clothes. Probably his clothes.

  He stumbled out of bed, grabbed a towel, and fell into the shower. The water woke him up a little but he wanted nothing more than to be back in bed, asleep, with today not being what it was, when it was. A rapping on the bathroom door interrupted his shower. He flicked off the shower head halfway to listen for words, the water still hissing in the pipes.

  “You almost ready?” His mother’s voice, uncomfortable.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t feel like using any more words than he had to.

  In the family room sat a black duffel bag that his aunt, an airline attendant, gave him for Christmas. Black with a single white stripe, it sat on the couch, filled with clothes. Clothes folded so perfectly that they made the bag square. Only fourteen years old, he hadn’t learned how to fold clothes quite that well, much less pack them so perfectly into a bag. He thought about how much he loved his mother.

  “You ready?”

  “Let me put on my socks and shoes.”

  He wasn’t even looking up at her. He was too afraid. Instead, he dropped down onto the couch, next to his black bag, and began to put on his socks and shoes. His socks slipped up his moist feet and ankles. His shoes felt tight when he pulled down on the laces.

  He held his stare at the floor while his mother fixed coffee in the kitchen. He glanced out into the backyard and could tell by the colors of the gray brick wall that it was overcast. Dark gray sky. He locked his eyes back down on the floor in front of him. He was cold. His body didn’t want to be awake.

  He held his stare at the floor. He thought how it must look to his mother. How it must look as though he hated her. He wished he could tell her how much he loved her and how afraid he was. He was so afraid. He was worried to even think about how afraid he was, so he just stared down at the floor, his arms around his stomach to stay warm.

  “You hungry? The doctors said you could have some juice if you want, just no food.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Well. I’ll go warm up the car.”

  “Okay. I’ll just be in here.”

  His mother walked out to the car with her coffee, leaving the front door open behind her. He felt a coolness and looked out at the granite clouds frozen in the sky. A few minutes later his mother returned and told him the car was ready.

  “You got everything?” He looked up a
t her for the first time since waking up.

  “Yeah. All my clothes in here?”

  “Yes. I packed your shirts and some shorts but I didn’t know what exactly you’d need. I think you’ll be wearing a gown most of the time, but we’ll see. You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood and grabbed his bag and the backpack he laid out the night before. He didn’t want to linger in his house, didn’t want to take a last look at anything, he just wanted to go.

  The car ride up was quiet. They took their third car. A big old rust-colored Chevy Malibu Station Wagon. 1973. He remembered the model year because it was the same year he was born. The car radio didn’t work, hadn’t for years. The hum of the engine and the whistling of the heater would have to do.

  Halfway to the hospital he pulled a pair of drumsticks from his backpack. He didn’t play, but he told himself they were cheap and would be fun to mess around with. Actually, he didn’t really care whether he could play. If anyone saw them and asked, he could tell them, “I don’t really play, just goof around,” but [he would] say it so that it sounded as if he played but was just modest about it.

  He started to tap the drum sticks against the vinyl dashboard. The vinyl was brick red and rock hard from fourteen years of sun. The tapping increased. He was tapping quicker and quicker and eventually he couldn’t get it rolling any faster. So he started tapping harder. He kept tapping, harder and harder. The drum beat quickly fell out of its rhythm and the head of the drumstick in his right hand dug into the dash with a loud crack. He put the drum sticks down into his lap and stared down at the peanut-sized hole in the dash. The car was old and had its share of scratches and dings, but there was something about that little hole he just made. He was ashamed. Ashamed and scared. His mother didn’t say a word. She knew.

  For the rest of the ride he just sat, staring out at all the different buildings and cars they passed. Buildings and cars filled with people for whom today was just another day. They entered the hospital lot and pulled into an empty parking spot. Both he and his mother stepped out of the car without saying a word. One of the drumsticks was lying on the floor and the other rolled back under his seat.

  “You want your drumsticks?”

  “No.” He paused, searching for something else to say to her. “Thanks.”

  This acutely observed story, unwittingly told in the third person, feels less vivid than its predecessors. The past-tense retrospective gives it a closed, encircled, historic feeling. However, its four or five stream-of-consciousness scenes still convey much of the lonely dread a child endures prior to a major test of courage.

  The crisis occurs when his mother, instead of punishing him, rewards his stoicism by letting his damage to the poor old Malibu pass without comment. The resolution is that she understands him: the most important person in the world loves him and understands what he’s feeling, so Chris can be strong.

  This story too deals with the need and necessity for love. Its meaning? Perhaps that courage comes from feeling loved and valued.

  Example 4 (Amanda McCormick)

  A poor, hungry horse is standing in the backyard in the rain. The mother standing at the window with a ten-month-old baby on her hip considers the horse, and sighs. The horse has to be fed. She reluctantly goes outside and finds something for it to eat.

  Finally, her daughter gets out of bed, already surly about something. The mother begins to scold her about her horse, reminding her that she has been forgetting to feed it at all for the last few weeks. The daughter explodes at her, reminding her that her authority, since she is the stepmother, is not that of a real mother. Then wait till your father gets home, the mother threatens. The mother tries to draw a line about the care and feeding of the supposedly beloved horse, but is met with even more anger. The daughter storms out to meet some friends at a shopping mall.

  Despite the baby’s wails, the house is very quiet. The mother looks out at the scraggly horse standing in the rain. She is still angry at her stepdaughter and is not going to wait on this problem a day longer. She bundles up the baby and puts her in a stroller, puts on her own coat, goes outside and leads the horse out of its pen.

  The mother, the horse, and the baby start off down the road together. They pass rows of houses and rows of orange groves. Perplexed motorists honk at the sight for lack of a better reaction, but one man does stop and ask her if she needs some help. She stops briefly and shakes her head, no, and continues on her way in the rain.

  When she reaches the stables she is even more determined on her course of action. She offers the horse to them free of charge and they readily agree. The mother and the baby turn back in the rain and begin the trip home.

  The writer adds:

  I am the baby in this story, so strictly speaking I am too young to remember it. I remember my mother telling it to me over and over when I was young, so I have come to strongly identify with it. I have a strong image of my mother, myself, and the horse on the road, probably partially invented, but nonetheless an image that has shown up in my writing. Another thing that is important to me thematically about this story is the way that so much conflict can be invested in the image of something essentially innocent, like the horse.

  Told in correct scene-outline form, and with the requested afterthoughts, this potent and highly understated four-scene piece really belongs with family stories in the next chapter. I included it here because it shows how spontaneously one’s memory can empathically appropriate a loved one’s experiences. How powerfully we identify with anyone who deeply moves us!

  Empathy can transport us into another’s being, something important about the human heart that also works through stories. Both the ones we read and ones we tell can deeply move us. “I began writing,” said the veteran novelist Anne Tyler, “with the idea that I wanted to know what it would be like to be somebody else, and that’s never changed.”1

  In Amanda’s story about a struggle between women for ascendency, two powerful images stand out. One is the mother’s view, framed significantly by the home window, of the “scraggly” horse standing outside, abandoned and hungry in the rain. The other is the little cavalcade advancing through wet traffic—horse, baby, and implacably angry mother. Here are the makings of a revenge tragedy. Like figures in a Greek drama, the king’s new wife must force the antagonistic princess to accept the authority of her new stepmother.

  Through image and action, Act I lays out the inexorable conflicts of stepfamily life. The stepdaughter is acting up—no doubt angry at the girl baby who threatens to displace her—and so she willfully neglects her horse. The locus of her anger is her stepmother who, for the family’s very survival, must draw lines between what is acceptable and what is not. Outwardly she does so on behalf of the unfortunate horse—condemned to stand hungry, wet, and neglected. But the stepmother’s own future is at stake since the princess will inevitably try to make the father choose when he returns between herself and this new, bogus queen. Act II includes the crisis in which she gives the horse away, and during the resolution in Act III, the mother enforces her determination by taking the two innocents, horse and baby, on a long, wet journey through an uncomprehending world. Usually but not invariably the crisis comes in Act III, but here it comes earlier.

  Giving away the unvalued, unloved animal to people who will care for it has an implacable justice. The all-too-imaginable repercussions lie outside the story, just as a picture’s composition can suggest what lies beyond the frame (Figure 13–1).

  Figure 13–1 Stories sometimes suggest what is going on beyond their framing, as this photo does.

  The story lacks a confrontation between the two antagonistic women, but this could be developed. With our knowledge of the backstory, we see the mother’s act as a justifiable, if rough, form of justice even though everyone loses in the short run. The stepdaughter loses her horse; the horse loses its home; the absent father loses his household (to strife); and the stepmother loses (for the time being) all liking by her step
daughter. Beyond the story’s frame, we know that in the long run the stepmother’s life will be hell unless she demands respect by drawing a line. She must forcibly signify that she will neither be abused nor forced out of the nest with her baby. No wonder this story is important in the McCormick family.

  Discussion

  When you come to discuss your group’s stories as a collection, consider the following questions:

  What did they have in common?

  What themes did you detect?

  Did all the writers stay in treatment form (third person, present tense)?

  How did the stories convey their characters’ motivations and feelings when you had to infer them?

  How much more about the stories emerged during discussion by their readers? Why can the audience often see more than the writer, and what does this tell you?

  Childhood memories commonly preserve those awful moments when you woke up in horror to a demarcation line or taboo that you hadn’t known existed. Collectively, the examples above convey the shock and pain by which children learn the ways of the world. In drama as in life, the crisis or turning point is often catalyzed in a major act by a central character, as when the mother won’t tolerate the horse’s victimization any longer and resolutely gives it away. From this point everything must resolve into a new and changed situation, which we can imagine and do not need to see.

  On Memory

  Memory preserves only what is freighted with significance. Thus, everyone owns a highly visual and poetic bank of experiences, particularly from early life when one still had so much to learn. In a world of towering, incomprehensible authority structures, we pass through terrible moments of desolation and easily recall those moments of intense fear. At such times, we depend on our family to love and protect us, so we are terrified of losing or alienating them. How to get through this dark forest is the stuff of myth, legend, and folk story. These story forms transform what is harrowing and unavoidable into narratives, ones that metaphorically plumb the very nature of living and suggest how to survive.