Developing Story Ideas Read online

  In that spirit, three of the tales feature a central character crossing the threshold of the unknown and gaining new knowledge. Story Number 1 is dark because the child is alone, isolated, and responsible for some catastrophe that she cannot understand. By indulging forbidden curiosity and making a bid for popularity, she makes the victim suffer the wrath of the gods. Numbers 2 and 3 are about the solace of love, while Number 4 dramatizes the struggle for power between competing women of different generations, both of whom “own” the father.

  The human memory is a storehouse that automatically sifts and reorganizes what it conserves. Long-held memories often involve archetypal figures who are both actual and symbolic. They return in imagery and action rather than in words, and dreams are similar. The dreaming mind will project its most commanding meanings through symbolically loaded objects, images, and action. Anything lacking immediate significance goes into deep storage, remaining as a latent image ready to pop out when needed. Your journal will show how effortlessly the memory pares events down to poetic actions, images, and moments. Art does this too, which means that memory, consciousness, and the artistic process are intimately connected.

  Making art means taking what is significant and rearranging it to allow an audience to accompany the author on a psychic journey. The result is a shared stream of consciousness that evokes a journey of the mind and heart.

  Note

  1Interview in Daily Mail 31 January, 2015.

  Going Further

  Available at the website www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger are the following additional assignments: Assignment 13–2: Developing a Childhood Image and Assignment 13–3: Developing a Childhood Film or Photo Scene. Some novels that handle children’s subjective consciousness in a masterly way:

  Alain-Fournier. Le Grand Meaulnes. 1913 (Two teenage French boys, playing hooky from school, stumble during their day’s ramble upon a party going on in a wealthy home. The older boy, Meaulnes, falls in love with the daughter of the house, but they are unable for many years to find her again. Told through the younger boy’s admiring sensibility).

  Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. 1988 (Extraordinarily acute account of a painter’s girlhood that is particularly good on the treachery in friendships between girls).

  Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861 (About a lower-class youth in love with a banker’s daughter, this novel probes the bitterness of love that fails because parents have manipulated a daughter’s feelings. This great novel and its extraordinary psychological insights emerged from Dickens’s own four-year period of unsuccessful courtship).

  Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960 (The American classic about the racial and sexual issues of the American deep south, as experienced through the young daughter of the lawyer Atticus Finch while he risks his life fighting in court for a black man’s life).

  Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Company, 1991. (Two days in the life of sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from school and goes to New York).

  Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2000 (Superb memoir of a life in which boyish pleasures had to be snatched from under the eye of an abusive and controlling stepfather. The boy supersedes the tyrant, reunites with his older brother, and eventually wins the fair lady—their unlucky but spirited mother).

  14 Family Story

  Next we turn to a story passed down in your family, which means tapping into the mainstream of the oral tradition. In fact, Amanda McCormick’s story about the woman, the baby, and the unwanted horse from the previous chapter made a good introduction to this chapter’s assignment.

  Assignment 14–1: A Story Told in Your Family

  Step 1: Take an account handed down in your family, one that: Can be set anywhere and at any time

  Does not include yourself present at the events

  Is visual and behavioral and would translate well to the screen

  Describe the incidents and establish the characters, again using scene-outline form. Writing in this compressed form enables you to get the essence down on paper fast. Then you can present it much as an architect might show a model.

  Step 2: Write brief notes on: The story’s underlying meaning

  Any special narrative problems of which you are aware

  All families tell pointed tales that may focus on a family member’s distinguishing characteristics, a turning point, a warning, a particular person’s destiny, or some other memorable circumstance. Often dating back a generation or two, they also epitomize something about the family’s collective sense of identity. Some are funny and paint a trenchant portrait; others convey qualities or values told elliptically in parable form. Frequently they have a dark, sardonic quality that might point at obstinacy in the face of great odds, inherited weaknesses, misplaced ambitions, or some other regrettable character trait against which the listener should be armed.

  My mother would tell such a story about my father. During the down-and-out 1930s when they were impoverished newlyweds in London, she was ill in bed and gave her young husband the last of their money to find food in the street market. He was gone a very long time, and eventually returned not with groceries but with a silver fish-slicer, proud of having bargained it down to an exceptional price. And there, surprisingly, the story just stopped.

  I took it to signify how charmingly unworldly my dad had been during the prehistoric days before my birth. Now it yields a more somber meaning—that he neglected her when she was vulnerable, but must always be forgiven. All through my childhood she told odd snippets about his fatherless and hungry life as a Paris street urchin, and about his mother’s sentimentality, neglect, and abuse of his emotions.

  My mother might equally have told other, equally true stories about his tenacity, pragmatism, and ability to improvise much from little. She might, too, have recounted his professional reputation—for meticulous craftsmanship as a film makeup man, for his charmingly sociable nature, and his insatiable need to be liked by pretty women. Instead, she chose to see him as naïve and boyish. All her stories about him mysteriously ceased before I was out of my teens.

  The paradox is that so much gets signified by so little. Family members like to tell stories about each other that entertain and paint the essentials in a few deadly strokes. This is how we frame each other, because whoever can tell a good story gets to control that part of family history. As the picture frame hints at what lies beyond its margins, so too do family tales.

  How frequently each story was told, how it changed over the teller’s lifetime, and which stories persisted all indicate the hidden agendas, private understandings, loyalties, disappointments, and other flux in the undercurrents of family life. To the sociologist and novelist, each family can become the face of a whole society in miniature, or a microcosm of something much larger.

  Discussion

  Family stories are the contours of a family’s sense of itself. Decide what each has to say about:

  The central character as an individual

  The central character’s role in the marriage, family, or society

  What the central character is trying to get, do, or accomplish

  The world in which the characters find themselves

  A philosophy of living or of problem solving

  The surface of the events it portrays and their subtext

  Examples

  Example 1 (Margaret Harris)

  P——, a woman in her fifties, goes with her husband on a trip to Russia in the 1960s. Her husband is a doctor knighted by the queen of England for his advancements in surgical procedures. He is a rather uptight, strict person with a constant need to criticize and control his wife. She on the other hand is an artistic and extremely talkative person who gets strange notions in her head and can’t let go of them …

  They arrive at the hotel, and because of their wealth, their accommodations are extremely luxuriant. Their room is equipped with a beautiful crystal chandelier that hangs from the ceiling ra
diating a shimmering rainbow of colors. The satin walls are papered ornately, and the oak floor is covered with an exquisite Persian carpet. P—— is concerned that their room is bugged. Her eyebrows twitch nervously beneath the glow of the chandelier. It makes sense to her because her husband works for the British Foreign Office and the prominence of his position accustoms her to such impositions when they travel abroad. She begins looking around the room. She looks everywhere, and her frantic and capricious manner is unstoppable. No article of furniture is left unturned. Her long groping fingers probe every nook and cranny of the room.

  This is disturbing to her husband, and he becomes so upset that he decides to dine without her, as she will not leave the room until she has found the bug.

  Her search continues to escalate more frantically, as greasy-haired and raincoated KGB officers seem to recite dogma in her ears. Having checked every possibility she finally decides that it is perhaps planted underneath the carpet. To pull the carpet up she has to remove large pieces of furniture. She does this herself, as she is by no means a small woman, 6 feet tall and weighing a healthy 175 pounds. Panting and exhausted, she discovers a small golden knob in the center of the room. This must be it, she thinks! It becomes clear that one can unscrew it. She musters all her strength to unscrew the golden plate that is on the floor.

  With a sigh of relief she looks around to see that the KGB men have disappeared. However, a large crash comes from below, as well as screams. This concerns her greatly. She quickly tries to put the room back together and look as if nothing happened. Seconds later the management enters and tells her in broken English that she has unscrewed the chandelier in the room below.

  Author’s notes on the story’s underlying meaning and importance:

  My relative P—— was always doing foolish things. This wasn’t the only time something went crashing from one floor to another. Once she left the bathtub running and it fell through to the floor below.

  Paranoia can lead you to act without thinking.

  Her imagination made for great moments in life that at the time must have seemed embarrassing.

  Her marriage was so unhappy and controlled that she got out of control in other ways …

  Women didn’t have careers then, and so were more apt to make up grand schemes.

  This was the only way she could get her husband’s attention. Even bad attention was better than none.

  She married someone like her father, also cold and aloof. This was her way of being defiant.

  About themes, the author says,

  An artistic personality when crushed will find other ways to create—even scenarios that are not real.

  A truly happy person learns to trust, whereas a person who doesn’t trust is more apt to be under someone’s control.

  If you expect someone to act foolishly, they will.

  The author’s notes need nothing extra from me. Apart from the setup details, it is practically a one-scene story. I am moved by the loneliness and sadness of the unloved P——, and by the way her unremitting anxiety generates a myopic distraction that only serves to deepen her isolation. She is one of those bittersweet, comedic characters living a “life of quiet desperation.” The story successfully blends farce and tragedy, an exceptional combination resulting from a rare and compassionate vision.

  Example 2 (Amanda McCormick)

  For weeks she has waited to catch a glimpse of him leaving school, shopping at the corner market, or walking home through the center of town. Then the note is passed during the final period of English Composition. Dan B——, the catch of Barstow, wants to go out with her this Friday night.

  Trying to convince her strict parents that this would be a good idea is another matter. They insist on meeting this young man before he takes their daughter out.

  The big night arrives. She has spent hours primping—and praying that her parents wouldn’t ruin this moment by scaring away her new boyfriend. The doorbell—she races to get it. Just as she opens it, the voice of her mother comes up from the basement: “Come down here.”

  They inch their way down the basement steps and walk into her mother’s workshop—for the mother is an avid taxidermist. To the girl’s horror she realizes that at this moment her mother is skinning a mink.

  The boy stammers while the girl registers a look of great embarrassment. Before she can figure out a way to drag the boy out of the door, her mother has charmingly engaged him in conversation. She scrapes and cuts at the skin of the mink as she asks the boy how the baseball team is doing.

  The girl stands next to what might be the most attractive boy in the entire junior class, realizing that she may never be asked out again in her entire high school career.

  Author’s notes on the story’s underlying meaning and importance:

  This is my mother’s story. She always would tell it for great comedic effect, but that concealed what was probably a very painful and embarrassing memory. In a funny way, it tells the story of her parents who constantly threw up obstacles to her freedom and happiness when she was young. It also expresses how most teenagers view their parents as strange and potentially embarrassing creatures.

  If this were a movie, it would be important to convey the backstory that sets it up: what the family was like and whether this incident was a recurring type of event. It might also be difficult to convey what is going through the head of the girl as this scene is happening.

  This story sticks in my mind for its central characters’ pathos and eccentricity. It is often said that humor and tragedy are closely related, opposite sides of the same ever-turning coin. I find I am attracted to that very powerful comparison.

  Told in only three or four scenes, this story has a gruesome central image or motif—the dead animal having its beautiful skin torn off. How powerfully and economically it conveys the central character’s predicament under the horror-stricken gaze of her beau.

  A motif is a representation—visual, aural, verbal, or musical—of something important about a character, situation, subtext, or scene. A leitmotif is a motif used repeatedly and associated with a dominant theme. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy uses red and white imagery throughout to signify the relentless violence (red) perpetrated on his pure-spirited heroine (white) by the men who profess to love her.

  The skinned mink, implying a comment on the scene’s meaning, is a motif (see sidebar), a valuable signaling device in place of the further detail that might distract us from registering a central concern of the story.

  Film, with its shifting eyelines and close-up framings, is good at suggesting subjective points of view, but Margaret achieves the same in her writing. We see the mink only from the girl’s point of view, but we could switch to seeing it from the boy’s too. Imagine that we see his eyes dilate as he takes in what the mother is doing; he looks up at the mother’s face, looks across to his date. Then, as she improvises charmingly artificial conversation he stares at the hands cutting and scraping at the bloody animal skin. We imagine him thinking that if he lingers around this weirdo family, he will become their next specimen.

  Multiple points of view privilege the audience with POVs other than that of the main or POV character. This evokes the multiple awarenesses that coexist in any populous scene, and projects a richer experience for the audience.

  Scenes become richer with tensions and possibility when we sample other points of view. The two teenagers each see the mother, but her awareness of them is also part of the tension for the viewer. We understand that the heroine not only risks losing “the catch of Barstow” but all future dating. This would be all the stronger if the destructive power of school gossip had been established during the tale’s exposition.

  Drama provides exposition clues to establish whatever is vital for the audience to know about a character, time period, place, or other defining aspect.

  For us to infer this, the piece must establish the school’s extreme pecking order in its exposition. If we fail to suspect that the girl’s r
eputation will be tied to her mother’s sickening eccentricities, we lose much of the story’s implications.

  Exposition, or setup, establishes the factual framework necessary for the audience to comprehend the drama. It might include day or night, time period, place, relationships, social class of the protagonists, and so on. Exposition shouldn’t draw attention to itself or delay the action, so try to subtly embed it in the action. You never want your audience to feel it is being informed.

  In Amanda’s mother’s day, girls had to wait stoically for Mr. Right to come along and choose them. A motif expressing this—and one organic to the basement setting—is the spider awaiting a fly—an apt simile for the heroine’s predicament. Did you also notice how even the phrase “the catch of Barstow” has taxidermic connotations of hunting and killing? Hints like this will emerge in your own work, and it is no coincidence that your subconscious places them there. This is the story hinting at where it wants you to take it.

  Amanda’s terse tale uses a range of symbolic and juxtapositional techniques that allude to the medieval myth of the princess in the tower:

  At the beginning, the heroine stalks Dan. In legend, a princess would go out with the hunt so she was likely to see, or be seen by, the choice of her heart, the poor but handsome commoner.