Rather than go to the news today, I’ll just look at my own life. Things just happen, you know? If they affect you deeply, there’s a good chance that the emotion will filter into the writing and that’s good! If you can make people feel with your stories, then you’re at least half way home.
So…events in my life. We have two teenagers in the house. Wonderful kids. Love them to bits. Most interesting thing I’ve noted over the years, though , is that no matter how well one of them is doing at any given point in time, you can count on there being a massive emotional swing the other way in the future. These are the teenage years, after all.
Latest swing involved one of them stomping out of the house and not coming back until very late at night.
And the question again is – what kind of story? Domestic drama? Deep contemplative literary piece about growth, stages of life? YA fiction about [fill in the blank]. SF piece that takes place in another time or on another planet and delves into how teens there handle the anger or growing pangs of the teen years (I’m sure you can spin off some interesting or frightening imaginings).
Me, I’m going with a mystery this time around because the main emotion I experienced was fear. I feared for my child’s emotional stability, for their physical safety out wandering the midnight streets, for their future if we couldn’t work these issues out.
Posit blowup based on (creating fiction scenario here to protect the privacy of my loved ones), say, the discovery of suspicious powder in a daughter’s purse. Suspect cocaine. Major confrontation and blowup re the daughter’s friends and dragging in her behavior for the last number of months.
So she runs out.
That’s the setup. Big storytelling decision here is whose point of view (p.o.v.) to follow. The daughter’s? The mother’s? The father’s? The bad guy’s? A neutral observer (3rd person omniscient)? Some mix of the above? Chances are that you’ll immediately gravitate towards one as being the most natural for you, but it’s worthwhile taking a moment to consider the others. The story ideas that come out may surprise and excite you.
For me, the most obvious p.o.v. would be as the father. I’d probably have him chase the daughter out, have him discover her mixed up with bad guys or kidnapped or hut, and he’d rescue her.
But looking through my list of other possible p.o.v.’s, the next one I’m most attracted to is a mix of p.o.v.’s. Why? Because I’m not coming up with an ultra-complicated plot here. This is the suburbs. And I don’t feel like I’ve got some deep message about life to present. So the fun of this story for me would be in the visceral thrill of the search, the danger, the crossed wires of the different p.o.v.’s (for example, the daughter meets up with her dealer who she believes loves her though he really doesn’t, and the father is tracking the same dealer whom he believes to be one of his daughter’s few upstanding friends). Hopefully it all dovetails into a nice action sequence that has the good father rescue the daughter while the bad guy drug dealer, in some kind of ironic come-uppance, ends up getting shot, stabbed, forcibly overdosed, or bitten to death by mad dogs let loose from the yard of a neighbor the father really can’t stand (might throw in the dogs’ p.o.v. too).
I see a frenetic kind of back and forth p.o.v. swap at the end with a nice little black humor coda.
Where would you take this idea?
