You know, with Libya, Iran, Egypt, et al. going through their violent rethinks of who they want as leaders, it’s easy to forget how fortunate you are if you live in a country where leaders and governments are changed by a peaceful vote of the people. I’m talking Canada for myself. And if you couldn’t guess, we’re in the midst of a federal election campaign.
(Note to Americans reading this: Up here national elections don’t happen on a fixed schedule. There’s a maximum term of five years, but the party in power will jump the gun if they’re riding high in the polls. Or the opposition parties can force an election if they can force enough “non-confidence” votes on an important matter in Parliament. The election right now was triggered because the ruling party was found in “contempt of Parliament” for withholding information that they were supposed to release to the opposition parties.
So now we each get to vote for one federal representative, called a Ministers of Parliament, who will represent our riding. The party with the most elected MPs usually forms the government. The leader of that party, elected by registered members of that party in a leadership campaign that may happen rarely, become Prime Minister, our version of President.)
Yet when election campaigns become little more than mud-slinging contests, the electorate gets pretty cynical. Attack ads may help get your candidate elected, but democracy as a whole suffers. But the process is fascinating. You see candidates getting the boot or losing their ridings because of old Facebooks posts. You hear about dirty or irresponsible financial dealings that had a candidate declare bankruptcy multiple times. You have votes for the sexiest candidate, hear radio announcers calling candidates crude names, start wondering in general about the venality of the human race or large portions thereof.
And hey, if there aren’t as many stories in there as you want to make up, I don’t know where else there would be. People like David Baldacci have built their careers on them.
But we’re doing short stories in these posts, so how about we focus on one first-time voter? She’s finishing high school, which she’s found a bit of a drag because she’s really bright and didn’t toe the line on the standard social and achievement expectations. She’s accepted into a good university and looking forward to starting as much because of the smart people she expects to meet there as anything. Then this election is triggered and she realizes she’s old enough to vote. She sees this opportunity, even more than going to university, as her chance to finally step out of her adolescence into her burgeoning adulthood.
So there we’ve got a character and a setting. Of course, we’ll want to give the character more specifics if we decide to do this story. We’ll want to know her attractiveness, her family, her political and social and other views. Particularly since, starting with a character to launch this story, we’re probably mostly going to be interested in her personal growth and revelations. It’s a character piece. We want to understand and feel for/with her.
All we need now is the conflict. It could be something big, like some political dirt that for some reason becomes known only to our girl. But that sounds hokey to me. If I were doing it, I’d probably center her conflict on her feelings of wanting to be grown up and explore what that means in terms of the responsibility to vote. Does she need to vote strategically? Should she stand up to her friends or family who claim that voting for any of the candidates is wrong because they’re all liars?
I see it as a pretty earnest story where she goes from one position to the next, honestly struggling, until she finally makes some kind of radical choice like a faked assassination attempt or joining one of the campaigns and doing something outrageous like dancing naked to draw attention to some issue.
Honestly, for a piece like this, I’d have to start writing it and see where the character, as I started to hear her in my head and think like she thinks, took me. Some call it “writing into the mist.” Others call it “flying by the seat of your pants.” I personally think it’s just a way to cope when you don’t see the perfect ending so you trust your imagination will find it, or one that’s at least interesting.
It usually does.
