Story Idears

1. Helper Man and Guilty Girl – I thought this up last semester. A guy is twistedly altruistic, to the point of furtively causing people problems in order to help them. He lives with his sister and her son. When his sister finds out that Helper Man is the source of some chronic trouble, she kicks him out but honors the bond of kinship insofar as she doesn’t take legal action. Homeless, Helper Man meets Guilty Girl underneath an overpass by a ditch. Guilty Girl believes that she is irrevocably without worth. She floats from place to place, too dark and formless to even initiate suicide. Because she won’t take action to support her existence in this world, she is the neediest person possible.

So they make a great match!

This is about as far as I’ve gotten in planning. The characters and their curiously balanced relationship are what fascinate me, but I know it needs some plot to illustrate philosophical points. Maybe I’ll think up what philosophical points would manifest in a relationship like this. Yeah, that’d be a starting point for choosing plots.

 

2. Something about a girl named Millicent (nicknamed Cent) whose parents become unable to care for her (not necessarily orphaned). So she is raised by an embittered aunt (who shares her nameseake) and uncle with her hateful, rambunctious cousins. When I imagine the story, the strand of relationship between Cent and her like-named aunt is what receives the most illumination. Again, it’s relationships… Also, I want this story to be a sort of diorama of character dimensions. One example I had in mind is how her older boy cousin, who torments her throughout childhood, becomes an enobled war hero revered by outsiders. The other is the relationship with her aunt… They actively dislike each other, but at several key points in each other’s lives they only have each other. I have one scene clearly imagined near the end. Cent is more intellectual than the whole blue-collar family who raised her. She has done well in school and gets accepted to a college… Her aunt, despite the friction and misunderstanding within their relationship, knows that Cent will not be able to go unless she pays – and so she does. That’s a concept I want to express: the disharmony and unity within relationships, the attraction and division, tied to and tugging from. I remember back in junior high, location in classes was as integral to the formation of a relationship as kindred spiritship. I’ve become better friends with some people than others, because, well, they were physically present at drama club or in class or whatnot. And others were not. It really makes my brain slober with fascination to think of those contrasting parameters of relationship composition – positively transcending, spiritual and local, mundane.

So that’s what I would want to explore in this story. It’d also be a chronological story, watching people grow and develop through time. Another pattern I’ve noticed in my writing thanks to my meta-brain skills that neurologically multiply in young adulthood!

 

3. The Girl Who Didn’t Think. I *think* I wrote about this already. Already my main character and I are obviously differentiated.

 This would have to do with the process of realizing that you are a separate entity from the social flow. Abbreviated so’flo’. Abbrev.soflo.

 

There are so many Ben Gibbard lookalikes in Denton. I wanted to note that for a moment.

 

4. Any more ideas? Some inspection of aestheticism and Bohemia. Like that’s not vague enough. I find it interesting that I can arrive so nearly in appearance to alot of people around Denton, but I still don’t necessarily have common ground underneath. Well, besides the common ground I can find all humans standing on (not just literal dirt and San Augustine, but, you know, thoughts and emotions and things with which people are filled). Something about this generation.

Still vague.

 

This list begins a begging exploration that I’ve been ignoring for quite awhile.