Sharing Heartbreak

I think I'm being fed the story a step at a time. Yesterday I felt rudderless and decided to just move ahead and write until something came along. I busied myself with dialog and trying to establish personalities and a relationship.

Overnight I arrived at the obvious conclusion that the woman needed to have a problem. Hooray for me. I'm writing a short story with characters and I decided they should have problems of their own. It's a fricking breakthrough.

You know I'm just way off base on all of this. It should have been obvious that every character had to have a problem or two that they were dealing with in the midst of the story. I need to do some character drills. A tense scene where four people interact and they all have problems we don't know about until the end. Until then we just watch them and wonder why they do what they do.

I need to do some but make them short. I keep shoving more interim projects in between the ones that are already there. I may be wrong, but that might be counterproductive.

As I was saying yesterday I'd made it up to the point where he met a woman who fascinates him and even yesterday I was assuming she was going to be evil in some way. I mean, I started out with her as a serial killer, for crying out loud. Why do I always reach that high on the shelf? After that I considered maybe a ghost or alien or there was a time tunnel onboard the Amtrak train. Come on, we're lucky to find a working bathroom, so the idea of a time tunnel might be just a bit over the top.

So last night I banged my head against the pillows until I decided that maybe the woman had just had an abortion and that was her problem. Well I consider that a breakthrough for me and my tunnel vision. Time tunnel vision. Finally I had arrived at a more common human problem and one that would very definitely cause her to have big ethical and moral problems. Good deal.

So after Ben left for school I had to take his truck into Mike to check out some ABS and traction control warning lights that came on after he'd replaced the brakes and as I'm coming home I still flailing to have something else, more dramatic for the woman to have. Now remember I spent my entire life as a nurse. No matter what else I might tell you, for 40 years I was a nurse. It doesn't seem possible but it is.

I'm coming home and I think there's got to be more to this. Yes, abortions are very traumatic. I'm sure that's especially so later in life when you look back on things. I'm a man and so I've never had one, but I know what regrets are and I've seen the effects of such things. As I'm coming around the corners near Tempo lake it strikes me, what's the most widely destructive thing, in my narrow opinion, that can happen to a family that tears it to pieces. Loos of a child, SIDS, or something close to it.

No one to blame but with a single first child and all those hopes and plans in place. It's is inevitable that the couple blames each other and the poison begins. It's an unquenchable fire that burns until the relationship and both individuals are destroyed.

Given my pathological personality, I have contemplated that many times all the way to its end.

That's my direction.

More later,

(photo by Jay Mantri @ jaymantri.com)