Day 16 Assignments

[Christopher Carlson]

Christopher Carlson’s Profound Map Version 1

What I learned doing this assignment is the work is never complete, but rather a process.

TITLE: LITTLE ISLAND OF JOY
WRITTEN BY: Christopher Carlson

1. What is Your Profound Truth?

A. When true love beckons, do not fear it – embrace it

B. I would like the audience to feel that love — be it physical or spiritual — is enduring and rewarding, an experience a person ignores at their own peril

2. What is the Transformational Journey?

Old Ways: in the 19^th/early 20^th century society frowned on the notion that handicapped people could have any sexuality whatsoever; a blind and deaf character who has lived her under the close supervision of her family and teachers, conforming to strict expectations of what is considered acceptable behavior

Journey: Helen meets Peter, a hearing and sighted man who falls in love with her, introducing her to physical intimacy, then asking her to marry him, a secret yearning all of Helen’s life

New Ways: A character who is willing to rebel against societal prohibitions and fulfill her yearning to express her sexuality without feelings of guilt; by doing so, she resets her relationships with those people closest to her – her mother Kate and teacher Annie Sullivan Macy — who were keeping her in check; a character who emerges with a stronger sense of self and becomes a more realized human being

Transformational Logline:
1. Transformable Character with an issue…
2. …takes a journey that challenges them deeply…
3. ..and concludes with the transformation.

Transformational Logline:

After a deaf and blind woman falls in love with a hearing and sighted young man, she defies the expectations of her family and society by conspiring with her lover and fulfill her yearning to passionately love another human being

3. Who are Your Lead Characters?

Change Agent (the one causing the change): Peter Fagan

Transformable Character(s) (the one who makes the change): Helen Keller

Betraying Character (if you have one): Peter Fagan

Oppression: The 19^th/early 20^th century prohibition against handicapped people engaging in any sexuality, reinforced by those people closest to Helen – her mother Kate and Teacher (Annie Sullivan Macy)

4. How Do You Connect With Your Audience in the Beginning of the Movie?

A. Relatability – They Are Us!

Helen excluded from participating in the sensuous, sexual world that others around her are engaged with; at some point in our lives – likely adolescence at least — we’ve all felt on the outside looking in, i.e., that physical relationships are for others, not us; when Hollywood filmmakers criticize Helen’s lack of ‘adventure and romance’ in her life, we’ve all felt the pain when others were critical of our lives and/or our accomplishments

B. Intrigue

Learn how a blind and deaf woman communicates and experiences the world

C. Empathy

Feeling for Helen because she’s excluded from profound and significant aspects of human life, namely, a physical relationship with another human being because of her handicaps

D. Likability

We see that Helen has tremendous natural energy; she offers care and compassion to Teacher when she’s having problems in her marriage, and also when she’s diagnosed with tuberculosis; also, Helen has a natural beauty.

5. What is the Gradient of the Change?

What steps do the Transformational Characters go through as they are changing?

Gradient 1. The Emotional Gradient

A. The “Forced Change” Emotional Gradient

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

B. The “Desired Change” Emotional Gradient, Incorporating Action Gradient

Excitement, Doubt, Hope, Discouragement, Courage, Triumph…or Loss.

Excitement:

Helen travels to Hollywood to participate in a movie being made about her life

Doubt:

Helen meets Peter, who exhibits great deference toward her which is exactly what she hates; when he expresses affection for her, Helen defaults to the Old Ways, feeling that physical expression is not something she should participate in

Hope:

Helen, letting go, welcomes Peter’s advances

Discouragement:

The people closes to Helen – her mother Kate and Teacher – denigrate Peter’s character and reject him

Courage:

Helen conspires with Peter to continue their relationship in secret and to plan elopement

Triumph … or Loss:

Helen acts as a fully liberated woman and embraces the experience of loving another, despite being betrayed by Peter; in effect, Triumph and Loss

Gradient 2. The Action Gradient

Setup: (see above)
Journey:
Payoff

Gradient 3. The Challenge / Weakness Gradient

Challenge: Hollywood director and producer challenge Helen’s sense of self by wanting to add romance and adventure to her story
Weakness: Helen’s utter lack of experience in those domains

Next Challenge: Peter expresses his feelings for Helen
Next Weakness: This touches her greatest yearning, at the same time accessing her internal voice forbidding physical intimacy

Next Challenge: Being in her first physical relationship
Next Weakness: No experience in the realm of sexual intimacy

Next Challenge: Helen compelled to lie in order to protect and defend her lover
Next Weakness: self-doubt

Next Challenge: mother Kate exiles Peter from the Wrentham house, never to return
Next Weakness: impossible choice

Next Challenge: against all odds, Helen plans elopement
Next Weakness: no support

6. What is the Transformational Structure of Your Story?

Mini-Movie 1 ­ Status Quo and Call to Adventure

Helen, blind and deaf, is living with Teacher (Annie Sullivan Macy, her companion of 25 years) and Teacher’s husband John Macy in their rural home in Wrentham, Massachusetts. Establish that she is unmarried and without a physical partner; establish also that Teacher’s marriage with John is troubled. Helen and Teacher travel to Hollywood where a movie is being made about her life. The director and producer want to inject ‘romance and adventure’ into the bio-pic, a reminder that Helen has lived a protected life; establish the societal taboos prohibiting handicapped people from leading sexual lives. Upon return home, Teacher and John separate.

Call to Adventure: Helen meets Peter, the young man who reveres her.

Mini-Movie 2 ­ Locked Into Conflict

Peter, in his post as secretary, travels with Teacher and Helen to New York City where Helen delivers fiery anti-war speeches to large audiences. Helen and Peter, via a series of encounters, gradually develop feelings for each other, he respecting her, always deferential, she trying to encourage him in his career. Teacher is critical of Peter’s character and behavior. Teacher, Helen and Peter return to Wrentham because Teacher has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Locked Into Conflict

Mini-Movie 3 — Hero Tries to Solve Problem ­ But Fails.

Kate, Helen’s mother, comes to Wrentham to assist her daughter while Teacher is sick. Helen does her best to keep Peter at a polite distance, fearing that physical engagement is something beyond her, but also afraid of defying Teacher. Helen now faces challenges from both Teacher and Kate, who is also suspicious of Peter’s character and intentions. Helen defends Peter, but her attempt to change people’s minds is a failure.

Turning point: Standard Ways Fail

Mini-Movie 4 ­ Hero Forms a Plan

Traveling by bicycle and canoe, Helen takes Peter to her island retreat where they make love for the first time. Peter asks if they can keep their relationship secret from Teacher and Kate until they can get to know him better and accept his presence. Helen agrees. Teacher departs for a sanitarium hundreds of miles away.

Plan backfires: Helen commits to secrecy and lying

MID-POINT: Helen and Peter have begun their sexual relationship

Mini-Movie 5 ­ Hero Retreats & Antagonist Wins

Kate persists in her hostile feelings toward Peter. Peter asks Helen to marry him. She accepts. Helen feels compelled to lie to her mother in order to shield and protect her relationship. When their engagement becomes a news story in the Boston papers, both Helen and Peter deny that it’s true.

The decision to change: Helen tells Peter that she can’t marry him until she tells Teacher and Kate the truth about their relationship

Mini-Movie 6 ­ Hero’s Bigger, Better Plan!

Kate orders Peter to leave the house, forbidding him from ever seeing her daughter again. He leaves, unbeknownst to Helen. Kate demands that Helen issue a public statement denying that she’s engaged, which she does. In secret, Helen conspires with Peter to elope while she and Kate make a journey by ship and train to Alabama. At the last moment Kate discovers the plan and makes alternate travel plans, defeating Helen’s elaborate scheme.

Turning point: the ultimate failure – the secret elopement plan foiled

Mini-Movie 7 ­ Crisis & Climax

While Helen and Kate are at the family home in Alabama, Peter secretly makes contact with Helen via the kind assistance of a black woman who knew Helen when they played together as young girls. Helen and Peter make their 2^nd elopement plan, which involves escaping the house in the middle of the night. The family aborts the plan at the barrel of a shotgun, terrifying Helen. The next day, Helen defies her mother’s wishes, informing her that she and Peter are going to have a life together. The lovers secretly plan a 3^rd elopement.

Turning point: apparent victory

Mini-Movie 8 ­ New Status Quo

Unbeknownst to Helen, Kate confronts Peter and explains all the reasons why his relationship with her daughter can never work, which throws him into a state of doubt. Per their plan, Peter returns during the night and sees Helen waiting with her suitcase on the porch. At the last moment, he silently departs – BETRAYAL! When Helen and Teacher reunite in Wrentham, Helen expresses happiness that she had the relationship with Peter, attributing its failure not to Peter but to the circumstances. Helen and Teacher become a huge success on the Vaudeville circuit, Helen radiating and articulating the power of love as the key to her happiness.

Turning Point: new status quo.

7. How are the “Old Ways” Challenged?

What beliefs are challenged that cause a main character to shift their perspective…and make the change?

A. Challenge through Questioning

The filmmakers ask Helen to falsify her story by adding ‘romance and adventure’ to the movie about her life — Teacher challenges the filmmakers’ intention, but is outvoted by Helen, who is trying to get along with everyone

Helen challenges Teacher’s and Kate’s indictments of Peter’s character, but fails to convince them, which ultimately steers her into secrecy

Helen challenges society’s unrealistic and false perception of her as a goddess on a pedestal

Peter challenges Helen’s own assumptions that a physical relationship isn’t possible by declaring his feelings for her

Kate demands that Helen issue a public denial of her publicized engagement to Peter – Helen complies, intimidated by her mother – FAILURE TO CHALLENGE

Kate challenges Helen by forcing her to do things against her will, entrenching the old ways, but leading Helen to devise strategies to circumvent her mother’s will

Helen challenges the Old Ways by truthfully answering a reporter’s question as to whether she had contributed money to the NAACP and decrying the history of slavery, stating clearly that she doesn’t accept treating black people as 2^nd class citizens

Helen challenges her family’s behavior by expressing shock and dismay when they abort her plan to elope with Peter, particularly expressing anger that her brother-in-law used a shotgun to drive off Peter

Peter challenges Kate’s belief that in world culture Helen represents a Goddess of Perfection and indicts the notion of Helen being on a pedestal, arguing that’s exactly the thing she doesn’t want

B. Challenge by Counterexample

The filmmakers add ‘romance and adventure’ scenes into the filming supposedly depicting Helen – instead of being appalled, she’s intrigued

Helen experiences the breakup of Teacher and John Macy’s marriage, showing her the difficulty of maintaining relationships but also inspiring her to try

During anti-war speeches in New York, Helen folds her arms in non-compliance, demonstrating how the workers can foil the President’s plan to bring the United States into WW1

Peter challenges the prevailing societal belief that handicapped people shouldn’t be in sexual relationships through his courtship of Helen

Peter challenges Helen’s own assumption that a physical relationship isn’t permitted by displaying his love for her

In Alabama, Helen challenges the Old Ways by reinforcing her friendship with a black woman, enlisting her aid when communicating with Peter

Helen, despite her challenging loss in the realm of love, affirms her experience with Peter and her right to love another person, despite being what others call ‘handicapped’

C. Challenge by “Should Work, But Doesn’t”

Helen challenges John Macy, presenting all the arguments why he should return to his marriage with Teacher – the Old Ways – but John has already let go of the Old Ways, his marriage; Helen, on the other hand, isn’t yet ready to accept this change – she’s expecting to impact John’s decision, and is surprised and disappointed when her challenge doesn’t appear to have any effect

Helen apologizes for the role she supposedly played in the breakup of Teacher’s marriage, impacting their marriage negatively because of her dependency on Teacher, which reinforces her attachment to the Old Ways, i.e., that a relationship isn’t appropriate for her as a handicapped person

In Helen’s first extended conversation with Peter, she undermines her beauty, “I’m doing my best to pretend that I’m beautiful,” which she expects will steer him away from her; she challenges the notion that she’s ‘beautiful’ but her modest denial doesn’t have the intended effect on Peter; instead, he’s even more intrigued, and insists that she possesses inner and outer beauty

When Helen reveals that she hates the sound of her voice, she’s repeating the old indictment of her voice – the Old Ways – which she learned from things Teacher has said to her through twenty years of trying to make it better; Peter challenges Helen’s assertion and questions Teacher’s critique

Kate and Teacher indict Peter’s character, hopefully driving away Helen’s suitor and reinforcing the Old Ways

Helen’s Alabama family do everything they can to reinforce Helen’s traditional role

D. Challenge through Living Metaphor

When we first meet Helen she’s swimming underwater, where the world is silent for all human beings — this underwater realm is a metaphor for Helen’s silent world. The challenge will arise when she surfaces and we see that her ankle is tied to the shore; ‘under the water’ is a living metaphor of Helen prospering in the world, being on land is a metaphor symbolizing all her difficulties

When Helen arrives at the Los Angeles railroad station, she’s surrounded by press and photographers, representing the Old Ways, i.e., the heroic portrait society has painted of her. This living metaphor represents her fame and notoriety in the culture.

On a Hollywood set, Helen and Teacher watch a hellacious monster battling a beautiful young woman for a baby cast aside in ‘the Cave of Father Time,’ the baby symbolizing Helen’s soul. This living metaphor sequence represents the Old Ways of thinking, i.e., that Helen’s fate is linked to being saved by other, and is not dependent on her own actions.

Helen is attracted to the simple heartfelt relationship between two songbirds, a counterexample to all the human trials and tribulations of human relationships. Aided by Teacher’s report of the birds’ encounter, Helen can experience the mating songbirds as a living metaphor representing the wonder and simplicity of God’s creatures being with a mate. As Helen reports, she can “feel the love.” In her mind, if these two birds can find their love, then why not me, too? Of course this is unstated.

In New York, Helen speaks from a dais to an auditorium of union workers. The dais acts as a living metaphor representing her popularity and ability to reach out to and influence the wider culture. This heroic pose harkens back to the Old Ways. When Peter tries to add his voice at the dais, Teacher challenges his right to do so – that ‘right to speak’ represents Helen’s world, the Old Ways, not his, and he doesn’t have the right to participate in it.

8. How are You Presenting Insights through Profound Moments?

A. Action delivers insight

New Ways/Insight: a handicapped woman is absolutely capable of and has he right to physically love another human being

Action: Helen accepts Peter’s declaration that he cares for her and invites his kiss, it being the first one in her life, and does so knowing that the woman closet to her, Teacher (her companions of twenty years plus) objects to his continued presence in their life and has asked him to leave.

New Ways/Insight: Affirmation of knowledge over ignorance/live in the present, not the past

Action: During filming, the young woman representing Knowledge defeats the giant representing Ignorance, and saves the baby from the Dark Cave of Father Time – Helen affirms the action while Teacher views it as simply ridiculous

New Ways/Insight: Affirmation of physicality; loving another is a positive human expression

Action: During filming, a scantily clad actress representing Helen lustily kisses brave Ulysses as he reaches the shore from his storm-ravaged boat – Helen affirms the action while Teacher views it as false and ridiculous

New Ways/Insight: A blind/deaf person is capable of embarking upon adventure

Action: while Teacher frets and worries, Helen rides in an open bi-plane and experiences all the flying stunts with joy

New Ways/Insight: A blind/deaf person can fully participate in her society

Action: Helen addresses a standing-room only crowd at a New York anti-war rally, exhorting people to radical action

New Ways/Insight: A hearing and sighted man can be attracted to a blind/deaf person

Action: Peter demonstrates his seriousness about his feelings for Helen by learning to finger-spell, her primary means of communication

B. Conflict delivers insight

Insight: affirmation of knowledge over ignorance

Conflict: Literal hand-to-hand combat when a woman representing Knowledge wrestles a Giant representing ignorance for a baby, representing Helen, in the Cave of Father Time, over the future of Helen’s soul

Insight: It’s important to tell the truth when depicting a person’s life

Conflict: Teacher argues with the filmmakers over their right to add ‘adventure and romance’ when making a movie about Helen’s life

Insight: Loving another person means also accepting their frailties

Conflict: Helen confronts John Macy re his decision to leave Teacher and their marriage

Insight: Live in the present, not the past

Conflict: Kate confronts Peter re whether he should uphold how society views Helen – on a pedestal, representative of the Old Ways – and not marry her, or whether he can bring her into the New Ways – a relationship and marriage

Insight: Loving another is a positive human expression, which a blind/deaf person can fully participate in

Conflict: Helen in conflict with herself after Peter declares his feelings for her, i.e., whether to accept his advances, or not

C. Irony delivers insight

Action: In opening scene, Helen is swimming skillfully in a lake

Irony: Little do we know that she’s blind and deaf and that one ankle is tied to a boat anchored on the shore

Action: The filmmakers express a need to add ‘adventure and romance’ to Helen’s story

Irony: Helen is one of the most unique individuals on the planet, the first blind/deaf person to graduate from a university – an interior adventure, an ‘adventure’ of the mind; Helen is probably one of the most ‘romantic’ individuals they will ever meet, someone truly in love with the world and all its creatures, and also a person who has sustained a romance for 25 years, albeit a Platonic ‘romance of the mind,’ with Teacher

Action: Helen pleads with John Macy to return to Teacher and their marriage

Irony: In actuality, Helen is probably the primary cause of the dissolution of the marriage because she requires so much of Teacher’s attention, leaving John Macy feeling neglected and less important than Helen in the long run

Action: Helen and Teacher lament the end of Teacher’s marriage to John Macy

Irony: In this same moment, two songbirds summon each other from porch to apple tree in a display of simple love in nature’s kingdom

Action: Helen brings Peter to her special island and they make love for the first time

Irony: Helen waits until Teacher has left Wrentham before moving forward with Peter

Action: Kate comes to Wrentham to watch over Helen while Teacher’s away

Irony: During the period of time when Helen is under the watch of her mother, Helen engages in the very thing – being sexual with another person – that would be most objectionable to her

9. What are the Most Profound Lines of the Movie?

Pattern A: Height of the Emotion

When Helen trembles with excitement as Teacher narrates the convergence of the songbirds.

Emotion/Meaning: the love expressed by the birds is something beyond what our human characters are capable of expressing

Dialogue: In progress

When Peter expresses how much he cares for Helen.

Emotion/meaning: Peter’s brave expression of his feelings for Helen allows her to express her feelings, and for the first time in her life

Dialogue: Helen, I admit I found some comfort in your words. They felt like a bright sun to me.”

When Helen expresses how she experiences the world, concluding with her passionate embrace of Peter

Emotion/meaning: Helen describes her passionate relationship with all things of the earth.

Dialogue: Helen, “I couldn’t live without the feel of another person’s hand in mine. It’s something I never forget.”

When Helen’s family foils her plan to elope with Peter, seeing Helen’s utter agony and helplessness

Emotion/meaning: This beat will provide a visceral understanding of Helen’s limitations, as her family maintains their power and authority over Helen’s life

Dialogue: Helen simply calling out his name while trying to catch up with him, but instead groping alone and failing to do so, “Peter, Peter.”

Helen waking up on the porch, alone, abandoned by Peter.

Emotion/meaning: Helen did everything in her power to enter the realm of the New Ways, but those around her prevailed. The betrayal by her Transforming Agent is the most painful part of it.

Dialogue: Helen’s ultimate reaction to this abandonment is silence. There will be time later for her to express herself on this point, but I believe it’s best not to do it in the moment.

Pattern B: Build Meaning Over Multiple Scenes

Line: the reference to the far-off distant land as a destination

1^st time: Peter, “Ian is asking where we’re going.” Helen, “To a far-off distant land.”

– Helen says it jokingly to Peter when he asks her where they’re going, though it is also a literal place representing the small island on the lake near their home; for Helen, it embodies a special and sacred place

2^nd time: Peter, “May I take you to that far-off distant land?” Helen, “Yes, please, Peter – take me there.”

– This time the line isn’t literally referring to the island, but is a metaphor for their private time together, far from prying eyes

3^rd time, when Kate asks Helen where she intends to go after elopement with Peter, she responds, “It’s a far-off distant land that’s not on any map.”

Line: “if Teacher were with me …”

1^st time: Helen assures Peter that if Teacher were with them, she would acts as a go-between and convince Kate that their relationship was the right thing for Helen

2^nd time: Helen uses the phrase to chastise her mother, stating that if Teacher were there, she would support Helen and Peter’s relationship

3^rd time: Peter uses the phrase to counter Kate’s argument against their marriage, which Kate absolutely refutes

4^th time: Helen says the phrase directly to Teacher, “If you had been with me, it would have been different,” to which Teacher replies, “So you say” – this response is certainly not the whole-hearted affirmation Helen may have expected, but rather an ambivalent replay, which likely suggests to the audience that nothing would have been different

line: Helen, “Life is a daring adventure, or nothing at all.”

1^st time: one of the filmmakers quotes it to Helen and Teacher, as a pretext to add ‘adventure and romance’ to their Hollywood film

2^nd time: Peter uses it with Helen to bolster his own trepidation re the plan to hide on the boat and escape with Helen at one of the ports along the way

3^rd time: Helen says it to Teacher when she’s explaining why she’s not angry with Peter’s decision not to marry her

10. How Do You Leave Us With A Profound Ending?

A. Deliver The Profound Truth Profoundly

Profound Truth: When true love beckons, do not fear it – embrace it

Against absolute opposition from her mother Kate and family in Alabama, Helen commits to her love for Peter. She secretly plots the elopement three times, doing her everything in her power to make it happen.

B. Lead Characters Ending Represents The Change

Helen waits on the porch with her packed suitcase, demonstrating her absolute embrace of the New Ways. Unfortunately, Peter arrives on scene but betrays his commitment and fails to take Helen with him. When it’s clear he won’t be taking her to that ‘far-off distant place,’ she maintains her poise.

C. Payoff Key Setups

Will Helen ever experience true ‘romance and adventure’ in her life, or is that somehow out of bounds and unreachable because of her disability?; will Helen be able to overcome Teacher’s and Kate’s objections to Peter?; can a blind and deaf person navigate a series of complicated and challenging situations purely on her own gumption and spontaneity?

D. Surprising, But Inevitable

The conclusion is put in doubt when Kate makes her personal and secret appeal to Peter to not marry her daughter, for a whole slew of reasons, all of which represent the last desperate cries of the Old Ways, and a negation of the ending that Helen and the audience desire. The audience won’t know the final impact on Peter. I think they will expect Peter to follow through on his commitment to Helen, but in this case, Peter is both the Change Agent and the Betrayal Character. I believe the audience will be shocked and disappointed by his decision, but they will also understand it. The unknown element then is how will Helen respond? Thankfully, Helen is a changed person from the Helen we meet at the outset, a character who absolutely embraces the New Ways.

E. Leave Us with a Profound Parting Image/Line

The profound line from Helen to Teacher, “Of course I can forgive him. The fault wasn’t in the loving, but in the circumstances.”

The profound parting image will be Helen and Teacher together on the Vaudeville stage, representing not the physical intimacy shared by Helen and Peter, but embodying their spiritual, enduring love affair of many years. This image lets us see that Helen is still loved, and lets her express directly to the audience her belief in the power of love to transform and sustain human lives.

As the parting line, Helen displays her humor and resilience when an audience member asks if she would ever consider marriage – her reply, “My goodness, yes – are you proposing?”

[Heather Hood]

Hi Christopher,

I wanted to give you some feedback and tell you how impressed I am with your screenplay. You must have done a lot of research into the life of Helen Keller in order to get into this kind of depth.

I am visually impaired so your topic really interested me. I love how you represented her inclusion into the world and gave her a ‘voice’ for the disabled. Thank you for opening peoples eyes to what we can do when we can’t see or hear. I hope someone is brave enough to produce this.

The reaction of the teacher and mother are fairly typical for the period. It’s hard to say much more without reading the script. You can understand their over the top uber mothering of Helen when the boyfriend/suitor comes on scene – they’ve been taking care of her for so long. I wonder, is there a financial consideration for them involved with Helen’s care? Might that be an issue they would be worried about? If there is, you might have to work that in.

Remember women’s role in society in general at this point in time. A normal woman did not have much freedom, never mind a disabled one, so make sure you don’t overstep any boundaries, especially if her family is from Alabama! I’m from Canada, and I know things were different in the States – in many ways, where Helen was from things were much stricter. You’ve chosen a time period when so much was changing for women, a lot of men were over reacting in various ways.

Best of luck with this! Looking forward to seeing it on the screen.

Heather

[Julia Keefer]

TITLE: Seismic Seesaw, the third novel of a rock trilogy with screen adaptations
WRITTEN BY: Jake and the Magma Monsters aka Julia Keefer
What
is Your Profound Truth? A. High concept: Confronting climate catastrophes to
save the earth requires sacrifice, ingenuity, and collaboration but we
must be compassionate about recalcitrant humans and not make this another
dystopian world order where only some survive. Greed prompts the leaders
to hide fossil fuel investments and the collateral human damage to stay on
top.

B. Ibrahim’s truth is that he isn’t what he appears to be and his need for power and money force him to compromise his values to be part of the secret Green Garchs, an ecoterrorist organization that twists the honest values of Good Greenies.

C. The personal truth is Jake’s transformation from a superficial, narcissistic,
fun-loving fitness instructor to a caring health professional and then
someone who can confront death with courage and compassion. His narrative
embraces more dramatic events from victims and villains. But I must link
both so that Jake’s ADHD breaks through to discover Ibrahim’s plot and the kids’ scientific research on the boats.

What
is the Transformational Journey? Jake’s transformation is simple, but I
will clarify the high concept journey.

Old Ways: Fossil fuelies and frackers have been eliminated in earlier
novels but Ibrahim, who professes to be Green, secretly invests in fossil
fuels. He likes power but wants to save the earth for his progeny. He practices
Islam but has tweaked its dogma so that he can participate in the secret
one percent plot to develop and unleash the COVID virus and its variants,
a pandemic that occasionally goes awry. Research from this venture is used
to develop cures for neurodegenerative diseases related to scarring. It
works both ways like the COVID vaccines. The powers-that-are-hidden fight
about the fine points. Some wanted to get rid of the old, weak, fat, and
hyper. Then there is collateral damage. Then the argument goes that old
people will die at the same age, but a healthy old age is cheaper for
everyone. As the novel erupts, Ibrahim becomes less sure of his will and
their plans and humbler in the face of fate. He can’t seem to bargain with
Allah. But Ibrahim also hires BB, the serial killer/rapist/arsonist from
the first novel who was never convicted of his crimes because he didn’t
confess, to be his agent to squirt sanitizer filled with condensed COVID
and set fires to outdoor restaurants that are near rent-stabilized NYC
tenements where seniors live. In each major city, agents are supposed to get
rid of as many seniors and “unproductive” people as possible since they
are a drain on the earth’s resources. Jake, Litonya, and the kids
eventually discover and bust this high concept plot. <div>

Who
are Your Lead Characters? Jake, Litonya, Ibrahim, BB, the serial killer/rapist/murderer from the first novel who never confessed.

Change Agent (the one causing the change): Jake’s parents and his wife
Litonya change him, but Ibrahim and BB via the pandemic and their plot
cause him to focus (since he has ADHD), to figure out what it going on, and
to tell Litonya who was collaborating with them. He doesn’t want to commit
a crime. But Litonya kills Ibrahim and Jake’s calling the cops make BB
jump overboard after being confronted with proof.

Transformable Character(s) (the one who makes the change): About five
characters change but Jake is the protagonist since he narrates the novel
in tandem competitive sequence with the Magma Monsters.

Betraying Character (if you have one): At times, Ibrahim and BB betray
since they are so good at lying. I must get better at lying to create page-turning
suspense and cliffhangers.
Oppression: Aside from the evil deeds of the villains, the oppression is
climate catastrophe, a superhuman force articulated by the three rocks
that narrate the trilogy. </div><div>

How Do
You Connect With Your Audience in the Beginning of the Movie? A.
Relatability – They Are Us! A racially diverse and mixed group across ages
and cultures confronts the human challenges of loss, fear, sickness, death
etc. while trying to love other humans and nature.

B. Intrigue: I must ask more questions even though I know the answers, I
must suspend action for cliffhangers, and I must mess up things in the fog
of humanity in novel ways to worry the audience
C. Empathy: I have enough death, suffering, disease, and death to
stimulate empathy even with flawed or villainous characters but sometimes
I don’t describe scenes with the right dose of emotion to elicit same in
the reader.
D. Likability: Jake must address the reader in his alternating chapters,
giving them fitness advice, rhyming, charming them, and finding fun ways
to deal with stressors. Ibrahim is always polite, BB clean and
conscientious and considerate even though or because he is a killer, Litonya
is the role model for communing with nature in her strength and
brilliance, and other characters have qualities, talents, and education
that make them interesting.
What
is the Gradient of the Change? Because these are first novels, then screen
adaptations, I must remember to describe gradients in his chapter, the way
movie stars analyze the through line of a script so their transformations
are seamless even when shot out of sequence.

What steps do the Transformational Characters go through as they are changing?

Gradient 1. The Emotional Gradient

A. The “Forced Change” Emotional Gradient Because there is a lot of death, natural and forced, Kubler-Ross’ stages of mourning are fine but that there is not always time for denial except before receiving a diagnosis like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Forced change occurs with flooding, fires, aging, and the high concept plot with the virus.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

B. The “Desired Change” Emotional Gradient
Jake sincerely wants to be a caring health professional. He is excited about EMS and doing house calls with mom the doc, but is challenged with the deaths of loved ones and is own illness.

Excitement, Doubt, Hope, Discouragement, Courage, Triumph…or Loss. Loss is more poignant after the height of triumph because people get numb after too much disaster.

Gradient 2. The Action Gradient: My weakness is that I am not good at action movies or describing violence, wars, or other huge high concept actions. Originally a static novel, I am trying to visualize all the actions of characters and nature without words or explanations to get an aerial view to develop the best slug lines for an eventual movie adaptation.

Setup: Everyone is locked down at the Summit, in Manhattan as homeless seniors, or on Huguenot Street as characters we know from the first novels.

Journey: They sail up and down the Hudson from the Manhattan wharves and boat basins or the Summit to the Palisades dock near Litonya’s seismology post in the Palisades to Kingston where they can get to New Paltz. They bike along the rail trail and beside the Wallkill River. In the third novel, there aren’t as many scenes in Mohonk and Minnewaska as there were in the first novel, a climbing thriller. There are some scenes on the streets of Manhattan with soup lines, outdoor restaurants, and protests, but nothing like the tourism of the second novel.

Payoff: Their actions are amplified around the world digitally but their real world includes gyms, labs, restaurants, shows etc. on their ecoboats. Over a long period from 2020 to 2060 the northeast changes as it becomes inundated with water though basic places stay the same. I must improve my visual/spatial descriptive abilities but I don’t want to be all over the place. I hate wars and non-stop violence in movies and am drawn to the pandemic because it made the streets so clean and quiet and deadly. I spend a lot of time in nursing homes and treating PD, ALS, Alz in a massage/PT house call practice and am intrigued by the activity inside the body as cells are clogged, neurons die, dendrites get tangled up etc. A creative way to film it would be to blow the microscopic world up the way they do on newsreels making COVID look like a spiked red and yellow cactus. The rocks also have an internal invisible world under the surface that erupts.

Gradient 3. The Challenge / Weakness Gradient

A: The rocks are challenged by erosion, excessive weathering from rain, ice, winds etc. and they gradually turn to gravel. They cannot control their landslides or earthquakes.

B. Ibrahim’s challenges are that despite his money and power and secret connections, fate surprises them and creates disasters or collateral damage that hurt him. He lashes out at the world, creating evil, although he started my trilogy as a proud pillar of the community.

C. Jake is challenged by the lockdown when he must go virtual, by his need to be essential in EMS, by the deaths of friends and family, and then by his own disabling Parkinson’s. He finds many ways of coping that may seem like he is bouncing over life but when the world is drowning you can survive on the tip of the iceberg. He loves with generosity, humor, and compassion, plays like a kid, teaches kickboxing as fitness fun and self defense but rarely gets into fights. When he does, it is dramatic. 1. What is the Emotional Gradient you’ll use? In my last seismic seesaw novel of my trilogy, Jake was originally a Candide-like optimist in contrast with the Magma Monsters’ ruthless rush to death and destruction, but one note character equals satire, not drama, so I am giving him more dimensions since I have had so much trouble with this project. But he oscillates between desired and forced change because he wants to spring back to the exclamation marks of the wellness/fitness lifestyle!!!

2. For each emotion of that gradient, tell us the following:

A. Emotion: Excitement

B. Action: Jake develops more medical training and dimensions to his fitness career because he wants people to listen to him as they confront more serious health challenges.

C. Challenge / Weakness: Jake’s weaknesses are narcissism and inability to listen to others patiently and carefully in part because of ADHD etc. He wants to jump from excitement to triumph without the stages of doubt, hope, discouragement, although he has courage. He is the opposite of Hal’s methodical approach to the gradients of emotion. He sings and screams and falls off the ladder!!! Then he picks himself up, smiles, and winks.

A. Emotion: Depression about COVID diseases and deaths

B. Action: Jake successfully developed COVID therapy for his mom but failed performing CPR on his buddy’s parents and then his buddy Rodney died despite his efforts.

C. Challenge / Weakness: Jake cannot stand the depression of mourning so he marries his buddy’s widow and has the baby he always wanted, an action that came in part out of weakness and circled back to excitement, his modus operandi. To survive, he must keep forgetting and forgiving and forging ahead before he is dead, something he won’t let himself imagine.

A. Emotion: Denial

B. Action: Although Jake could accept his dad’s ALS and his mom’s Alzheimer’s because he could care for them and they are older, he denies his Parkinson’s when he first gets symptoms of tremors, vertigo, and balance issues, making excuses, but also accelerating his fitness, something that exhausts him and gives him more symptoms as if he were spinning tires in a ditch.

C. Challenge / Weakness: He cannot stand going through the Kubler-Ross gradients but he learns to sublimate rage into kickbox, albeit in a chair or the pool, bargains with the Magma Monsters that he can now access via his Native American wife Litonya Lenape, and exults in the achievements of his kids, but is still frustrated. The Levodopa PD drug temporarily brings him back to his excitement phase with his renewed sexual potency (it can activate men in their eighties but he is only in his seventies). However, the symptoms get worse, the drug less potent, and he is faced with depression. At the end he must get help from his Sufi friend Orhan to release his energy into the cosmos. The main thing is not to get glued to depression like a roach in a roach motel. At the end of the trilogy, he, Litonya, and others of their generation die in 2060 but this loss is a legacy for their offspring who experience some degree of triumph in their battle against climate crises and painful, endless geriatric diseases.

What is the Transformational Structure of Your Story? Three threads A for the Palisades Rocks, MM, B for Ibrahim’s High concept linked to Litonya and BB, and C for Jake’s personal and professional transformation.

Mini-Movie 1 ­ Status Quo and Call to Adventure and Inciting Incidents

A. MM’s status quo is locked into the Palisades since the Jurassic period, stale, stalwart, and steady. Call to Adventure occurs with the landslide into the Hudson when Litonya is walking around, a foreshadowing of their finale and a symbol for these Magma Monsters to be the tandem competitive narrators in alternating chapters. Question: What will happen to the shorelines of the Hudson and everything around New York as the twenty first century progresses?

B. Ibrahim considers himself a religious Muslim, family man, educated professional dedicated to renewable energy and infrastructure via his EvergreenEnergy Company. His persona is perfected with politeness. His Call to Adventure occurs with Pandemic 2020 when he invests more in Pfizer and Moderna stock, joins a secret one percent organization, and gets the vaccine in May. He shows his injection spot to Litonya when he picks her up in his electric chair. What does this mean? If he is in a trial, how does he know it isn’t a placebo?

C. Jake’s status quo is that of a successful Manhattan fitness star. His Call to Adventure is the Pandemic that closes the health clubs and makes training impossible, so he is shown turning a church/art center into his virtual fitness temple 90 minutes upstate in New Paltz on Huguenot Street, where the first novel took place.

Mini-Movie 2 ­ Locked Into Conflict Plot Point One?

A. Rocks tease the reader with a suspense novel structure in their odd number chapters. They tell the reader secrets Jake doesn’t know and disagree with his perspectives. They are omniscient for aerial views and inside cells, but I don’t know how much omnipotence they have or how they submit to fate, Mother Nuclear, Father Sky etc. Finding the right narrative voice for these “we” narrators remains a challenge. I am not sure what their primary objective is other than to express themselves and tell their stories.

B. Ibrahim suspects that “bad people” have deliberately engineered and released the virus to kill the old, weak, sick, fat, hyper etc. and to change the global power structure to divest oily-garchs. He keeps this secret but Litonya guesses. He is locked in despite his more or less ethical past. They must save the planet.

C. Jake’s first conflict, as such, is with his Mom, a doctor who gets COVID. As a change agent, she guides him towards patience and listening on house calls, new techniques of wellness, and the beginning of his EMS training to be more “essential.”

Mini-Movie 3 — Hero Tries to Solve Problem ­ But Fails. Crossing Threshold?

A. Rocks must want the opposite outcome of Ibrahim and Jake so there are three separate throughlines. Because Ibrahim must lie so much, he is not a direct narrator. Rocks must narrate all the scenes without Jake or ones where they want a perspective on Jake. But they must not be always on Ibrahim’s side in order to show the third point of view. I am not sure how this fails.

B. Ibrahim invests more in big Pharma and High Tech due to insider leaks, expands his EE Company, but is forced to work with Boat Bob, formerly a serial killer/rapist/arsonist in the first novel whose testosterone has waned enough to make him prioritize money over necrophiliac sex. Ibrahim enlists him for jobs he must do on the Upper East Side but when he sets the outdoor restaurant Italian Village on fire to burn a nearby rent stabilized tenement filled with old people, it backfires and FDNY, including BB’s son Joe, inspect and survey the area. However, the sanitizers filled with condensed COVID do work to infect and get rid of vulnerable people who are draining the economy. Besides COVID, they are doing research on other diseases to develop bioweapons, cures, and vaccines. He is running out of “Green” money so he gets some Saudi oil money, just this once. Their accountant, CS (Cheering Spear Chinese), finds out so he encourages BB to rig an antique car explosion timed to kill two remaining Feldmans living in the new Colonial as parasites and CS. However, BB’s son Joe dies, the big tragedy of his life. Since BB is a psychopath, Joe’s death is a painful, passing shadow that makes him hate humans more and vow to do anything to kill.

C. Jake does CPR on the Feldmans and they all die. Others would retreat into depression, but he impregnates his deceased buddy’s wife Litonya and works harder to make a home for all the kids upstate and in the Summit in Manhattan. When challenged, Jake tries to be positive like Candide with his ebullient energy and obnoxious rhymes.

Mini-Movie 4 ­ Hero Forms a Plan Digging into the Special World

A. MM, my Palisades rocks, goal is to puncture petty puny people plans driven by power and control and deluded by human imperfection because nature, Father Sky, Mother Nuclear, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes is a fate filled with surprise.

B. Ibrahim contributes to the superior plan with the sanitizers and a few water main breaks or contaminated air conditioners to give a Legionnaires differential diagnosis that New Yorkers handle better than fires. He keeps it secret from his wife Sandrine and triplets and Jake the nanny and fitness trainer and pays BB to do the dirty work. Like Al Qaeda and local and sustainable produce, separate cells around the world spread the virus and do what it takes to clean the air and water. Because NYC future is water, he supports his kids’ and Kisele’s desire to make ecoboats.

C. Jake’s plan remains better wellness and fitness in the face of disease and disaster and now, two new kids–Jesse from Litonya, and adopted Aanadi when Joe is killed in the fire. But he is getting older and his dad weaker with ALS, his mom a bit weaker.

Mini-Movie 5 ­ Hero Retreats & Antagonist Wins

Is this mid-point?

A. Floods sweep through the northeast due to rising sea levels, tropical storms, weak waterfronts, and oppressive humidity. The East River on the UES and the Wallkill River in New Paltz flood causing catastrophe damage. Water is stronger than rocks, water erodes rocks, and MM realize their lives are slowly ending as they morph from igneous to sedimentary and then get dissolved in rivers and oceans—but not yet. So they focus on the human disasters.

B. Despite Ibrahim’s power, his EE company, the ecoboats etc. the superstorm is a surprise and his condo collapses, killing Sandrine his wife and injuring Omar, his son. He is devastated. Like BB and MM, his pain erupts into rage that he unleashes by throwing things around, screaming with BB, and turning away from his religion especially because he became an infidel once he lost compassion. Use rosary beads to strangle someone? Soil the prayer rug? Drown the Koran in the river? Ibrahim’s pain makes him want to control the new research on neurodegenerative diseases.

C. Jake fights the flood on the Wallkill with boats, helps Orhan and Nikos escape from 16 6 Huguenot when the Town and Country condominium goes under. He saves their colonial stone house and his fitness church but brings parents on the boats. While he is dealing with water, his antagonist is neurodegenerative diseases. Jake massages his father as he dies of ALS, saying he is going to a better place. But his main concern is his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s and troubling symptoms he is getting. Since they all had COVID, he wonders if the scarring has led to these clusters of amyloid plaques and tau tangles. He is desperate for cures.

Mini-Movie 6 ­ Hero’s Bigger, Better Plan!

A. Despite High Tech, Big Pharma, and some fossil fuel divestment, the earth is changing in a way that is not good for humans and the characters who began the trilogy in 1998 are aging and dying. This is the biggest plan of the universe—constant change. Nature is bigger and better than humans.

B. Ibrahim’s Green Garchs are against cures for many neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and other diseases that prolong life in weak people, but his daughter Delphine is working in research, when she isn’t choreographing shows on the ecoboats, and dissolving plaque and enhancing blood brain drainage are her objectives. Kisele has taken over the EE company, married Coral and then are developing ingenious ways to power the world without fossil fuels to clean the air and water. Litonya wants to leave nature alone, but Ibrahim is making millions with the Green Garchs. Earthquakes are cropping up because the bedrock was destroyed for years by fracking. NY groundwater is getting contaminated. Kisele’s EE company is global, and they are concerned with water supplies affected by fracking and earthquakes, his mom’s legacy.

C. Jake’s mom is wandering around with Alzheimer’s and he is shaking with PD. Aanadi and Jesse care for them and are in geriatric health care. Jesse is a lab rat but he is a bit retarded like Steve’s Jesse but not schizo like mine. He might discover the cure in a lab. But if Ibrahim’s company buys these cures to stop their distribution, deliberately withholding them from people. Jake begs Ibrahim for the bigger, better drugs he knows he has. Ibrahim will not give Jake these drugs because it goes against the rules of his organization. But why can’t everyone get these drugs? Chapter 16 is Plot Point Two.

Mini-Movie 7 ­ Crisis & Climax I must remember to prolong and tease readers with the crisis before staging climaxes.

A. Earthquakes happen more frequently in part because of fracking. There are more landslides in the Palisades. Precious New York water is contaminated. Floods are rockier getting close to tsunamic levels.

B. When Jake finds out that BB is the serial killer from the first novel, the one who infected MC the tour guide in the second novel, and the one who killed so many people in the third novel, he is about to kill him when BB fights with one of his kids. Then he remembers the bar brawl, calls the police as they approach the shore, causing BB to jump overboard, dying the way he wanted—in the womb of water since his mother abandoned him as a baby. Before he dies, BB rats on Ibrahim, saying he was his hit man and that Ibrahim’s company has killed millions. Litonya finds a way to kill Ibrahim without getting caught the way she was when she killed her father by pushing him under a tree during the Sandy Storm and then spending 7 years in jail till she was released during the COVID pandemic. Maybe Ibrahim deliberately had her jail infected hoping she would survive and be released?

C. As Litonya is doing her last climb around 2060, there is a slight earthquake, she slips, Jake comes hobbling up from his chair by the river and a rockslide of Palisades igneous rocks kills them quickly and mercifully in old age, holding each other, better than the hospice. Their kids pick up their bodies in the ecoboats.

N.B. These deaths will need better visualization and description and may change.
Mini-Movie 8 ­ New Status Quo not a return to the Ordinary World nor a Resurrection

A. The last chapter is a medley for the three rocks—Sedimentary Shawangunk that narrates the first novel, Climb and Punishment, The Manhattan Prong of Marble, Schist, and Gneiss that narrate my second novel, Come to Magnificent Metamorphic Manhattan, and Igneous from the Palisades that narrate Seismic Seesaw with Jake. These three rocks describe the endless rock cycle. Life is a circle, infinite, even when periodic explosions and blasts seem to hint at apocalypse. There is always new life. Life is inorganic and organic. Rocks are essential and that is why I have studied geology to personify them.

B. With the deaths of Ibrahim and BB, the world order that unleashed the COVID virus is exposed and destroyed. They had bought and hid the cures for neurodegenerative diseases and now these are in the hands of the WHO, CDC, UNESCO, UN etc. for worldwide distribution.

C. Kisele and his tech colleagues hack into the Green Garchs computers that expose how they bought cures and hid them and unleashed viruses with the help of innocent animals like bats. Kisele, Coral, Delphine, Omar, Aanadi, and Jesse, the kids who pursue the environmental, musical comedy, and geriatric care jobs with compassion for diverse humans and nature, living in the stone houses on Huguenot Street when they aren’t sailing on the ecoboats. Orhan, Nikos, and Omar advise them on spiritual and intellectual matters.

How are the “Old Ways” Challenged?

What beliefs are challenged that cause a main character to shift their perspective…and make the change? Ibrahim’s religion is challenged because he cannot obey the five pillars of Islam and be part of this global society that unleashes viruses, harbors cures and vaccines, and kills people supposedly to save the earth.

A. Challenge through Questioning: Jake doesn’t question a lot in the beginning but as life gets heavier, he focuses more to figure out what is really going on, how he is being used, and other others have been abused. Ibrahim and BB don’t question. ThWhat I learned again is something I always knew–the similarity of dramatic structure to argumentation, CDQ to thesis question, and in this case, Old Ways to assumptions that can have fallacies that allow characters to struggle and change.

a) Old Ways Jake races through everything The faster the better, Time is arrow and I am the shooter, New York is a treadmill and I am ahead of the pack. Go fast to flourish. Speed is an essential component of my training programs.

b) Challenge Jake: Except that I am getting PD, slowing down, shuffling, shivering, and shaking.

c)Counterexample Jake: Maybe slowing down has some perks except my smell and taste are muted from PD. They also serve who only stand and wait. At least I am not blind like Milton was. How can I be the exception to the rule when my wellness program of diet, exercise, and meditation is perfect?

d) How it might play out: Something good comes out of this with his kids and patients. Develop the scene on the eco boats. Delphine, Jesse and Aanadi work on vaccines or drugs to put dopamine back into the brain not just via the intermediary of levodopa. To do this, they must be privy to some of Ibrahim’s project or vice versa.

a) Old ways Ibrahim is into power. Religion and science and Green activism can create a new world order but sacrifices must be made and there is collateral damage. The COVID bioweapon also killed healthy young people. He thinks he can control the apocalypse. Personal sacrifices must be made for his high concept plot but pain is for others.
b) Challenge: His wife and only son die in the Manhattan flood of 2028 when the Summit condo collapses into the East River.
c) Counterexample: Their penthouse was supposed to be impervious because Sandystorm only flooded the basement. He and his daughters are on eco boats but now he has more respect for nature’s unpredictability. He is still committed to his international high concept plot but his heart is broken.
d) How it might play out: He gets closer to Jake and confides in him about personal problems, but not the big plot.

a) Old Ways: Litonya loves rocks more than humans and her career is geology.
b) Challenge: She gives birth to Jesse on the ecoboat surrounded by humans near PP1.
c) Counterexample: She is exhausted. Jake takes care of their baby and braids Litonya’s hair, a sacred action. Or is this the action exercise?
d) How it might play out: A new kind of love develops based on her dependency and vulnerability to her family. This happened in the first novel but there is more depth in her relationship with Jake than with his COVID-deceased buddy Rodney.

a) Old Ways: BB/Leo has APD and is a robot. Old Ways. He changes identities but never himself.
b) Challenge: He set up an antique car to blow up but the fire set a house on fire burning his daughter in law and when his son Joe the firefighter arrived to put it out he succumbed to another geothermal explosion as he took her out.
c) Counterexample: Losing this handsome, brave, successful adopted son was the worst thing that could happen. It depresses him. It breaks the glass of his APD and makes him a bit more vulnerable, but maybe not enough.
d) How it might play out: After talking with Ibrahim about the high concept, he gets over the death enough to go back to killing others because the price is right. This was the turning point. But then Ibrahim loses his son. Should they continue along their path or back off? BB gets closer to the other kids so Litonya and Jake never suspect his true motives. Since BB was born in 1960, he should be dead by 2050 at the latest. Not sure if Jake should push him overboard or if Ibrahim does or Litonya or suicide or whatever.

a) Crisis after the deaths of Jake’s parents as he suffers from PD. Litonya and Ibrahim argue about the high concept and Jake makes Litonya give up consulting. But how do Ib and BB die? These questions will break the high concept plot and change the details of the pay-offs but I am not sure what the best choices are.

B. Challenge by Counterexample

C. Challenge by “Should Work But Doesn’t” Ibrahim’s world collapses because his investments are not as stable as he thought. His position on top of the pyramid being polite is shattered. He changes for the worse.

What I learned is that I must hypnotize myself to make my precious characters fight even though I hate conflict of every kind in real life.

Arguments must be more original, not just on-the-nose screaming. Lies, irony, flattery, and changing the subject to heighten subtext can help. Or screaming at someone else who is not responsible, or screaming at the mirror. Or doing something as they argue that enhances activities to create visual symbols. Loudness replaces soundness, revealing the cracks in people’s politeness.

– Competition: Rodney Jake and Joe must compete more in the first two novels even though I don’t like competition. Is this for attention from friends and family, girls, grades, money, jobs or what? This competition will make Jake feel guilty when they die.

– Power struggle is different from competition. Ibrahim seems to have no competition for his power but Litonya disagrees with some of his plans and he needs her expertise so this should ignite a power struggle near the end. I am working on another vaccine or drug related to amyloid clearance so there should be a power struggle around this life-saving secret.

– Dilemma: I must stretch out Jake’s dilemmas to tease the audience. One is to give CPR to his Mom or not but that can’t be stretched too long. I tend to solve problems too quickly instead of presenting the dilemma so the reader/audience can solve it first in their minds. A dilemma in the form of a disjunctive syllogism should frame the entire third novel related to will versus fate in the face of death.

– Physical confrontation Jake beats up Keith and plays with boxing but can anyone logically get into a fist fight? The first two novels have more fights when the testosterone is running more freely but as people age, their ability to fight physically diminishes. I have been idealizing the youngest generation, as grandparents do, but perhaps I should stage at least one fight to be more realistic. Damn. I hate fights although I love teaching cardio kickbox where no one is touched.

– Love triangles occur in the first novel and are resolved in the third when Rodney and Priceless have died. Maybe I need one love triangle with the youngest generation but the last novel is NOT a romantic comedy.

– Verbal abuse is on the nose but it works. Not sure who would use it when. It is different from arguments. In the first novel, Jake’s dad abuses him verbally, one reason he runs away. The Feldman trio abuse people verbally causing stress in the community.

– Public humiliation demands a position, political or communal and Ibrahim seems to be shielding himself from any publicity or politics. Sometimes the most powerful people are invisible. In the first novel, Jake’s father feels that if Jake doesn’t disappear, he will be humiliated by having a son who plagiarized. He is chair of history.

– Loss is necessarily part of the last novel of a trilogy but it must be depicted in terms of fate versus will to enhance choices and dramatic actions. Events that are inevitable don’t make readers turn pages.

– Stakes are raised according to the pressures of time, the escalation of harm as death approaches, and the corrosion of values.

– Plan goes wrong. Not sure how plans can go wrong except when nature does things to the bio weapon that weren’t planned. Young and healthy weren’t supposed to die.

– Falsely accused. Samir could be falsely accused of the serial rapes and murders in the first novel, BB or one of the homeless framed for Sam’s murder instead of his daughter Litonya in the second, and in the third novel, Litonya could be falsely accused of the high concept plot when she wasn’t privy to all the details.

What I learned is to focus on the vicious circle of insight to action to insight fueled by some kind of conflict.

Insights into Action: In novels characters can transform through inner thoughts, dialogue, poetic epiphanies etc. but this exercise reminds me that major scenes must have enough conflict followed by insights followed by ACTION to propel the story forward. In the past I eschewed small, minor actions but arguments over toothpaste, an alarm clock, or even imaginary or past events that create animosity can create narrative thrust. In real life, most scenes are not catharsized in definite action, one reason people like stories and films. I must go through Jake’s 9 chapters to describe one or two actions that can push his throughline. Since aging and climate disasters create deus ex machina actions that traditional dramatists dislike, Jake must do something to change his character right up to his death.

Or do the actions deliver insight with impulsive Jake? 1) Arguments with Keith about sexual harassment of minors in the bar erupt in physical confrontation but the action of hitting Keith gives Jake the insight that he is only hurting himself by breaking the law in a vicious circle. He should have called the cops. 2) The eminent loss of his dad to ALS precipitates Jake’s action of massaging his father’s cold feet, delivering the result his father wanted, a blissful quick death from throwing an embolus, so this becomes an insight as Jake lets his dad keep lecturing as he “goes to a better place.” 3) As his mother is dying of Alzheimer’s, he must curb all action to respect her living will, something that gives him insights into the concept of dying at the right time since we must die. 4) He finds his tremor too bad to hold weights or focus pads (plan gone wrong) so he shovels ice cream into his face and then realizes he is hurting himself. 5) When Jake learns of BB’s past and present crimes, he subdues his action, the desire to throw BB overboard. Instead he calls the cops and as they arrive, BB jumps overboard so the action is the same. 6) At the end of his life, with the stakes raised by age and disaster, Litonya’s screams force him to hobble towards her as she tumbles down and they both die, a mistake but one that avoids more suffering going forward. His final action was to help a loved one despite his PD disability.

Challenge through Living Metaphor

What I learned is that living metaphors have the potential to create filmed analogies and increase symbolism, something I need because I am not naturally visual. When stories get really complex, colorful, and over-the-top, tragedy, drama, and thrillers can turn into comedy, something that seemed to happen as I wrote just now.

Mirror: 1) Old ways have Jake looking at himself in the mirror and his students behind him to correct them. 2) Mirror can be tilted so they look at themselves and not him or he is behind them or like Litonya, they want nothing to do with mirrors. 3) Mirror can be smashed in a moment of rage when he has PD. 4) Mirror is used as a weapon to try to kill BB near the end. 5) Mirror is given to his kids so he no longer has mirrors.

Bed: 1) Old ways: Jake usually jumps out of bed to work or play. 2) His first major challenge is when his mom is dying of COVID in bed in part because she is wearing a mask and is at the busy medical center. He thinks enough about her to bring her home, open the windows, take off the masks, and give her oxygen and food at home but this requires a change in his behavior and attention. 3) When he makes love to Litonya, he becomes less mechanical and sexist, taking care of her needs and then getting swept into a spiritual communion that procreates the first baby that is his legally as well as biologically. This is a blessed bed. 4) When faced with the challenge of his father’s death to ALS in 2030, Jake massages his swollen feet as he gives his last lecture about colonial history revisited for diversity and inclusion. In medias res, he throws an embolus, saying he is going to a better place, better than slowly choking to death, with the attention and drama he likes. Jake always wanted people to listen to him but has compassion for his father’s last lecture and lets him rant and rave. 5) When his mother is dying of Alzheimer’s he faces the agonizing dilemma that no EMT likes of obeying her Living Will for DNR and DNI and letting her die naturally. BB the traitor helps clean up both beds because it is too much for Jake. BB grew up in a funeral parlor so he is good at this.

Chair: 1) Jake has ADHD and hates to sit so he does squat ups with kettlebells. 2) Jake’s dad Jean has a kind of bionic chair once he gets ALS so his voice can boom through the room without demanding too much from him physically. 3) When Keith says vulgar things about women at the bar, Jake swats him, and his face falls into his French fries and ketchup. Jake regrets this action but it helps make his point. Next time he vows to fight through legal channels. 4) Jake finds Lana sitting on the toilet as a chair rigor mortis with a blue butt bruised by lividity after coding from the Delta variant because she refused the vaccine. 5) Litonya squats on the deck in a chair position as her waters break h but when Jake shows Jesse to his great grandma Julie, she keels over at 92 in church dying peacefully. Jake sits at his computer and works harder organizing his career, appreciative of the many uses of chairs.

Garden 1) Jake’s new fitness studio, a church turned into an art studio and now his gym overlooks a garden that he usually ignores. 2) When Mom gets COVID, he picks fresh basil, mint, and rosemary from her garden to stimulate her sense of smell and taste. Eventually it works after he treats her with fresh air, oxygen, exercise, good food etc. 3) He picks wildflowers to give to his partner Litonya when he finds out she is pregnant, waiting for her to decide whether she wants marriage or not, finding ways to serve her and allow her to keep working at the Earth Observatory as a geologist. 4) After BB tweaks the antique car to blow up and it happens too close to the solar house, killing Jake’s friends Joe and CS as well as the targets Keith and Norm, Jake takes the kids to the village garden to ground them in life since they all had to pass the fiery inferno on Huguenot St. 5) To curb some of his mom’s wandering, he sets up an indoor garden on the porch seasoning the activities with enough exercise to tire her out.

Rocks 1) Jake has a tiny piece of the igneous rock of the Palisades that he uses to cut things when he hikes. Otherwise, he hates this rock, preferring the Gunk climbing rock of the first novel, or the Manhattan Prong of the second. 2) Jake lands the ecoboat fall 2021 on the Palisades dock so that Litonya can finish her childbirth on dry land. When she kisses the rocks, he has more respect for them. 3) When Jesse marries Aanadi and Kisele marries Coral on the Palisades instead of on the boats after the big floods, everyone celebrates and Jake is humbled by the rocks’ longevity and the legacy he is leaving his kids. He won’t last forever contrary to his assumptions. 4) Jake finally realizes that BB has been using rocks to knock out victims from the nineties until his last attempt to hurt one of his kids in 2050 who is doing research on geriatric diseases. Jake feels like hitting him with a rock but his PD and morality cause him to call 911 to get him arrested. 5) At 80, Jake wants to accompany Litonya for an easy walk in the Palisades. At first they stay on the wide flat trail. Because of his PD, he is tired and sits on a wedge of igneous rock while Litonya decides to free climb a short pitch. This time her reach exceeds her grasp, in part because of her 85 years and in part because of an unexpected quake, only around 3, but enough to shake the rocks and cause her to slip, fall, and scream, hitting her head on a rock and getting knocked out. Jake tries to help her but the quake continues and with his PD, he cannot perform CPR. He gets so stressed by the falling rocks that he also slips and falls. Fortunately they are both knocked out near the little park beside the dock so their kids can claim the bodies an hour later. Better than a hospice or euthanasia at the end of life. MM says Litonya had cancer cells and was about to get sick at 85 so this death was preferable. Then the rock cycle recycles as humans should.

How
are You Presenting Insights through Profound Moments?

Irony delivers insight What I learned is that I must
imagine the split screen or superimposition of cinema to enhance my
linguistic ability to use irony so that I can sequence and juxtapose
scenes that seem like the opposite but that force characters into insights
that transform them. An important element of creativity is Janusian (the
door opens both ways) and is one way to inject comedy, satire, and depth
to events and actions that may just be taken literally otherwise.
Jake’s
transformation from irony occurs in increments. At the beginning his sense
of humor is ebullient but as his optimism is challenged by medical and
environmental and villain disasters he, unlike Candide, makes sarcastic
comments about the beautiful weather during floods and the advantages of
having your buddies die–more kids and a wife. The ultimate irony occurs
when he gets PD and temporarily succumbs to bad habits with food, drink,
and laziness that his clients had over the years. Then he pulls himself up
to the cliff with Litonya’s and his kids’ help and transforms even more to
help himself and others. Irony crystallizing into biting satire may be
more the voices of the Magma Monsters and Ibrahim, master of the high
concept plot. Ibrahim and BB are also victims of doing the right thing for
the wrong reasons, saving the earth to kill the weak, old, fat etc., or
the win/loss of collateral damage when their loved ones die, in part from
their actions or negligence. Since I must develop this high concept plot
as I review the first two novels, it is stressful because I don’t want to
get rid of good things I wrote 15 years ago. Irony provides a window for
things that may not fit in that can lead to originality or humor.
What
are the Most Profound Lines of the Movie?
Make a list of the 5 most emotional moments in your screenplay.

I added lines immediately to each action.

1) Jake and Rodney are doing CPR on Feldmans. Fuck this waterbed. Roll em over. They fucked for years on this waterbed. What the fuck? How could they both code at once? Supreme exertion, stress, fear. Then sorrow when his buddy Rodney also dies.

2) Passion when Jake makes love to Litonya, his widowed wife. Their baby Jesse crowns on the boat and comes out on land at the Palisades cliff. He is an amphibian, the new human! Fear, faith, then Joy.

3) Dad dies of ALS while Jake is massaging him. “I am going to a better world. I am a good Christian.” After he dies, Jake realizes he is scared of death and doesn’t want to think about it. He works out harder but is worried about his mom with Alzheimer’s.

4) Jake is desperate for Ibrahim to give him the shot to dissolve plaques but Ib says it isn’t ready although others have received it. Why are they hiding this research, this drug, when so many seniors need it? Jake: Mom’s death. She won’t let me do anything. DNR DNI. Lots of action in Acronyms. EMS is to undress with finesse, not oppress. CPR leaves a scar. DNR parks your car in the bar. DNI lets you die. They also serve who only stand and wait. It is great when your fate makes you lose weight unless it means you are sliding off the cliff of life. She is 90. That is enough time. What is enough? When I must do nothing to obey Mom’s will, I cannot rhyme or speak. Tragedy kills rhyme.

5) Litonya’s pulmonary fibrosis. I won’t take the shot. I don’t trust him or it. Coughing on the cliff. Once scars stick to tissue it’s hard to pry them off. Can you stop further scarring? Aging is the massacre of relentless entropy. Switching back to anabolism will cause cancer. Jake: I am shaking as the earth is quaking and we are aching but our kids are baking and making love.

Profound theme: They want the drugs and research but climate confrontation must be combined compassion, one of the themes of the trilogy. In other words, you can’t just fuck the frackers and drown the fossil fuelies but a new world is needed to survive climate crises.

Three recurring motifs throughout trilogy

1) Jake: Play is work, work is play, do it today, sing don’t say, never obey, don’t be a prey, pain will go away, roll in the hay, fear at bay. Rhyme makes time bounce.

In One, Jake wants to play instead of work, in Two, he makes work play with fitness, in Three, he wants to be more essential so he works until exhausted and decides that life should end with some play.

The Kids love Jake because they like to play.

Ibrahim: I don’t want to waste time playing so Jake is the nanny as well as the stud and seed service.

2) MM: Stay safe is the chant of the news, the way people abuse and use each other.

Jake: Stay safe and strong. It won’t be long before we are okay.

Ibrahim: Safety is a sequence. What comes first–the virus or the vaccine? The vaccine or the virus? It’s all about the dose. Too much or too little at the wrong time is poison; otherwise it is safe and effective. What comes first–the cure or the cause.

BB: Law is based on the sequence of crimes. If you kill before he pulls his gun it is murder but after it is self-defense. Never confess. Safety is in silence.

Joan: Doctors are supposed to keep patients safe but that is impossible.

Jean: People will pay millions for the illusion of safety.

Litonya: Safety is another human delusion.

3) Death

Jake: I am scared shitless of death. Dying sucks and suffering is torture. We must fight it with fitness.

Jean: I am going to a better place. I am a good Christian.

Joan: DNI DNR

Litonya: The earth is taking me back.

Sandrine: Il faut travailler son jardin.

BB: I made love to death my entire life so death doesn’t scare me. (Then his son is burnt to death.) This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Joe was never supposed to die before me. Silence is the only way to mourn him.

Ibrahim: Certain things are outside my control. That is why I submit to Allah. Science only goes so far. For a while I thought I could control fate but this flood that suddenly collapsed my condo, killed my wife, and injured my son was too sudden. But the larger goal is to save the earth with my kind on top. So fuck Allah. Long Live the Green Garchs.

How Do You Leave Us With A Profound Ending? I will review the endings I put in the outline as I rewrite the novel. 1. What is your Profound Truth and how will it be delivered powerfully in your ending? Despite technological advances, life extension, and climate catastrophes, humans are mortal and there comes a time when they must be absorbed by the earth creating a legacy for those left behind. Jake’s profound truth was to morph from self-serving to truly helping people but that must tie into the high concept.

2. How do your lead characters (Change Agent and Transformable Characters) come to an end in a way that represents the completed change? Litonya and Jake die together as an earthquake rattles their grips in a relatively simple, safe hike in the Palisades. The Palisades or MM rolls into the river as it rises. Jake could throw BB overboard but what is the secret of Ib’s longevity? That prompts the final confrontation between the two.

3. What are the setup/payoffs that complete in the end of this movie, giving it deep meaning?

The question of who the serial killer/rapist is is finally confirmed with BB’s confession Or Jake’s discovery before Jake throws him overboard. Jake, Ibrahim, and Litonya have an honest discussion about the high concept plot with the kids Aanadi, Kisele, and Jesse who did research on degenerative diseases. There is now a vaccine to ward off Alzheimer’s and PD. Too late for Joan but the kids can take it so they don’t succumb. But why would Ibrahim and BB keep the vaccine from Jake? Is this part of a plot to kill old people? When and where do Ib and Jake have this conversation? Ib would be crazy old 90 so what is keeping him alive? These vaccines. BB would be 100 so this won’t work. He must be finished off earlier. He is not tied into the structure. How do MM feel about Ib and BB?

4. How are you designing it to have us see an inevitable ending and then making it surprising when it happens?

I want to make sure the audience thinks something else might happen to keep them engaged and create surprises. Could Ibrahim keep the vaccines a secret to Jake? They must have them before Joan dies in 2040. It looks like Jean will have to die at 2030 if he gets his diagnosis right after COVID although technology could keep him going longer. The beginning chapters are problematic now if his PD is partly caused by his getting COVID. I will have to give him COVID from Joan. BB is aging. He can’t be younger than 1955 or can he? Maybe 1960 like Chris. What dirty work does he do for Ibrahim? I have more than one CDQ throughout the trilogy but I must write them all down. I need better deaths or diseases for Ibrahim and BB. I had incidental, naturalistic deaths that will destroy my focus. The audience knows Jake is struggling with PD heading towards a wheelchair but fighting all the way and Litonya has cancer cells brewing in her spine from exposure to fracking chemicals–but no, she wouldn’t be near benzene unless she had to investigate the damage in those areas. But why would she sacrifice herself when she hates people?

What is the Parting Image/Line that leaves us with the Profound Truth in our minds?

The kids and some of the characters are still alive, safe, successful, and happy on the eco boats. Parts of Huguenot Street and central Manhattan around Central Park are okay although the coastline has changed because those buildings couldn’t survive and had to be replaced with oyster beds, salt marshes, berms, etc.

As igneous becomes sedimentary, the rocks are grateful for their recycling because they never die. The image is that life continues- individuals may die but life is immortal on the earth. Then when the earth is eaten up by the sun or hit by an asteroid or destroyed by human stupidity, its materials are released into the universe. There is also an interior world of particle physics and other dimensions that humans cannot see but is there to keep things recycling. Life is a circle not a cliff that you are pushed off even though it seems like that. Maybe looks are deceptive, something sexy Jake learnt as he succumbed to PD.

What I learned from this assignment is to revisit the assumptions, habits, filters, and social values that cement my prejudices and to use a scalpel to peel off similar coatings in my characters.

What makes people change? Inspired. Lust, greed, money, necessity. Creativity. Forced. Threatened. Terrified. Rigid thinking relates to fallacies of presumption, relevance, and ambiguity. Cognitive flexibility is challenging at any age, but particularly when life constricts with aging. However, my doctor sis says patients change the most in hospices. People are often blinded by their limitations or made grandiose by goals that they cannot accomplish. How do you unstick someone, pry them loose? Does it have to be painful? How can problems be reframed with a different perspective? Is it good to end the trilogy with more questions to worry the reader and viewer.

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[Julia Keefer]

Critique of Chris:

Since Chris is the only entry in this forum I will take the liberty of giving him a brief critique. I do not have to be “nice” because Chris’ project is timely, commercial, heartfelt, and well-organized. I am instantly drawn into the romance between Helen and Peter and inspired by her courageous acceptance of her sexuality. I like the historical setting although as Hal says, it increases the budget, but islands and Massachusetts rural life can be easily filmed. Chris chooses significant metaphors and visuals to symbolize the profound transformations and deep emotions. Have you also done filmmaking? I don’t want to just praise but the synopsis is excellent.

I wonder about the dialogue and whether the subtext is worked out enough to cover the bedrock of betrayal in as interesting verbal ways as Chris is with visual cues. Some of the examples are okay but on-the-nose. Actors will want to play these challenging roles.

His outline is cleaner and more organized than mine but I am writing a trilogy of messy novels. 🙂 Inserting the Hollywood film into the story opens it up in an interesting way, adding a delicious irony when the producers want romance and adventure added to a sad story. Peter’s betrayal comes as a surprise.

For contemporary audiences, can you do more with the kind Black character who helps out? How much license do you have to frame the story today with the inclusion/diversity, social justice, protests, and ableism? Is your market TV film or big feature?

You will be successful or maybe you already are. Excellent work.

[Heather Hood]

I hope this is clear enough for people to get a good idea of what the movie is about. Any comments would be welcome. And thank you!

Profound Screenplays

Title: Into the Mist

Written by: Heather Hood

1. What is your profound truth?

Integrity is part of every human being.

2. What is the transformational journey?

· Old Ways: You fight however you must to win.

· Journey: Andrew learns in Canada; everyone is fighting a battle.

· New Way: Win the fight with honor.

Transformational Logline:

In order to bring his daughter to Canada, uncompromising sea captain, Andrew McKinnon, is thrown into the wild Pacific Northwest and forced to deal with not only the ghosts of his past, but the very real ghosts, pirates and hostile tribes that inhabit the treacherous coast.

Who are your lead characters?

· Change agent: Jian Min Li, 65, Chinese Diplomat.

· Transformational Character: Andrew James McKinnon, 70, Naval Captain

· Betraying Character: Billy – 18-year-old orphan.

· Oppression: 1886 Canadian Wilderness and her People

2. How do you connect with your audience at the beginning of the movie?

A. Relatability: Andrew is a tired old man saying goodbye to the love of his life – the sea.

B. Intrigue: What the heck happened to land him in jail and get him so beaten up? What horrible thing happened to his family? Why are he and his brother-in-law having such a horrible feud about Andrew’s wife?

C. Empathy: Geeze, why are the British so prejudiced toward the Irish?

D. Likeability: Andrew seems like such a tough guy, but he risked everything to rescue a drowning child, and gives the last of his money plus the coat off his back to a homeless mother shivering in the rain.

3. What is the gradient of the change?

Emotional Gradient:

Forced Change

Denial/Shock: “Just kill me and be done with it.” Andrew doesn’t care. His wife is dead, he has spent the last 35 years towing the British line, fighting in their wars, just to have them throw him away. They see him as “just another Irish brute” because of a past where he was forced to fight just to survive.

Anger: “Why is she dead and you’re still alive?” Absolute fury that the man who is responsible for his wife’s suicide is working on his brother-in-law’s ship.

“You win the fight any way you can.” Andrew is frustrated by being challenged to change a method that has always worked for him. Winning equates with honor and that means someone usually dies. Now Jian Min challenges him with “ all life has value, even your enemy.”

Bargaining: “A wise old man buys the information he needs. You have heard of this, yes?” He proposes they buy information for the location of Jian Min’s daughter instead of trying to take out every criminal in Vancouver until they find the man who sold her.

“There’s no gold left in Barkerville, but there’s plenty in the Yukon. Who’s with me? Do we go north?” In order to finance a trip to Juneau to rescue Meilin and send for Andrew’s family, the party planned to escort the boys, Conner and Billy to Barkerville, but Andrew has been given a map with the co-ordinates for the first claim in the Klondike on 40 Mile creek.

Depression: “All these years I’ve called on you in faith. Am I so damned unworthy?” When Jian Min dies, Andrew hits rock bottom. One too many people have been taken from his life.

Acceptance: “When you are angry no one needs to respect you. You are like a mad wolf. Where is your honor?” Andrew has finally got what Jian Min was trying to teach him and is teaching it to the troubled boy (Tah Tiks) he lives with in the Tsimshian tribe.

4. Action Gradient

Set Up

On the day he is supposed to retire and look after his family, Andrew is exiled from Ireland for a murder he didn’t commit. He is transported to Canada on a ship captained by his brother-in-law, Quinn, who decides he will stay below decks with the coal gang. There he finds the one in charge of the gang is none other than Daniel Smith, the man responsible for his wife’s death. Not only does Andrew have to cope with exile, his wife’s death and disgrace, but now he is faced with the return of the man responsible for all of it.

Journey

· When Dan tries to pick up the fight where they left off, Quinn interferes. Andrew is deposited in Montreal. So is Dan – Andrew finds this out later when Dan tries to get back at him by taking out the two young boys who have attached themselves to him.

· Enter the change agent – Jian Min Li who believes life is a precious gift.

· Andrew realizes he can’t kill Dan – life is a precious gift, no matter how much he hates Dan for what he’s done.

· Goldmining in Barkerville is a bust, the gold is played out, but Scottie bequeaths Andrew with a map to his claim on 40 Mile creek in the Yukon. Andrew comes up with a plan.

· Jian Min teaches Andrew to control his temper and ways other than violence to win a fight: life is sacred.

· The party heads north to Juneau in search of Jian Min’s daughter via the inside passage with Red Seamus Fogerty aka “The Preacher”, a renegade Jesuit priest turned slaver.

· Seamus kills four miners on Read Island angering the spirits of massacred Haida who kill the entire crew except for Andrews party. Andrew strands him on the beach to face the same fate as his crew, taking the ship. They sail north to Juneau, short handed.

· Jian Min’s daughter, Meilin, is in Skagway, where a Potlatch is being held. To get her back they must trade something of value because she is a valuable slave. Pondering this Jian Min and Andrew are out with the women and children of the village when a marauding bear attacks. Jian Min kills the bear, but loses his life.

· The Chief gives Meilin to Andrew because her father has given the most at the Potlatch: his life. Andrew learns this truth – life has the most value when you spend it for others.

Payoff

· Living as a slave with the Tsimshian makes Andrew see a different world, where people are respected for what they do, not for what they possess. The People care for each other. He has value as a good worker and a provider. He is finally able to control his temper.

· As the village is attacked the children run onto the collapsing river ice. Andrew goes to rescue them but is too heavy. He flips over on the slabs, unable to find purchase. Jordan runs in to help him. All seems fine and then Billy shoots Andrew, in payback for the death of his brother. Tah Tiks kills Billy. Tah Tiks is sobbing, he’s losing another father, but Andrew is at peace. He says to Tah Tiks “Teach your brother to fish.” Which really means “look after your family.”

Challenge weaknesses:

Challenge: “I’ve given my word. There’ll be no violence.”

Weakness: Andrew isn’t used to losing. He’s used to winning any way he can.

Challenge: Every way he knows to be the “right way” of behaving is not working.

Weakness: Andrew doesn’t adapt well to change. He questions his worth.

Challenge: Seamus almost sinks the Bean Nighe

Weakness: Andrew’s temper gets them into trouble again when he tells Seamus to start acting like a Captain and takes over.

Challenge: Jian Min dies. Andrew now has all these people counting on him.

Weakness: He is at his lowest point and feels unworthy and abandoned by God.

Challenge: “If I can just get through this one last thing I win…”

Weakness: Killing Seamus brought no honor, just re-enslavement and shame.

7.What is the Transformational Structure of Your Story?

Mini-Movie 1 ­ Status Quo and Call to Adventure

Andrew is on his ship saying good byegoodbye to his life on the sea, about to retire when fate intervenes. His nephew is being sent to America to pay off his father’s debt. In a fit of temper, Andrew goes to rescue the boy, the rail on the ship breaks and he and the owner of the merchant ship fall into the harbor. They both drown. Andrew is resuscitated and tried for murder – exile from Ireland or a hanging. Andrew choses exile and is sent to Canada with plans to bring his family over as soon as he can.

Mini-Movie 2 ­ Locked Into Conflict

On board the SS Sarmation Andrew discovers the leader of the coal gang is none other than Daniel Smith, the man who raped his wife and is the father of his daughter Jenny. The two of them pick up their unfinished fight and Andrew is dumped in Montreal. So is Dan, but Andrew doesn’t find that out till later.

Mini-Movie 3 — Hero Tries to Solve Problem ­ But Fails.

In Montreal there is no work if you’re Irish. Andrew gets on the train to the west coast. He finds the two young boys from the coal gang have jumped ship planning on heading to Northern British Columbia to mine gold. They ask him to go with them. A dying prospector overhears the conversation and talks him out of the idea, but if Andrew will promise to give him a decent burial he can have his claim on 40 Mile creek in the Yukon and gives him a gold nugget the size of a walnut.

Mini-Movie 4 ­ Hero Forms a Plan

Andrew talks his companions into heading north to the Yukon.

Mini-Movie 5 ­ Hero Retreats & Antagonist Wins

Vancouver has burned to the ground. They have to find a way to go north. They secure berths on the scummiest schooner on the west coast run by Red Seamus Fogerty, AKA “The Preacher” a buccaneer/slaver who has plans of his own for them.

Mini-Movie 6 ­ Hero’s Bigger, Better Plan!

When Seamus gets the entire crew slaughtered on Read Island, Andrew strands him there to suffer the same fate and takes over the ship. They head for Juneau in search of Jian Min’s daughter.

Mini-Movie 7 ­ Crisis & Climax

Seamus gets off the island and comes after Andrew with a band of Tsimshian warriors. He challenges Andrew to a fight-to-the-death exchange for some Jesuit priests they have captured and taken as slaves, knowing Andrew’s weakness for slavery. Underestimating Andrew badly, Seamus loses the fight and his life, but Andrew loses his freedom, becoming a Tsimshian slave. He will never see his family again.

Mini-Movie 8 ­ New Status Quo

In the Tsimshian village Andrew is treated as a valued member of the community for his hunting and fishing skills. He becomes part of a family and finally is at peace. He has learned to control his temper and teaches his adoptive son this. He is happy. Then his friends come to rescue him and the village children run out on the river ice to escape the invading warriors. Andrew goes to rescue them and almost drowns. Just when it looks like he is safe and will live after all, Billy shoots him in revenge for the death of his brother.

8. How are the Old Ways challenged?

A Through Questioning:

o Jian Min challenges Andrew if he fights to win any way he can because he is lost. (which is pretty close to the truth)

B Challenge by Counter example:

o Xhuuya says at Jian Mins grave “Important man give most precious thing he have away.” Meaning Jian Min gave his life to the tribe. In exchange the chief gives Andrew Jian Min’s daughter.

C Should work but doesn’t:

Andrew keeps trying to make plans but nothing goes as planned

o He gets kicked off the train.

o The city of Vancouver is burned to the ground

o He spares Dan’s life and Dan goes to Ireland to look for Jenny.

Trying to lead the party to 40 Mile Creek.

o Seamus is on their trail

o Meilin gets kidnapped

D Challenge through living metaphor:

o The potlatch is a living Metaphor – the wealthiest person is the one who gives the most away.

o The Raven:

In Pacific Northwest culture, a raven stands for change and is also known as the trickster. It was the bringer of fire, but the stealer of berries. It never forgot someone who did kindness or ill. Andrew is plagued by a raven from the beginning of the movie through to the last scene.

9. Presenting Insights through Profound moments

A. Action delivers insight

Jian Min dies by his life principles; that all life has value and shows Andrew how to live with honor. He fights a huge black bear, knowing he dies saving the village women and children. In so doing he gives up the most important thing he has (his life) for his daughter’s freedom.

B. Conflict delivers insight

Andrew spends the whole movie fighting to find a way to bring his daughter to Canada, yet we find out she isn’t even his – she’s Big Dan’s – the product of rape. (Although this might be an example of irony) Andrew can’t even avenge his wife’s suicide because Jenny might hate him for killing her real father. Why? Because all life is precious and has value, even your enemy.

C. Irony delivers insight

Andrew abhors slavery because of his past as an Ottoman slave when he was kidnapped by pirates as a boy. Yet he trades his life for the life of the Priests. When all is lost, Integrity remains.

9. What are the most profound lines of the movie?

· “When all is lost, integrity remains.”

· “When everything else is gone, all we have left is integrity. It has no race, no skin color, no sex. It doesn’t give a damn if you’ve got one leg or none. It comes from the fires within, the flame God gave us when we drew our first breath.”

· “We never know the impact our lives have on those we meet. Integrity must go before us like a beacon, to light the dark ways for others.”

· “Important man give his most precious thing away with open heart. We respect this man.”

· “We place people in boxes because of our differences. We miss so much that way.”

· “How did we manage to exterminate a species an entire people relied on in such a short time?. What kind of people are we, Jenny, that we can do such a thing? One more buffalo. One more fish. One more tree.”

9 How Do You Leave Us With A Profound Ending?

A. Deliver The Profound Truth Profoundly

Jenny and Andrew have a voice over from Andrew’s letters quoting the advice Andrew’s captain gave to him when he was a young cabin boy: “When everything else is gone, all we have left is integrity. It has no race, no skin color, no sex. It doesn’t give a damn if you’ve got one leg or none. It comes from the fires within, the flame God gave us when we drew our first breath.”

B. Lead Characters Ending Represents The Change

Andrew loses his life after he rescues the children from the ice. The last thing he says to Tah Tiks is “Teach your brother to fish.” Which mirrors the same thing he said to the lieutenant in the first scene of the movie-> “Teach my grandson to fish” He’s really saying “teach him to look after his family”. Andrew spent his whole life looking after his family out of duty, but now he’s saying it out of love, because all life has value.

C. Payoff Key Setups

We thought Andrew was going to drown. It sure looks like it because we know he can’t swim.

D. Surprising, But Inevitable.

Totally unexpected that Billy would pop up out of nowhere and kill Andrew. But we kind of never expected Andrew to be reunited with his family.

E. Leave Us with a Profound Parting Image/Line

That damn interfering raven flying away. into the mist. Go pick on someone else.

[Julia Keefer]

I love your story Heather. It looks good in synopsis so now it depends on how the scenes play out. My nephew Vince Arvidson is a DP and director in British Columbia https://www.vincearvidson.com/ He works free lance with the CBC etc. but has his own company Candela Collective. I live in NYC and am out of this loop but your story seems like something that would interest them if you can’t get big Hollywood producers. Good luck! Julia Keefer

[Heather Hood]

Thank you Julia,

I appreciate the tip. I still have to fine tune the screenplay a little bit and adjust a few scenes now that I have a map. It’s funny how writing a 120,000 wd book and getting it published doesn’t scare me at all, but pitching a screenplay has me quaking in my boots!

Heather

[Christopher Carlson]

Hi, Heather and Julia,

I would like to thank you for offering your thoughtful critiques of my LITTLE ISLAND OF JOY. Much appreciated by me!

I’m not sure how long our forum will be accessible, but I will try to return the favor at some point during this week. If we lose access, my email is cccarl@mac.com I’ve tried to communicate directly on this website with messages but haven’t succeeded in doing so.

I’m hoping that Hal or Cheryl also weigh in with their instructors’ critique.