[Seana Graham]

Main conflict: Becoming her true self as opposed to the kind of person her friends and family expect her to be.

Old ways: Coming from an advantaged background, Amelia Stanhope is on track to head off to the college she’s worked hard to get into, and thus start the life she’s envisioned. She’s in sync with her family’s values as well as her larger community’s.

New ways: having seen the world for herself, she is also beginning to think for herself and choose her life from a different perspective.

Act One:

Opening: We see Amelia in her old context. The family dynamics, the expectations and assumptions. We see Amelia fitting comfortably into this. Maybe a little too comfortably for a young woman on the verge of adulthood. Is the issue for her, how is she going to grow up, given all the padding? Color her well-adjusted. But is she also sleepwalking through it all just a bit?

Inciting incident: the pandemic becomes public knowledge. Maybe we see the news coming through the media—that original CDC announcement on the television set where the schools maybe having to shut down is on the screen. Maybe they all hear it without really paying attention to it. The mood is, surely this doesn’t apply to us.

Turning point: The city is locked down and the schools close. No ignoring things now.

Act Two:

New plan: Staying at home but trying to take it all as temporary. No big deal. The Stanhopes are adaptable, plus they have resources. They can do this! Maybe looking down on people who are making this a big deal, not realizing that those others have different challenges.

Plan in action: The wheels start to come off the cart. Enforced togetherness is not the joy they thought it would be initially. The kids start wanting to get out. Maybe one of her siblings actually does get out. Maybe there are consequences—both with the police and within the family. Amelia, observing this, starts thinking about better ways to do this.

Is there a love interest?

Midpoint turning point: Amelia escapes! (or in some less literal way separates herself from her family.) Maybe she goes to a Black Lives Matter rally!

Act three:

Rethink everything: This is where Amelia thinks about the received wisdom of her family and her class and community. She starts to realize something about equity. She makes new friends—starts to see the world from their eyes. This puts her in conflict with her family, who haven’t been ‘woke’. Starts to wonder if she really wants to go to a small, largely white liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere. As so many people have thought during this pandemic she says, “I’m not going back.” But to do this she’s going to have to confront her parents, and she’s also going to have ACT on her newfound beliefs.

Turning point: this may be where she confronts her parents and when an ultimatum is delivered, she walks out. Goes and stays with these new people she’s found.

Act 4:

New Plan: Escaping isn’t enough. She has to figure out “what now?”

Climax: I don’t actually know how this is going to play out. Maybe there is a strong temptation to just go back again because this way is just too hard. Maybe one of her parents shows up and she almost gives in.

Resolution: At the end, we see Amelia starting at the junior college. Maybe we think that she’s given in and is going to the old dream of college—maybe the music or some other clue gives us the idea that she has conceded. She’s wearing new clothes, dressed for school. But when we actually see what she’s looking at, it’s some kind of urban tech place. The people around her are diverse. She sees one of her friends from the marches and the friend sees her. She smiles and runs to catch up with them.

[Seana Graham]

Seana’s Character Interviews

What I learned is that I have a pretty good sense of my protagonist, who spoke up quite clearly. My protagonist didn’t open up that much, partly because it isn’t human, but also because it’s a bit more mysterious and I don’t think I really gave myself permission to delve. Maybe I will in another later pass.

Protagonist

Tell me about yourself:

I’m Amelia Stanhope. I live just outside of New York City in a commuter suburb. I’m in my senior year and my friends and I are all starting to apply to colleges and getting our parents on our backs to get our college applications done and prep for the SATs and stuff like that. My brother went through this last year and he really sweated it out, but I’m good at this stuff and I’m more disciplined than he is. Frankly, I’m more worried about leaving home and friends and everything I’ve known. I’ve lived here my whole life. I mean, sure, we’ve traveled and stuff like that, but I’ve never really been on my own.

Why do you think you were called on this journey? Why you?

I don’t think it’s just about me. I think it’s about everybody. But I think for me, maybe it’s all been a little too easy. I heard Gwyneth Paltrow say once that once she became a star, it was like all the doors were opened for her. I’m not a star, but maybe that’s a little how it’s been for me too. It’s all been plotted out in advance. I’m on a path that someone else made for me.

You are up against the pandemic. What is it about that that makes this journey even more difficult for you?

Well, I guess that’s pretty obvious. It’s more difficult for everyone. Everyone. But maybe it’s harder in one way when you had your route as planned out as I have. Some people are used to things not going their way. But I’ve had no preparation. It’s more abrupt. Me and my friends, we all were good at visualizing the future because we knew people who had walked that path before us. But no one’s walked this path before. Not exactly, anyway.

You’re going to have to step way outside your comfort zone on this journey. What changes do you

expect to make. And which of tem will be the most difficult?

It’s funny, because I think for a lot of people it’s going to be about learning to adapt—like mom will have to work from home, and my sibs won’t be able to go to school and see their friends. But on this kind of stuff, I think I’ll be okay, because I’m good at adapting. What I think will be the hardest for me is just learning to accept what is. Like, I’ll keep wanting to stay on the course I was already on. It will be really hard for me to accept that that’s not what’s going to happen

What habits or ways of thinking will be difficult to let go of?

I guess I’ve partly already answered that. But I think the biggest jolt will be that whatever I was trying to do before, I was supported. Like the resources would be there. If I needed tutoring or materials or just emotional support, it would be there. I could take it for granted. But in my new situation, that isn’t going to be the case. I’m going to have to find the workarounds on my own. I’m not sure where the emotional support will come from either.

What fears, insecurities and wounds have held you back?

I think that up till this point in life, I have coped with these things by making a kind of pact with life—if I play by the rules and do what’s expected of me, I’ll be taken care of. I’ll be all right. My parents are both kind of alpha types, and in a lot of ways it’s easier to just do what they want. They have a clear vision of my future and it’s just easier to accede to that. But now the rules have been broken. They aren’t going to be with me and I am going to have to fend for myself. I won’t owe them the same allegiance. The bargain has been broken.

What skills, background or expertise will make you well-suited to face this conflict?

Well, first of all, I’m young. I may be a little stuck on my old path, but I’m not set in my ways. I pick things up quickly and most tasks I pick up quite easily. Plus, I’m curious and I like to learn. In fact, there have been some things in my life that I’ve wanted to learn more about but have been discouraged from pursuing because they don’t contribute to the over all plan. They aren’t things that will look good on my college application.

What are you hiding from the other characters? What don’t you want them to know about?

It’s mostly the kind of stuff I just mentioned. But it’s also, anything that doesn’t have the approval of my family, friends and larger community, I don’t show. So, though I don’t have a secret life like a spy would, in a way, I do. I have a secret identity which is just all the things that don’t fit in the world I’ve been living in. It’s not like the real me is so different from what I present, but it’s more like it’s clipped.

What do you think of the antagonist?

In my small, everyday self, I was just in a complete rage and/or sulk about it? Why is this happening to ME? Why is it MY senior year that this is happening? I thought of it as personal, which I guess means I thought of it as a person. But I’ve slowly come to realize that it’s not personal at all, and that’s the most devastating part. It’s not trying to hurt me, because it doesn’t even know that there is an I to hurt. It’s more like a machine. Except that it has a drive to live too. It wants its species—if you can call it that, to thrive just like we do. And we mow things through without thinking about it all the time.

But sometimes I think of it as though it really was a great teacher. Like it’s come to show us all something different about ourselves, both individually and collectively. To stop us from going on the way we were. To give us one last chance. Or maybe I should say that it’s the agent of whatever that is.

Tell me your side of this whole conflict/story.

I think I’ve said enough on that. The rest remains to be discovered.

What does it do for your life if you succeed?

I become a richer, more authentic and individuated person.

Antagonist

Tell me about yourself.

I am not conscious of myself, at least not yet.

Having to do with this journey, what are your strengths and weaknesses

My strength is that I am something new, something that the humans haven’t wrestled with yet, and so harder to fight. I can turn their best impulses, like courage and compassion against them.

Why are you committed to making the protagonist fail?

I am not committed to making them, any of them, fail. In fact, if I’m too successful, I can kill them off and I need them as a host. Although probably I will find other organisms to inhabit, but the human being is exceptionally suited to my purposes, especially now. Because it moves around so much. Without human locomotion, I’d be nowhere.

What do you get out of succeeding at your plan?

I take over the world, not to put too fine a point on it.

What drives you on your mission?

My only goal is mindless replication. I don’t even know that I’m trying to achieve something.

What secrets must you keep?

If I’m to answer as if I had a personality, it would be that I can be vanquished. I have caused much harm, but I am not as powerful as I look. And at my smallest level, as the individual virus unit, I am eminently squashable. But the scientists are prying apart my every little secret. Soon, I will have no mysteries left.

What secrets do you keep?

My secrets are what are known as my mutations to humans. I can change form, I can become something new, something harder to pin down, more elusive.

What makes you special?

My particularly awesome spikes. Also, looked at objectively, I am beautiful and mysterious.

What do you think of the protagonist?

As I keep saying, I do not think of her. I am not evil. I am amoral. There’s a difference.

What is your side of the story?

I am part of this world just like humans and other organisms are. From the perspective of the universe, I have as much right to be here as you do.

[Seana Graham]

<div>Seana’s Character Profile. Part 2</div>

What I learned is that I definitely want to take a stab at making the antagonist a non-human character, but also to think of it in some ways as if it were one as I continue to flesh this out.

Amelia Stanhope

What draws us to this character?

Her youth and innocence. She is the kind of girl who gets along easily in life because she is likeable and friendly, ‘gets on well with others’, is smart enough to achieve her goals easily and is willing and able to live up to others expectations, particularly the figures of authority in her world.

Traits: Achiever, compliant, friendly but somewhat detached from her peers, future oriented.

Subtext: She isn’t the star. She doesn’t draw envy because she doesn’t draw attention to herself in that particular kind of way. Something has not been developed in her or at least revealed yet.

Flaw: she is still very much under the sway of her family’s views and to a certain extent the little microcosm that she lives in. Put it this way–if her community told her that something was alright to do, she’d do it, because she still believes implicitly in its authority.

Values: She so far holds the values of her tribe. She hasn’t become self-reflecting yet.

Irony: The very gifts of the community that has given her so much to help her launch has also made her conformist and unreflecting on other paths and points of view. She has learned to be compliant, but she needs to see that she needs to be compliant to something greater than this small world view.

What makes her the right character for this role?

She has all the attributes that can make her a great servant healer. She learns quickly, she is adaptable, and she is disciplined. All she really has to do is shift her allegiance.

The pandemic:

What draws us to this character?

It’s power. Amelia and all characters represent us as being in its thrall. It is the great teacher of humanity. Amelia like everyone else in the story learns that there are forces in this world that are simply more powerful than us and that the hero’s journey is in this case not to defy it outright, but to study it, to learn it’s ways, and defeat it by other aspects of our humanity.

Traits:

Above all, it’s soulless, mindless impersonality. An enemy that uses our best best qualities against us–qualities of fearlessness, and the longing to be together with our fellow human beings. It also exploits our selfishness at every turn. If we can still use the phrase the ‘me generation’, the pandemic is here to tell us that it is not always about us.

Subtext:

I was going to say that there is no subtext, that it’s about as direct as a sledgehammer. But then thinking about the way it spreads silently through people who show no symptoms, I would say it has a sneaky way of traveling through the world.

Flaw: It’s fatal flaw is that ultimately, human beings can defeat it. Or, at the very least, rob it of much of its power.

Values: Survival and repetion of itself is it’s only value. You could say that it isn’t a classic villian, because it is totally oblivious of the havoc it has created. I suppose you could put that in the irony part as well.

Irony: Although it has created such devastation, human beings have learned many new and unexpected things because of it. Even just in the realm of scientific research alone, people have already learned so much from dealing with it.

[Seana Graham]

Seana’s character profiles, Part 1

What I learned doing this assignment is that ideas start to cohere as you just attempt to write things down. I also think I have a new sense of the theme of this story after grappling with all this.

Protagonist: Amelia Stanhope

Hero/dreamer. She’s on a pretty standard path for her age and demographic, but getting stranded by the pandemic will shake things up.

Antagonist: the pandemic itself. It is a change agent. It will challenge everything she thinks she knows about herself and others.

Supporting characters:

Her parents and siblings at home, who will in various ways represent the status quo. Her mother is probably going to be the main enforcer of ‘the way things are’ before the pandemic and the last to let go of the old ways. There is probably a sibling who is already on that path and is held up as an example. Maybe another who was already having a hard time playing by the rules before the pandemic even set in.

In her new community, which will be more rural or at least less urban, there will be the family she has come to stay with. I’m seeing a strong woman character, possibly a grandmother who has already chosen her own road. At first I that she was the change agent antagonist, so we’ll see.

I haven’t decided yet if there are others in that household. If she isn’t the grandmother but more a contempory of Amelia’s mom, there may be a character that this woman too has to spar with, showing Amelia how you do that. I’m thinking perhaps it’s a potential partner, but with a lot in the way of this happening.

Minor roles, background characters.<div>

I’m thinking the background characters at home will probably be people from her school, friends and teachers, counselors.

In the new community, there could be several people who show her different examples of how people think about living.

Genre:

Drama. Coming of age story with some lighter comic moments.

Protagonist character profile:

She’s sixteen or seventeen. Her internal journey is to become more self-reflective about what she really wants. To make decisions that aren’t just in obedience to her parents.

External journey: to go out and be among people who are different than the ones she’s known and come home again, better equipped to make her own choices.

Motivation: In a sense, she has to find her motivation, because as the story starts, she is largely just complying to the expectations of others, though she isn’t conscious of that yet.

Wound: I am not sure that anything of a wounding nature has happened to her as the story opens, and maybe that’s the problem. She has lived in a bubble that she hasn’t seen outside of yet and the pandemic will force her to see beyond that.

Agenda: Her mission is to get back home and resume life as ‘normal’ again. Part of the internal journey is to come to terms with the fact that that is not going to happen. That she can’t wish it or will it. So there’s a tug of war between the fact that she has to become more individuated, and at the same time, she has to learn to surrender. She has to learn the difference between’ going along to get along’ (conforming) and going with the flow of life–‘using the Force’, if you will. In neither does she have all the control, but in the second she will be more in alignment with her unique nature.

[Seana Graham]

Seana’s transformational journey

My hero is Amelia Stanhope, a teenager nearing the end of her junior year. She lives in a well to do suburb of New York and is pretty dialed in to her future. She’s got the grades, the family connections and the intelligence to be looking forward to going to a good college, finding the right partner and landing a good job. But visiting her grandparents in the rural south, she becomes stranded there by the pandemic lock down.

Her internal journey is from a fairly unthinking and taken for granted life path, to one that is more open to her own deeper desires and goals.

Her external journey is about learning this culture that is not like the one she knew at home and having to decide if the old path was right for her.

The old ways:

Studying hard with her college bound friends

Focusing with her peers on getting into the right college/

A social scene of strictly her peers who are all thinking along the same lines

Teen romantic interest

The new ways:

A broadened understanding of human beings due to getting outside her bubble.

A new vision of how she wants to live her life.

A new sense of who she might want as friends and romantic attachments.

A new connection with her grandmother.

What I learned from doing this assignment:

Seeing the characters journey as being an arc between old ways of being to new ways of being has already given me a clear sense of the trajectory of this story, while not making me feel too pinned down on specifics.

[Seana Graham]

Hi, I’m Seana. I’ve written a’ couple of longer scripts and a couple of shorter ones. I’ve taken a fair number of courses here. l’m taking this class because I’m eager to work on some new, longer material than the short stories I’ve been turning out over the last year or so.

I struggle to think of something unusual about me, but I always like the unlikely fact that my mom was from a fairly well to do family in Santa Monica and my dad was from a large dairy farming family in Illinois, but they ended up crossing paths in LIbya, where they were both connected to Wheelus Airbase. Of course, it’s completely unlikely that any of are here, really.