Creating a story for Harriet’s House and Home of Her Heart
As mentioned in my last post, playwright and novelist Kent Stenson believes the development of a new story should emerge from character work. The characters should drive the creation of the story.
In his workshop, Kent asked us to look at the terminology different playwrights have used to discuss the process of creating a story for a play script. Following EM Forster (1927), Kent distinguishes between the terms: “story” and “plot”/“scenario”.
Forster writes that a story presents “the facts” of a case. It talks about the “who” (the characters), “what” (the narrative push), “where” (the geography or region), and “when” (the time or era).
A plot or scenario talks about the “how” and “why” (the motive or motivation of the characters). To illustrate, Forster writes that the sentence “The king died then the queen died” is an example of a story. It states the facts of “who”, “what” and “when”. However, the sentence “The King died, then the queen died of grief” is an example of plot or scenario. It states “why” the queen died.
In his workshop, Kent had us write a three-page story from our character narratives that only mentioned the facts: who, what, where and when. The story was to be written with a beginning, middle and end. Once again, we read aloud our three-page stories and received feedback in the form of a compliment; an image that seemed important; a quote from the story that resonated with the listener; who the listener thought the main character was and why; a question about the story; and an urge to see something in particular happen in the story.
The next assignment was to begin a twenty-five-page scenario that added how and why to the story. Following Kent’s workshop process, I worked with the character narratives I had written and created both a three-page and a twenty-five-page story for Harriet’s House.
I found exploring my emerging story by writing a beginning, middle and end in three pages very helpful. It wasn’t too intimidating of an exercise. Expanding the three-pages to twenty-five pages was more challenging, but doable since I had already created a beginning, middle and end.
As mentioned in my first post, the story I created in my novel Home of Heart is not the same the story I told in my play Harriet’s House. The story I created for the novel has some of the same characters who appeared in the play. However, the novel also introduces new characters, such as Sister Francesca, Luisa’s chosen mother in Colombia, and Nana Lottie, Luisa’s adoptive grandmother who at the age of 17 left her home in Munich to escape the violence of Nazi Germany. While my plays Harriet’s House and Ana’s Shadow are set in Toronto, Canada, Home of Her Heart takes place almost entirely in Bogotá, Colombia. Luisa needs to leave Toronto to find answers to questions she’s been carrying ever since leaving her birth country. Why did her mamá die of pneumonia when antibiotics could have saved her? Why wasn’t her papá around to take care of her and Ana? Luisa’s determination to find answers to these questions, as well as her determination to reconnect with her birth family provided the foundation I needed to create a deeper story into the complicated family and societal politics of transnational/transracial adoption and fostering.
In my next post, I return to the work of character development and share an exercise by writing instructor and playwright Claudia Hunter Johnson which I used to develop my character Luisa.
All the best,
Tara
References
Forster, E.M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth Penguin Books Ltd.