Strong Concept, Flailing Narrative

Two weeks to deadline—for a formal workshop that includes manuscript review—and I have not even ten post-its on the wall in front of my desk by the window. I have over three thousand words that need to be rewritten from third- to first-person POV. I have characters and events, and a loose theme, but no sense of conflict or purpose. Where is the arc, I beseech the gods of storytelling. I’m looking for lightning to strike in the way it has with previous deadlines: a flash and fury of idea synchronous with execution. This is pulling teeth with oily fingers. This is Sisyphean without a pinnacle in sight worth attempting to reach. In short, this is on the edge of hopeless.

Not entirely, though. I’m mentally buttressed by the fact that I have a backup short story on hand, a cushy 4800-of-the-5000-word-limit story about hurricanes and Cape Cod, mixed with some grief. It’s odd how much I have a type, a form, a milieu of taste for particular stories. This one I’m currently struggling with—let’s call it “The Taking”—deals with flooding, the Catskills, and some grief, as well. It’s set in the nearish future, when the Northeast climate has undergone conversion into a wet/dry seasonality, and state government has crumbled a bit into county and regional federations. That’s all backstory, not explicit in the actual prose.

Really it’s about Aubrey, a county maintenance worker everfighting rain events and brush fires, all while reeling from an unknown spiritual encounter that shakes loose her death grief. This then is set in an area of the former New York state that—all true—is home to over a dozen watershed dams serving the five boroughs. Many of those reservoirs are built on top of former Catskill villages and hamlets, taken in the 1930s to 1950s by eminent domain for such external purposes. Towns were either displaced to the surrounding hills (such as the town in which Aubrey resides) or condemned entirely, and their former residents modestly compensated for their losses. People in some towns—this is also true—called it “The Taking” with no small amount of bitter anger lodged in the sentiment.

I love the inkling of a theme of this story, that this kind of loss has memory in the land and the people residing there. The loss of The Taking echoes into the future, when steady heavy rains threaten the dam with overflow in combination with mudslides of eroded fireswept hills. A stretch for now, perhaps, and barely, but this is 2041, and you can’t be certain it’s still unrealistic. Residents are once again displaced, losing homes and livelihoods, left cold and resentful at I don’t know what, the weather, perhaps. Or did the dam’s creation a hundred years prior doom them to this fate once again, a second Taking?

I needed to keep talking this plot out until I find the spark of connection that weaves everything together. Thank you.