The story follows a Kuwaiti mother as she tries to keep her two unyielding teenage children safe during the brutal Iraqi military occupation. It is told in three alternating points of view: the mother, the drug-addicted teenage son, and the teenage daughter who falls in love with a religious zealot.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT: sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force
In the summer of 1990, the antagonistic force in this novel, a war-hardened, hungry, and bitter Iraqi military force occupies Kuwait, a rich and peaceful neighboring country. The goal is to subjugate the protagonist, her family, and everyone in the country to Saddam Hussein’s rule by any means necessary. They harass, steal, and humiliate Kuwaiti citizens at checkpoints. As the Kuwaiti resistance movement builds, and efforts are made by the natives to poison, shoot, and plant bombs that kill occupying soldiers, the invading army becomes increasingly brutal, using random imprisonment, beatings, torture, and even death to break the will of the people. One of the soldiers shows up at the home of the protagonist, seemingly in peace, and demands cooked meals. He is mocking and disrespectful, but never quite seems violent, except in those moments, when light humor turns dark, and his hand hovers over his pistol. He straddles the line between sympathetic and horrifying. No one knows his intentions.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT: breakout title
1) The Daughter of Kuwait
2) Every Single Grain of Sand is Ours
3) Desert Daisy
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: comparables for your novel
Genre: Literary fiction / Book club fiction
Thematically, this novel is in the vein of A Place for Us and The Lies We Hide. I imagine the book belongs on the same bookshelves that carry Isabel Allende, Elif Shafak and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s books. Like me, those authors wrote novels that explore family dynamics, feature strong female protagonists and are set against non-western backgrounds.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound
During a military occupation, the line is blurred between protective and humiliating as a mother tries to protect her headstrong children from the invaders and their own choices. In this family-centered literary drama, characters struggle with rage, helplessness, the balance of traditional versus liberal customs, and the betrayals small and large to which the occupation drives them.
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: inner conflict & "secondary conflict" involving the social environment
Amal, the mother, wrestles with how to handle her son’s addiction. She doesn’t want to tell her husband because he is prone to violence, and she doesn’t want to seek help from family or friends because it will scandalize her son. She handles everything on her own, which is not handling it well at all. Her resentment toward her husband’s blissful ignorance and lack of involvement grows. The son, Sami, does not see himself as addicted and thinks his mother is protective to the point of being humiliating. He wants to join the Kuwaiti Resistance and fight Iraqi soldiers himself but he is only 17 and an addict. The daughter, Zaina, is in love with a zealot who refuses to marry her unless she changes her lifestyle to become more conservative. She loves him, but is conflicted about his request and she resists it. The invasion separates her from him, but she still seeks him out, at all costs.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail.
Setting: Kuwait, in the summer of 1990. When the novel begins, it is the warmest time of the year and temperature easily hits 100 F. The main characters, Amal and her two children and husband, live in a medium-sized villa with a front yard that has a large thirty-year-old palm tree. In date season, the palm tree births enough dates to share with the whole neighborhood. The villa sits at the mouth of a cul-de-sac shared with a small mosque and twelve other houses – newer structures, all flat-roofed and in varying shades of camel. A couple of owners tried to make their homes look like palaces adding oversized columns and decorative urns – an attempt at grandeur that fell painfully short given how small the two-story houses were. Other homes used up every square of footage permitted by the municipality, making no room for parking, and forcing all their guests to park on the street, thus thinning a road that barely fit two cars side-by-side. The only unbuilt plot in the neighborhood, a sandy rectangle facing the protagonist’s villa, hosted street cats that sometimes hissed and growled and swatted each other to assert reign over the trash. When they tussled among themselves, rolling around, kicking, biting, and screaming, the whole neighborhood heard it. All the houses were cuddled together, and there was hardly any room between the protagonist’s and her neighbors’. When it’s quiet, they could hear everything.
Five times a day, the muezzin’s voice is heard through the mosque’s minaret, reciting the Islamic call to prayer. The men in the neighborhood shuffle out of homes, and head to the neighborhood mosque. It is so safe in this neighborhood that people often sleep with their doors unlocked. Everyone knows everyone.
This neighborhood setting changes when Iraqi Republican Guard storm Kuwait and invade the country. Checkpoints are placed at different street entrances and cars are stopped and inspected. Soldiers are seen at the local supermarket and tanks sometimes show up in the street. Kuwaiti Resistance members remove the signs on the streets and homeowners remove the plaques on their doors to make it difficult for soldiers to find their way or know who owns which home. The neighborhood turns from a peaceful neighborhood to one where people sneak peaks behind drawn curtains, and half the homes are missing their residents, most cars are confiscated, and people wake up, eat, and sleep in constant terror. Walls of schools are spray painted with anti-invasion messages, pamphlets are distributed by the Kuwaiti Resistance, cash is smuggled and distributed to Kuwaitis at mosques, house rooftops are used to shout protests against the invasion and Kuwaiti men, most of whom used to work white collar jobs, now pick up street garbage, make bread at the bakery, and distributed smuggled cash or guns to their neighbors.
New York Pitch Assignments - December 2021
in New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
Posted
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: story statement.
The story follows a Kuwaiti mother as she tries to keep her two unyielding teenage children safe during the brutal Iraqi military occupation. It is told in three alternating points of view: the mother, the drug-addicted teenage son, and the teenage daughter who falls in love with a religious zealot.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT: sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force
In the summer of 1990, the antagonistic force in this novel, a war-hardened, hungry, and bitter Iraqi military force occupies Kuwait, a rich and peaceful neighboring country. The goal is to subjugate the protagonist, her family, and everyone in the country to Saddam Hussein’s rule by any means necessary. They harass, steal, and humiliate Kuwaiti citizens at checkpoints. As the Kuwaiti resistance movement builds, and efforts are made by the natives to poison, shoot, and plant bombs that kill occupying soldiers, the invading army becomes increasingly brutal, using random imprisonment, beatings, torture, and even death to break the will of the people. One of the soldiers shows up at the home of the protagonist, seemingly in peace, and demands cooked meals. He is mocking and disrespectful, but never quite seems violent, except in those moments, when light humor turns dark, and his hand hovers over his pistol. He straddles the line between sympathetic and horrifying. No one knows his intentions.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT: breakout title
1) The Daughter of Kuwait
2) Every Single Grain of Sand is Ours
3) Desert Daisy
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: comparables for your novel
Genre: Literary fiction / Book club fiction
Thematically, this novel is in the vein of A Place for Us and The Lies We Hide. I imagine the book belongs on the same bookshelves that carry Isabel Allende, Elif Shafak and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s books. Like me, those authors wrote novels that explore family dynamics, feature strong female protagonists and are set against non-western backgrounds.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound
During a military occupation, the line is blurred between protective and humiliating as a mother tries to protect her headstrong children from the invaders and their own choices. In this family-centered literary drama, characters struggle with rage, helplessness, the balance of traditional versus liberal customs, and the betrayals small and large to which the occupation drives them.
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: inner conflict & "secondary conflict" involving the social environment
Amal, the mother, wrestles with how to handle her son’s addiction. She doesn’t want to tell her husband because he is prone to violence, and she doesn’t want to seek help from family or friends because it will scandalize her son. She handles everything on her own, which is not handling it well at all. Her resentment toward her husband’s blissful ignorance and lack of involvement grows. The son, Sami, does not see himself as addicted and thinks his mother is protective to the point of being humiliating. He wants to join the Kuwaiti Resistance and fight Iraqi soldiers himself but he is only 17 and an addict. The daughter, Zaina, is in love with a zealot who refuses to marry her unless she changes her lifestyle to become more conservative. She loves him, but is conflicted about his request and she resists it. The invasion separates her from him, but she still seeks him out, at all costs.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail.
Setting: Kuwait, in the summer of 1990. When the novel begins, it is the warmest time of the year and temperature easily hits 100 F. The main characters, Amal and her two children and husband, live in a medium-sized villa with a front yard that has a large thirty-year-old palm tree. In date season, the palm tree births enough dates to share with the whole neighborhood. The villa sits at the mouth of a cul-de-sac shared with a small mosque and twelve other houses – newer structures, all flat-roofed and in varying shades of camel. A couple of owners tried to make their homes look like palaces adding oversized columns and decorative urns – an attempt at grandeur that fell painfully short given how small the two-story houses were. Other homes used up every square of footage permitted by the municipality, making no room for parking, and forcing all their guests to park on the street, thus thinning a road that barely fit two cars side-by-side. The only unbuilt plot in the neighborhood, a sandy rectangle facing the protagonist’s villa, hosted street cats that sometimes hissed and growled and swatted each other to assert reign over the trash. When they tussled among themselves, rolling around, kicking, biting, and screaming, the whole neighborhood heard it. All the houses were cuddled together, and there was hardly any room between the protagonist’s and her neighbors’. When it’s quiet, they could hear everything.
Five times a day, the muezzin’s voice is heard through the mosque’s minaret, reciting the Islamic call to prayer. The men in the neighborhood shuffle out of homes, and head to the neighborhood mosque. It is so safe in this neighborhood that people often sleep with their doors unlocked. Everyone knows everyone.
This neighborhood setting changes when Iraqi Republican Guard storm Kuwait and invade the country. Checkpoints are placed at different street entrances and cars are stopped and inspected. Soldiers are seen at the local supermarket and tanks sometimes show up in the street. Kuwaiti Resistance members remove the signs on the streets and homeowners remove the plaques on their doors to make it difficult for soldiers to find their way or know who owns which home. The neighborhood turns from a peaceful neighborhood to one where people sneak peaks behind drawn curtains, and half the homes are missing their residents, most cars are confiscated, and people wake up, eat, and sleep in constant terror. Walls of schools are spray painted with anti-invasion messages, pamphlets are distributed by the Kuwaiti Resistance, cash is smuggled and distributed to Kuwaitis at mosques, house rooftops are used to shout protests against the invasion and Kuwaiti men, most of whom used to work white collar jobs, now pick up street garbage, make bread at the bakery, and distributed smuggled cash or guns to their neighbors.