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Jennifer Colliau

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Posts posted by Jennifer Colliau

  1. The Act of Story Statement

    A gallery assistant in a bitter marriage, unable to progress in her career and frustrated with her inability to connect with her teenage daughter, finds a time portal to her adolescence and thinks she can change her past to better her present.

     

    The Antagonist

    The external antagonist is Scott, Alexandra’s husband, who is disappointed in how his life turned out and resents anyone around him who is trying to better themselves or their circumstances. He is the personification of inertia. He wants to do as little as possible: be a passive parent, slack at work, play video games rather than talk to his wife, not participate in disciplining their daughter.

    The secondary antagonist is herself, who in the past made poor decisions and resulted in her dissatisfying present life. She has hubris to think that she could make so many changes in her past when she is still the same flawed person. Yes, she does make some of the changes she sets out to. But she makes other bad decisions because she is a normal, broken person.

     

    Title Options:

    Perspective
    The Peach Tree
    From The Inside

     

    Comparables:

    Set within one person’s life as in Ken Grimwald’s Replay, our protagonist tries to make better decisions her second time around. The story revolves around how one woman’s time travel affects her story and the people around her, but the focus is on her internal experiences and struggles, as if Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander met Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends.

     

    Core Wound and the Primary Conflict:

    I‘m not entirely sure the difference between this and the Act of Story Statement. Mine is:
    A gallery assistant in a bitter marriage, unable to progress in her career and frustrated with her inability to connect with her teenage daughter, finds a time portal to her adolescence and thinks she can change her past to better her present.

    Character: Gallery assistant
    Core Wound: Feels that her decisions growing up brought her to her present crappy life
    Conflict: Bitter marriage and bad parenting
    Distinction: Adolescent time portal
    Setting: Present/25 years in the past


    Conflicts:

    Primary Conflict: Alex travels into her past and relives her adolescence so that she can avoid the expulsion and subsequent aimlessness that she believes led to her bad marriage and unsatisfying career. After making these changes, the time portal is destroyed and she has to relive her entire adult life. Her hubris made her think that she could play around with this time portal to make her life and didn’t consider unintended consequences. After living a different young adulthood, she tries to orchestrate meeting her husband and conceiving her daughter again, but of course she is a different person by then and she is unable to make it happen. She realizes she will never see her daughter again. She is finally free.

    Secondary conflict: She has an ongoing flirtation with a man at work. She admits her feelings to him and he rejects her. When she is stuck in her past, she encounters him again, falls for him again, and he rejects her, again. Her preoccupation with him prevents her from one of the things she wanted to correct in this new life: stopping her sister from meeting her future husband, who will die too young and leave her sister an emotional wreck.


    Settings:

    Major Setting 1:
    Present day. An abandoned apple orchard outside of a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where Alex lives with her family. Her husband grew up in this farmhouse, and Alex has never felt like it was hers. Deep in the orchard, after a bad fight with her husband, Alex finds a hollowed-out peach tree, and hides from him inside it. She falls asleep and wakes up in another peach tree a mile from her childhood home in her 16-year-old body.

    Major Setting 2:
    25 years ago. An unincorporated town outside of Gilroy, California where Alex grew up. After testing the mechanics of this portal, she decides to go back and relive a few months of her adolescence to make some changes that will hopefully result in a better career and more fulfilling adult life.

    Other Settings:

    The art gallery where Alex works: She has a crush on a co-worker which tempts her to be unfaithful. She also is trying to work with an upcoming visiting artist that inspires her.

    Baylor Court, a rural lot where kids go at night to get drunk and hook up. She has to navigate high school interpersonal relationships and having sex with her high school boyfriend, neither of which she considered when deciding to go through the portal.

    The artist collective in Germany Alex joins as a young adult. Once she is stuck reliving her young adulthood, she makes the most of it and really starts to pursue her artistic dreams.

    The art camp in Montana that Alex’s mentor helps her attend, and where she runs into her crush from her adult life.

    Chicago, in and around art galleries and cafes, where she has a brief relationship with that crush.

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