Hope

            The taxi driver from the Gare de Lyon was like one of those cheap rides for toddlers outside a supermarket which, for only a small coin, kept going long after the fun had worn off. Eve deposited her monosyllables into the conversation and the man spoke for minutes at a time, French that only made its way to Eve’s understanding in sly bursts, like mice creeping into a house in autumn. After a few minutes, she realized that he was a person who would talk with or without encouragement and was relieved to give up the chore of understanding him.

            Paris went by in a startling mix of the mundane and the spectacular. There were rows of rubbish bins and traffic and then suddenly the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower; a group of neon-splashed teens and then a long avenue of pleached trees with a monument at the end. Eve wondered if it were a sort of psychological test. Would taking your rubbish to the curb be ennobled by a view of the Arc de Triomphe or would the Arc de Triumph be cheapened by your rubbish? They drove through a canyon of pale gray houses, then a deeper canyon of uglier modern buildings and then a searing flash of green and they were out of the city and suburbs, and zipping through countryside that was a little too well-organized to be beautiful.

            Eve’s eyes lost focus in a blur of greens. She tried to feel the significance of her presence here, but felt only a wary sort of exhaustion. After a while, the trees seemed older, less orderly. There was a billboard by a river advertising Duran Duran at le Palace two years ago. It had red letters stamped over it saying Annulé.

Canceled.

            Eve shifted in her seat. She felt a bit sorry for this place and bit insulted on its behalf. She prodded her loyalty to the village as if it were a bruise. How big was it? How deep did it go?

1. FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement.
    

Eve returns to her adopted family’s French country home to see what she can learn of the parents who abandoned her there as a newborn. She discovers the diary of twin sisters and tracks their lives as they escape the crumbling chateau where they were born, to the English boarding school they attend, then a glamourous summer in Capri and finally life as the muse of a Parisian fashion designer. Eve must solve the mystery presented by the diary in tandem to the mystery of her own origins.

 

2. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them.

 

Petra has the physical strength and the ruthlessness to be the dominant twin, but Vivienne has the advantage of understanding social cues and norms. Mostly they depend on each other for emotional support and affection, but Petra’s obsession with their beautiful and absent mother threatens to upset the balance they achieve by themselves. When their parents divorce, their mother casually offers to take Vivienne and leave Petra to her feral existence with their father. The girls, who were eavesdropping behind the drapes erupt into the room at this news and run outside toward one of their havens. An accident sends Vivienne into the well, and by the time she’s brought out she is no longer in the condition to go with their mother. After the accident Vivienne despises their mother and Petra doubles down on her obsession. She pursues a career in fashion because their mother had had ambitions in that industry. Vivienne struggles to be supportive of Petra without encouraging Petra’s desire to seek their mother’s approval and affection. The mother is a casually destructive force throughout the book, but the reader is also aware of the threat that Petra represents to Vivienne.

  

3. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed).
    

THICKER THAN WATER

WELL BOUND

 

4. FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why?
    

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo explores the glamourous past through the eyes of a damaged and beautiful character. Likewise, the story is told in two chronologies and multiple voices.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart has a similarly unreliable narrator who turns out to be hanging out with the imaginary ghosts of her beloved cousins. In THICKER THAN WATER, at the end the reader will realize that Vivienne, who is present through her diary, drowned in the well at age 14. Petra took over Vivienne’s life after her death and continued to write her diary as if they were both still alive. Petra changes from an antagonistic force to a sympathetic character.

5. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication.
    

Eve was abandoned as a newborn at her adopted family’s country house outside of Paris. When she returns eighteen years later to learn what she can of her birth parents, she falls into the mystery of twins who overcame a feral childhood and an accident in a well to become successful in the 1960s Parisian fashion world. As Eve untangles the identities of the twins, she comes closer to her own origins.

 

6. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction.

Vivienne and Petra are living together in Paris in the late sixties. When they were children it was always Vivienne’s job to get whatever they needed from adults, but now Petra’s powers of repulsion have been reversed and she is beautiful and magnetic. Petra works with Ciro, a fashion designer. It’s a job that she pursued, in part, to impress the girls’ mother, who had failed ambitions in that industry. Petra hates to be called a muse because it is too passive, and she has her own ambitions. Vivienne is acutely in tune with Petra’s uncertainties regarding her role with Ciro. At the same time Vivienne is unsure of her own role anymore. She used to be needed to translate between Petra and the rest of the world. She had been the one with promise and ease with authority. Her own insecurity makes it difficult to unpeel possible jealousy from her role as Petra’s protector. Ciro keeps promising Petra the opportunity to design a jewelry line, but then makes it impossible for her to have time to do it. Vivienne points out that Petra is not progressing at all but does so knowing that her critique of Ciro undermines Petra as well.
 

Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it?
 

Harriet is Eve’s adopted father’s niece. She was a lonely child who liked to spy on people and record their secrets. As an adult, she is still lonely, and her inquisitiveness comes across as creepy. Eve catches her poking around Eve’s room, sneaking through a back hedge and trespassing in the chateau. Eve has to hide her discoveries from Harriet because Harriet’s reactions are unpredictable. Eve is not sure if Harriet is merely unpleasant or a true danger. In the end, Harriet’s instability puts both their lives at risk.

 

7. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it.

 

1947 Petra and Vivienne are born in a bathtub on the second floor of a moldering chateau outside Paris. Their grandmother hires a nursemaid, but when the nurse stops getting paid, she leaves, and the girls are left to wander the house and grounds without supervision. Cook hobbles around the kitchen making organ groans and telling myths. Father is in his study rattling his needles around on a silver tray. The girls sleep in a nest of sheets they’ve collected from the furniture that was not being used, and they put together clothing from the closets of their dead ancestors. When their mother visits from Paris it is like sunlight pouring through a cleft in dark clouds. She swans into the drawing room and throws chocolates at them until she grows bored of their presence. Sometimes they are allowed to help her bathe in tub where they were born.

PAST AND PRESENT Outside the chateau are a series of special places that Petra and Vivienne tend to every day. There are the stables, the culvert, the Old Oak and the well. The well is in the center of a stone patio that has become jumbled with age and the growth of brambles. It is made of yellow stone with an ankle-high lip and a rotting wooden cover. On the north side of the grounds are the woods where the villagers poach whatever wildlife they can find. Down a shadowy allee of oaks is the road to the village, which is small, close-knit and wary of the family in the chateau.

PAST AND PRESENT Just down this road is the house where Eve was abandoned. It is a symmetrical stone house that has served as the holiday home for three generations of Eve’s adopted English family. There are the usual closets of wellies, amateur paintings, bookshelves of light reading and family photos, but the innocent surface hides deep, generational unhappiness. Harriet seems to lurk around every corner guarding her father’s legacy, although Eve suspects that is not her true purpose. There is a wooden folly down on the bank of the river, which is where Eve finds Vivienne’s diary. The river and the folly are a refuge for Eve, who loves to swim and is anxious to stay out of Harriet’s way.

1962 In the diary, Eve reads about Baswell, an English boarding school that is attended by Vivienne and Petra as well as an unnamed peer whose notes about the twins are stuffed into the diary. The girls sleep in a large dormitory in a Victorian house. Each student has a bed with a small desk beside it and her trunk at the end of the bed. The campus is like a small village with walking paths instead of roads and gracious shady trees.

1964 When Grandmother dies, Petra and Vivienne use their inheritance to rent a flat in an unpopular area of London. They stay there on school breaks because their father has died, and their mother is always traveling. It is furnished with cast-off pieces that were left behind or found in the street. It smells of old fry up, but it has nice light in the afternoon. Petra develops her collections there, including her wardrobe, cigarette butts, and shards of glass she finds on her rambles through London.

1965 Their mother invites them to Capri with her new, wealthy husband. The hotel is perched on the side of a hill and filled with wealthy families. The girls stay in a room off of their mother’s suite and develop a routine of tennis, walking, poolside, then dinner. Vivienne is at the pool and Petra is in it, when Petra’s beauty and style attract the attention of Ciro, the designer. He invites Petra to a party on the yacht of some middle-eastern royalty and their friendship grows from there. When the girls leave the island, the unnamed note-taker (whom Eve has figured out is Harriet) reports that the closet of their room was filled with hooks, and that each hook had a little bit of hair on it.

1967 In Paris the girls buy a third-story apartment overlooking a small park with dirty grass and stunted trees. The apartment is a quiet spot in the maelstrom of Paris. The atelier is serious and busy, with a strict hierarchy. The parties the girls attend are hedonistic and beautiful. One pivotal scene takes place at the party Ciro has arranged to celebrate Petra’s first line of jewelry, Abattoir. It is in an apartment up in Montmartre, which overlooks Paris. Ciro has done everything in black, white and red. There are snowy cheeses surrounded by black garlic and red rose petals; blood sausage and slices of tongue and mistletoe berries the color of corpse fingertips. The jewelry is displayed in glass boxes along the length of the table.

1986 The river is the final setting. It has been raining for days and the river has climbed all the way up to Harriet’s father’s studio. The small wooden pier is bucking and snapping underwater. Muscular bands of current are sleek with power. The storm pauses to gather its breath and then sends a blast of wind straight at the lowering old tree on the riverbank. The tree tips, slowly at first and then all at once and a disk of roots springs up. Eve watches as the rain reveals white shapes in the latticework of roots. It gives the impression of something familiar. Eve recognizes a human skeleton, both arms outstretched towards the river.

 

 

FIRST ASSIGNMENT.docx