mhnicholas

Marcy H. Nicholas Pre-Event Responses July 30, 2023 1. Story Statement After being denied tenure, Oliver must find a way to create a new life outside of academia and beyond the Northeast by discovering a new home, new friends, a new love interest, and new experiences. 2. Antagonist Force At this point, I would characterize my novel as nascent. I haven’t thought about an antagonist yet. At the beginning of the novel the Dean of Liberal Arts serves as one force of antagonism as he tells Oliver that she has been denied tenure. In addition, Oliver has problems with another character Cameron, a privileged academic who does get tenure the same year that Oliver does not. I don’t know if Cameron could continue to intersect with Oliver or not. Why would she? Oliver is certainly divided between wanting to “return” to the life she knew in some form (at another school) or to lean into this new life in Florida. Ultimately, the novel is about one woman finding a new “tribe” of people around whom she can build a life. So the antagonist would have to be someone who is trying to mess that up in some way or who wants to convince her that she’s not equipped to do this or who is encouraging her to leave this new life. I don’t think that could be her parents or someone in Florida. Maybe it could be a long-term friend from her hometown; maybe it could be a guy she went to grad school with who always had a crush on her and now is trying to reconnect with her and convince her to be with him and become an adjunct. 3. Breakout Titles Finding Home Leaving, Arriving, Staying Three Months in Del Ray Beach (Or Whatever Beach in Florida I decide to set the novel 4. Comparables Lily King’s Writers and Lovers because it’s about a woman around the age of my character who is struggling with her identity and career while in the midst of grief about her mother. King writes in first person so it’s a good model of first-person POV. My character is grieving about a loss as well. I read After the Parade by Lori Ostlund a long time ago. She uses the journey archetype in the novel, which is what I am doing and what so many works of literature do. My character’s journey is not the organizational strategy of the novel, but in the tradition of the journey archetype, my character does meet characters that she must learn from once she gets to Florida The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I love this novel because even though Erdrich writes in third person, readers are still in the head and heart of the main character. Erdrich doesn’t interject these expository passages to “inform” her readers. The story is not that comparable to mine, but the novel is a good model of third-person point of view. 5. Hook Line with Conflict and Core Wound After being denied tenure, a thirty-five-year-old Oliver must deal with the shame she feels about this failure and confront her own inadequacies before she can accept and embrace her new life, friends, and love in Florida. 6. A. Sketch of the conditions for the inner conflict of the protagonist. Oliver’s inner conflict has to do with her feelings of shame and inadequacy after she is denied tenure. She thinks she must find another job, which will give her the credibility she is longing for. She begins to experience life outside of the walls of academia and is enjoying it, but her inner conflict keeps her from fully committing to the life that has been evolving around her in Florida and from fully accepting that she deserves love and friendship. One possible scenario. She spends the weekend with Michael her new love interest, but on Monday morning she gets an email from a university wanting to set up a video interview. She completely blows off Michael. Or maybe the antagonist, this former graduate school colleague, invites her up for a supposed job interview, and once she makes the trip, he was only asking her so he could convince her to move in with him and teach as an adjunct. Sketch of hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. A good question. I’m not sure if I have a good answer to this. Maybe she experiences the conservatism of Florida or the tension between transplants—the whole population boom in Florida in some way and wonders if she can fit in Florida. Maybe she goes to a book reading, asks a question, and gets embarrassed about something. 7. Sketch of Setting The prologue begins in Binghamton, New York at a small liberal arts college (fabricated). Then a year later, Oliver the protagonist, leaves Binghamton, thinking that she is going to drive the four hours to her parents’ house in Pennsylvania, move in with them, until she finds another job. However at the exit for York, she makes a split-second decision to keep driving to Florida, specifically to Del Ray Beach, (?) where Stan Sanders, a retired colleague lives. Oliver lands in a beach motel for a couple of nights and then ends up rooming with Stan for a while. In a very rough draft of this novel that I wrote a few years ago, I noticed that I was playing around with that tension between the uptight and dark and gloomy Northeast and the more open and sunnier Florida. The main character must “come out” in a sense from that dark and gloom of the northeast and of her life to embrace the sunny and new life that she can have in Florida. I should also add that the novel will cover about three months: June through August. Just to add: What a great execise! Loved doing this as it revealed for me the gaps I have in my thinking.