Second Visit to Hawthorne - Feb. 23

              Today I worked with Prince on developing the ideas for his story. Our first task was to try and develop a clear outline for Prince’s story. I had noticed in my original read-through that there were a lot of inconsistencies in storyline and the plot was rather unclear. I got that it was set in a post-apocalyptic world and that it involved aliens, mutants, robots, and humans; but the roles of each were rather unclear – and indeed Prince had not fully flushed out what he intended each of these factions to do within the story. In light of this, we sat down and had a very productive session of brainstorming. I showed Prince a couple of different mind mapping templates and discussed the benefits of having a clear outline of your story already written down. Prince is very keen on keeping his ideas safe in his mind and is not a big fan of the idea of writing things down until they are ready for the story. While this could be manageable for a short piece, Prince keeps talking about making this an epic tale that could span several books. In light of such magnitude, the story is going to need some clear direction which he can follow in his writing.

We hashed out some very interesting plot possibilities and Prince used me as a sounding board for his ideas. I helped him to bridge the gaps in some of his ideas – such as what the purpose of the alien queen might be in coming to Earth in the first place, or why Scarlet needed to combat the robots. We were able to work out a main conflict for the first story – the humans all live below the surface at different levels, the better off you are, the farther underground your residence. Recently, large subterranean mutants had invaded the lowest level of residences, pushing the higher class humans up into the next level, which in turn pushed that level up, and pushed the third level up onto the surface. Our story takes place on the surface where Scarlet and her troupe now have to face the invaders to save mankind. We developed the characters of Scarlet and Bug, and tried to determine their relationships to one another. We also tried to eliminate some of the meandering subplots such as Bug’s incessant need to wander off for no conceivable reason, and to either take them out of the story, or tie them into the action in some understandable way. Prince has come up with some very interesting ideas and found a way to lay out the groundwork for where he wants his story to go.