A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 13

This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Last week I provided a daily explanation about why you should make it a habit to be generating story ideas. This week, I’ll give you some tips on how to come up with stories.

Tip: Obituaries.

When it comes down to it, people live extraordinary lives. And obituaries summarize those lives in nice, neat packages. For some examples, go here.

So if you’re stuck for story ideas? Hit the obits.

Today’s story: The lives of the immigrant women who tend to the needs of others.

A recent New Yorker article on a woman named Emma, the mother of nine children living in the Philippines:

She made the equivalent of fifty dollars a week, which was barely enough to feed her own children. Edmund worked on his family’s farm, earning money only after harvests. Every week, Emma held a family meeting to discuss the household budget. After each daughter summarized her needs, Emma gave her money, but it was rarely enough. Emma kept asking for advances at work. “At some point, it just looked like I was begging,” she told me.

Emma’s oldest sister, Virgie, a teacher, also struggled to provide for her children, and in 1999 she moved to New York, where she became a nanny. With the money she earned, she sent her three children to college and bought a new house. Virgie was known as an O.F.W., an overseas Filipino worker. The label confers status in the Philippines, which receives more money in remittances than any other country except India and China. Since the nineteen-seventies, the government of the Philippines has promoted labor exportation as a strategy for relieving poverty and alleviating the national debt. A tenth of the population now works abroad, supporting nearly half of the country’s households and leaving some nine million Filipino children missing a parent. In the past decade, three-quarters of O.F.W.s have been women; former President Corazon Aquino has praised them as “the heroes of our country’s economy.”

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Emma and Nella found that in the eyes of many employers Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers, as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference. Some two hundred thousand women are employed as domestic workers in New York State, a number that is expected to rise in the next decade, owing to the aging of the population, the entrance of more women into the workforce, and the lack of publicly funded services for the very young and old. A 2012 survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that two-thirds of nannies, housekeepers, and home health aides were immigrants, half of whom were undocumented. Through their work, New Yorkers are free to have a public life, while the women working in their homes remain invisible: domestic workers spend long hours in private apartments, and are often paid off the books, with few of the legal protections afforded workers in other fields.

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Emma has not been home to see her family in 16 years.

There’s a story here, grounded in the life experience of immigrant women who provide childcare and end of life care to people much more well off than these workers. The movie Brookyln, which came out in 2015, was a moving story of a young Irish woman who immigrated to Brooklyn in the 1950s and it touched on some of the same issues: Feeling out of place, separated from family, adapting to a different culture. This contemporary story, however, has much more edge: The threat of deportation, exploitation by employers, exposure to crime in the lower-class neighborhoods in which these women are forced to live.

Yet there is also the survival spirit and the special bond of these women, each of whom shares this bifurcated life: Traveling from a world of near-poverty to work in multi-million dollar homes. These women have social functions together, cover for each others’ shifts when someone falls ill, loan money to each other, provide comfort when the work is too much and the pain of separation from families back home become too burdensome.

These women are largely invisible. Here is a chance to tell a story which puts a human face on their experiences.

As far as a narrative approach goes, this may seem an odd association, but 12 Years a Slave comes to mind, the saga of a young mother who comes to the United States to make money to send back home to support her family, especially her children. We follow her over a decade, balancing her two families: The one back home which she can only hear via phone calls and see via Skype, and the one for whom she works as a nanny. Trace the relationships she has with the husband, wife, and children, the latter with whom she becomes extremely close. Explore the nanny subculture. The drama of things going awry back home in the Philippines — perhaps a daughter gets hooked on drugs or the husband begins to have affairs — yet unable to leave because if she does, she will be unable to return to the U.S.

This is a tough sell. But you know what? It could be as compelling as hell. It reminds me of the wonderful indie movie Children of Invention by Tze Chen (you can read my 2014 interview with Tze here). Stories like these deserve to be told.

There you go: My thirteenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

What would you do with it?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.