A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 21
This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.
Today’s story: Activist Finds Missing Grandson 36 Years After the Government Abducted Him.
Estella Barnes de Carlotto, the founder an Argentine human rights group dedicated to finding missing children, said Monday that she has located her own grandson who was abducted by government forces over thirty years ago.
Carlotto founded The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1977 to help locate hundreds of children who were kidnapped during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” a period of violent government crackdowns against political dissidents during the 1970s. An estimated 30,000 people, including 500 children, were taken during the military dictatorship. The missing became known as “Los Desaparecidos” or “The Disappeared Ones.” Many of the children were raised by the same military officials who kidnapped them or even killed their parents.
Carlotto’s grandson, who her other daughter Claudia described as “happy and emotional,” was identified by the media as 36-year-old Igancio Hurban. His mother, activist Laura Colotto was taken into custody while she was still pregnant and executed with bullets to the head and stomach two months after giving birth. Hurban, now a music teacher outside Buenos Aires, was given to another family, who raised him as their own.
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“Thanks to everyone, thanks to God, thanks to life because what I wanted was not to die until hugging him and soon I will be able to hug him.”
There was a movie in 1982 called Missing starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Plot summary: “When an idealistic writer disappears during the Right Wing military coup in 1973 Chile, his wife and American businessman father try to find him.” So this is terrain traversed before in Hollywood.
Think of the universal themes in this story: Persistence. Belief. Hope. Family. And fundamentally an underdog story of the Individual vs. the System. Other movies with these dynamics in play include some notable ones including The Shawshank Redemption, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Papillon.
You could seek out the life rights to the actual story. Or you could fictionalize it. And if you go that route, why not genre bend it a bit. Instead of a feel good story with a happy ending, what if you went in the direction of a Protagonist who had lost a son or daughter, kidnapped in some foreign country, then spend the script not only following the character’s physical journey, gathering clues, but focus on their descent into a psychological morass. Lost in their obsession. And perhaps a twist ending: What if the son or daughter actually died years ago and the Protagonist created a false history of the kidnapping in order to distance him/herself from the truth of the past? This way, the Protagonist has some hope, albeit based on a lie… but over time they have come to believe it to be true. The very idea of kidnapped becomes a metaphor as their grasp of reality is ‘kidnapped’ by the tragic turn of events.
But you play the search and backstory as real all the way through the story. The Protagonist could have put together a file of clues and facts s/he has gathered along the way which seem to suggest the kidnapping is real. However that could all have been fabricated by the Protagonist. Moreover you could enter into the mind of the Protagonist to ‘see’ the kidnappers, give chase to them. And like Parcher (Ed Harris) in A Beautiful Mind, we can learn toward the end, it was all a fabrication, concocted by the Protagonist in their desperate attempt to avoid the truth that their child is dead.
I imagine a bleak ending here: The Protagonist meets death. But at least that way, they can rejoin their child… at least in their dying delusions.
Dark story. But hey, we live in disturbing times. Might fit the zeitgeist.
There you go: My twenty first 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.
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