A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 9

This is the fourth 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 #1: Look at news sites.

I’ve been demonstrating that in this series, every idea from a news article. While you can surely keep an eye out when reading the NY Times or LA Times, you’d better believe there are plenty of writers already eyeballing those pages. So troll smaller newspapers. Offbeat news sites. Have you ever checked out Weekly World News? I used to subscribe to the print version way back when and actually wrote a spec based on one of their articles: “Couple Adopts the Child From Hell.” Unfortunately the spec script “Problem Child” beat us by 2 weeks: same premise.

Today’s story: From Scrubbing Floors to Ivy League: Homeless Student to Go to Dream College:

It’s before sunrise, and the janitor at Burns High School has already been down the length of a hallway, cleaning and sweeping classrooms before the day begins.

This particular janitor is painstakingly methodical, even as she administers a mental quiz on an upcoming test. Her name is Dawn Loggins, a straight-A senior at the very school she cleans.

On this day, she maneuvers a long-handled push broom between rows of desks. She stops to pick up a hardened, chewed piece of gum. “This annoys me, because there’s a trash can right here,” she says.

The worst, she says, is snuff cans in urinals. “It’s just rude and pointless.”

With her long, straight dark blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses, Dawn looks a bit like Avril Lavigne. But her life is a far cry from that of a privileged pop star.

She was homeless at the start of the school year, abandoned by her drug-abusing parents. The teachers and others in town pitched in — donating clothes and providing medical and dental care. She got the janitorial job through a school workforce assistance program.

She’s grateful for the work. But it’s where she’s going next, beyond the walls of Burns, that excites her most. She applied to four colleges within North Carolina and one dream university. She’ll graduate soon before heading off, leaving her dust pan behind.

Last summer, Dawn was invited to attend a prestigious six-week residential summer program, the Governor’s School of North Carolina, at Meredith College in Raleigh, 200 miles east of Lawndale, to study natural science. It was a field Dawn had never studied before.

The program is reserved for the state’s top students.

Putnam ferried Dawn to Raleigh to attend the elite program and took her shopping, making sure she had the clothes she needed. Other faculty members contributed funds, too.

Putnam worried Dawn’s home situation could worsen while she was away. “We weren’t even sure where her parents were at that time. And there was an eviction notice on the house,” she says. “We kept telling her to get everything she could; we knew this was a possibility.”

Dawn saw her parents for 30 minutes during the middle of the summer program during a short break. They talked about her school and how she was doing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “It was just a regular conversation,” she says.

She wouldn’t hear from them again for weeks.

As she prepared to leave the summer program, she kept calling her parents’ phone, only to learn it had been disconnected. Putnam picked her up and brought her back to Lawndale.

“When I returned, my grandmother had been dropped off at a local homeless shelter, my brother had just left, and my parents had just gone,” she says. “I found out later they had moved to Tennessee.”

Her voice is steady, matter of fact. “I never expected my parents to just, like, leave.”

Dawn was abandoned.

“I’m not mad at my parents. My mom and my stepdad both think that they did what was best for me,” she says.

Hit the link above to read this remarkable story.

Now does this sound like a Lifetime movie? Perhaps. Of course, nothing wrong with that. But consider these narrative elements:

* Underdog: Young woman with zero life advantages competing at Harvard with fellows students who have had enormous benefits.

* Fish-Out-Of-Water: Homeless youth at an Ivy League school.

* Metamorphosis: The impact of education on the young woman, both scholastic and social.

* Strange Sojourners: Other characters with whom the young woman becomes friends.

* Hero’s Journey: The young woman experiences the Extraordinary World of an Ivy League school.

Plus there’s this: A great starring role.

Is there a way to tell this story in a big enough way to work as a feature length theatrical movie?

How to do that?

How to structure that story? A first act as a homeless woman, then transition to Harvard? Start in Harvard, then bounce back and forth between present and past?

How would you approach this story?

Another idea for you. And it’s free!

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. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

Comment Archive