Assignment 12: brainstorming

Required: Freestyle Brainstorm ▼

Spend at least fifteen minutes writing whatever ideas come to you about your plot, characters and setting.

Bonus: Extended Brainstorm ▼

Add at least fifteen additional minutes to your freestyle brainstorming time.

My plot will be driven by Evangeline. I have to keep the focus on Evangeline and keep all these other characters and the support staff that they were meant to be. My main problem will be highlighting their actions without them taking over the story. One of the biggest flaws in my writing is taking the focus off my lead. I see that happening in a lot of my stories and it will often lead to stagnation and dead-ends.
My plots can be supported by decent plot lines, they just have to keep Evangeline center and let the scenes, settings and the story arc coalesce around her.
Ideas to highlight minor characters yet keep the focus on Evangeline would be her running from time line to time line. Somewhere along the line, she will have to smarten up a lot. Her 2nd grade education is not going to cut it in moving through the dimensional shifts. And I will also have to figure out how to retain the memories in her run-back. I do see her as landing in Kate’s timeline and then going backward from there to different historical landmarks. Two of these will have to be in the future, and the rest will be as she progressively seeks her way home. Now at the same time, there are other forces operating to make sure all participants are returned to the correct timeline and dimension. There may or may not be a desire to retain the memories of the shifts. But I think it must be so because Evangeline has to get a backbone to get the reader to like her and root for her. She has to be able to form some kind of family unit in each line to anchor the story and make it enticing to the reader.

I will have to eventually tackle the question of how much memory is retained and how much is replaced. Will there be a Swiss cheese for brains effect? Will it be permanent? Will it be temporary? What happens if Evangeline misuses the memories she retains? There has to be some kind of safety switch that gets turned on and off to make all of this possible. They say history is inviolate, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so if I want to turn a college town into an environmental hazard in the blink of an eye. How will I make all of this revert back? How will the ladies want to revert back. Each one is gaining something precious in the dimensional shifting, as well as losing something that they cannot explain. That will be the key to holding the reader’s attention.
I will have to do a load of world building not only for the ideal world, but for the bio hazard one. Someone with more than passing interest in science will have to step in to assist Royal Blanchard to pinpoint the event horizon that landed his world in a horror show. Some kind of communication will have to be established with Kate and get her input in how to correct the problem. And how do I explain why she can communicate, but can’t return? I need her to anchor the 1858 timeframe so that her own timeline can be restored, even if she can’t be in it.