Letter I originally sent my sister in Texas...
December 11, 2006
Updated, February 2, 2007 and February 10, 2007
I am trying to write a radio drama for a competition. I have a lot of inspiration lately.
I had an idea for the story already. I was working on one for 15 years or so. The idea got kind of stale. This idea is fresher.
I borrowed the name “Josephine” from my sister’s old “dolly”. After I last talked to her on the phone, (Dec. 3, 2006) I needed to vent some grief. [She was telling me that they were going to be selling my grandparent's home.] I wrote a few paragraphs that expressed what I was feeling. It served as the basis for what my main character “Josephine” was thinking. I incorporated those paragraphs into the script.
Those original paragraphs are about a family in West, Texas. (They are from the Lums Chapel of my “dreams”, which has a town square and a down town area ["main street" or "high street"]. The real Lums Chapel was between Littlefield, and Whitharral, Texas. There wasn’t that much to it.) The patriarch grandfather has moved to a nursing home and they are selling the “ancestral home”. In the mean time, Josephine gets a job opportunity that entails her going to London, England to help an actor write his memoirs. She reluctantly goes to London, while the family issues are always in the back of her mind.
I wrote to my sister because, I wanted to see if the family in my story was too much like our family. I have tried to write it so that there is the love of our family. But yet the fictional family is vastly different from ours. If the fictional family was too much like ours----if she thought it would have offended someone, I would have had to come up with another idea. I have tried very hard to make it a different family yet I want it to have something of the “feel” that ours has---if that is possible. This fictional family isn’t in the story too much anyway. They aren’t actual speaking characters. Josephine’s mother and father fight like cats and dogs. There isn’t anyone exactly like these two in our family. The fighting is humorous in a way. The whole point is to show these two getting their act together. Then they end up in marriage counseling. The “Momma” and “Daddy” aren’t speaking parts either.
The real point of the story is to have Josephine be an example to the actor of what true Christianity is. Even if she doesn’t preach to him, she can maybe show him a verse now and then. But the main point is for her actions to be the sermon.
I just didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes with the storyline. I didn’t want anyone to think my characters were modeled on them. I haven’t modeled any character on a real person---except for certain aspects of the actor and I’m trying to model him on generic actors you read about.
Thanks!!!!