John Swinburn

From ScreenwritingU.com

My first memory of my clairvoyance is from my early childhood. I was five years old when I sensed my father’s automobile accident.  As I sat at the dinner table with my mother and my little sister, I suddenly saw the windshield of his car shatter and heard crunching metal. I heard an unfamiliar shriek come from his mouth, then saw him slump against the broken steering wheel. I blurted “Oh, no, Daddy’s hurt!”

I began to cry. Wail, actually. The scene was so fresh and real, it was as if I’d actually been in the car with him. I just knew he had been injured. I tried to tell my mother, but she just said, “There, there, honey, it’s going to be okay. Daddy will be home soon.” But he wasn’t home soon. It was almost a week before he came home, his head bandaged and his leg in a cast.

That first experience tested my mother’s skepticism about clairvoyance, but it didn’t eliminate it. In fact, she didn’t really believe in my ability to perceive events across time and distance until I was eleven years old. She thought my statement, just before my eighth birthday, that the baby Uncle David and Aunt Grace had been expecting would die in childbirth was coincidence. But, three year later, on October 10, I had a vision of a major earthquake. I told my mother about the quake and described the damage it would cause. I told her sixty-seven people would die and that cars would be crushed as the upper deck of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed onto cars below. I remember what she said when I told her what I’d seen: “I hope to God you’re imagining this, Sandro. It’s one thing to have a gruesome imagination; it would be horrible to really foresee such awful events.”

We were sitting in front of the television to watch the third game of the World series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants when it happened.  The pre-game commentary was underway when the screen went blank for a few seconds and then a world series graphic appeared. We felt the quake, of course, but for some reason it wasn’t as bad for us as we’d learn later it was for others. On television, the announcers’ voices could be heard for a couple of minutes against a backdrop of pandemonium. Suddenly, the screen shifted to a television news desk with the anchor, who began describing early reports of damage. She was joined by a reporter who stepped in to say a major fire had erupted in Oakland.

The anchor then encouraged viewers to shut off their gas supply lines. “If you don’t know how to shut off the gas to your house, look in the front of the phone book; it’s described right there in the section about what to do in the event of an earthquake. Now that we know of at least one major fire, it’s important that you take immediate steps to turn off your gas.”

My mother’s ashen face revealed her terror. “Sandro, get the phone book!”

Take a breath and write what’s buried deep down. Write what hurts most and has the greatest potential to destroy you. Reveal things you’ve never told another living soul. Commit to the page experiences you wish you’d never had. Tell of things you’ve done for which you’d trade your soul to undo. Share so much of yourself that you feel alone and naked and afraid of every glance cast in your direction. Bare your desires and wishes and dreams, even the ones you find silly or infantile.  Expose the weaknesses and strengths that drive you. Do all of this so that the rest of us know we’re not alone in our personal versions of hell, that we’re not the only ones who live life as the contemptible bastards we believe ourselves to be.

But if you can’t reveal these things, if you don’t have the strength and fortitude to expose yourself for who you are, at least create characters based on what’s hidden inside. Bring them to life and tell their stories, their full stories, so we can see there are others like us, even if they exist only in your imagination. Write about the monsters, but give them depth; let us see the youthful bully helping a crippled child cross a busy street. But don’t hide his flaws; let us see him shake down someone else for lunch money.

Another damn dream.  But this one might have opened up a channel to a plot for a novel.  I intended to write it down yesterday, when I awoke from the dream. But I did not. So I’ve lost some detail that I wish I hadn’t. Such is life.

I won’t go into the now-fuzzy details. Instead, I’ll get right to the plot.

A German man, rearing his one-year-old child alone, is convicted of a serious crime. Before sentencing, he flees with the child, first to Portugal, then to England and, finally to the United States, collecting forged birth certificates for the child along the way. The man quickly blends in to U.S. society, using an assumed name, and (using forged papers, of course) gets a good job. A few years later, he marries an American woman.

The boy is brought up in a middle class household. He does well in school.  Life is good all the way around.  Until the father’s secret is revealed. And the boy’s world explodes.

Because his father brought him to the U.S. illegally, the authorities decide they must deport the boy back to his homeland, Germany.  The boy knows no German and has no known relatives in Germany.  But the law is the law.

A parallel plot story has been taking place all the while, with another man and another little boy with only his father. This man, though, is from Honduras and he has no criminal record. He illegally enters the U.S. and, like his German counterpart, uses forged papers to get a job. He does well in the job market, gets married to a naturalized American citizen who was born in Canada and brings up his little boy as an American citizen. When he is found out, the little boy faces the same dilemma; he is to be deported to his “homeland,” Honduras, where no one waits for him. The law is the law.

The remainder of the novel chases the stories of the two boys and explores how their efforts to fight deportation will encounter radically different challenges based on where they were born.

The story will confront the conflicts between enforcing the law and changing it.

If I pursue this, it will take a HELL of a lot of research and effort to write as an interesting story that’s not too preachy, nor too dull.