Overdoing it With the Plot 12/30/02

Peter Jenkins walks with the kind of confidence one would imagine Frank Sinatra had. His chin was always up and his hazel eyes were usually squinted by the sun. Even on overcast he could be seen squinting up at the sky, as if her were waiting for something to fall or perhaps for the clouds to part so God could tell him all his sins will be forgiven and that he has no reason to worry. Peter smiles when he thinks these thoughts, for as much as he ignores Beth’s incessant chatter, he did worry more and more as his sins piled up like bad checks in the bank of eternity.
It was a beautiful sight, Susan thought when she would catch Peter squinting up at the sky and softly smiling. Little did she know that he was questioning his own morality. To Susan he merely looked happy and free. The freedom was really all Susan was in awe of, happiness would surely follow.
Today the day Susan was awakened with the reminder of her own painful imprisonment, it was difficult to find Peter beautiful as he stared smiling into the overcast sky. Today the sight angered her to the point of repulsion. It was unfair and unkind of him to flaunt his freedom in such an insensitive way. Susan’s thoughts ran to the juvenile idea of depantsing Peter, letting him feel the anguish of being stripped down, bare. Susan shook the idea out of her head, not merely because of the childish implications, but more because she was sure the whole event would leave Peter entirely un-phased. He would shrug his shoulders, pull up his pants, and walk away with a whistle. Susan knew this and so when she did walk by him on the way into the zoo, she simply gave him a hello that was only loud enough to divert his attention from the sky.
He turned to her with a smile that grew bigger with recognition. For all her ill thoughts, Susan could not help but to smile back and an overwhelming urge to hug him so that she could fell all the warmth that shone in his eyes. “How’ve you been?” Peter asked and Susan responded with small talk and gossip which kept Peter amused until they reached the main office of the zoo.

This is part of a story that I worked on for years. I came up with the idea my senior year of high school and I started writing about it my freshman year of college. This story went through a number of reincarnations with parts of the story being told from different perspectives. Finally, it became third person close with the focus switching from character to character. The real problem that I was having with this story is that it started out as something that was going to be short and simple but then more and more characters started coming on board and, next thing you know, I was working on a novel. I was definitely not ready to write a novel and this one was quickly turning into a convoluted mess.

The plot was really simple. An ape got loose at the zoo on Girl Scout day. There were just too many things that I wanted to get in there. The main character, Susan, was a zookeeper who was perpetually distracted by her secret life of writing romance novels (a career she wasn’t really proud of). Under her were Peter, who loved his life regardless of the situation and on this particular day was busy questioning his lifestyle, and Beth, a bible-thumping, born again Christian who spent most of her time attempting to convert the people around her. The visitors at the zoo that this story focused on were Virginia Belvedere, a former pageant winner and her daughters Sarah, who would rather be playing little league football, and Kaitlyn, who is following her mother’s footsteps into the pageant world and who only feels important when she is the center of attention. Other characters include Patrick Belvedere, Virginia’s estranged husband who only wants to be a good parent, and a pregnant hippie, who really didn’t have that much bearing on the rest of the story but who I think I was trying to make symbolic.

Anyway, the story didn’t work out but I’m keeping the plot idea just in case I decide to use it later. It might work, as long as I do a lot of trimming. If you read this blog more often you’ll probably see other parts of the story because I did work on it for so long. I just think that this is a great example of how things I really want to work out sometimes never do and how sometimes I sabotage myself by trying to achieve too much with such a little space.