Hey everyone! This post is just a plot point of my story and will include some ideas I have for symbolism that could be integrated.
Ideas for symbolism:
- Using wind to represent life (it is natural and light, in how it rises and falls.)
- Using a cool quote: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May – William Shakespeare (Cool because my mom’s name is May)
- Referencing the stages of grief somehow
- Physical distance in reference to emotional closeness
Exposition:
- Main Character: Me: a sensitive, reflective individual who has a distant kinship with my grandfather.
- Setting & Atmosphere: Shifts between intimate personal spaces (a family home, a train cabin) and evocative public rituals (a Beijing temple, a weathered graveyard) with nature as a constant presence (wind, weather, natural decay).
- Context: My grandfather’s life, once ordinary and now quietly obscured
Point of Attack:
- The sudden confrontation with the reality of death and loss
- Central Conflict: I must come to terms with her ambiguous grief for a man who was both intimately related yet fundamentally a stranger.
- To understand what it means to mourn and accept a familial loss that feels as fleeting and ungraspable as the wind.
Rising Action One:
- I attend a solemn ritual at a Beijing temple
- I see his portrait
- The sensory details must be prominent
Rising Action Two:
- Family dynamics
- A disruptive phone call brings news of my grandfather’s cancer
- Recollections of my grandfather’s life
- I weigh the memories of both comfort (my grandmother’s warm welcome) and alienation (my grandfather’s silent, distant presence)
Climax:
I don’t exactly want a climax to this story, but I’m imagining that part of it would be my mother’s outburst in the train. It would not be written in a passionate way.
Falling Action:
- I have a final conversation with my mother
- Understanding the natural world—the persistent, ever-changing wind—serves as a metaphor for the passage of time
Resolution:
- Acceptance
- The story closes on an open-ended reflection, inviting the reader to acknowledge that the dead live on as part of the natural, ever-present flow of life. Much like the wind that both carries and erases their traces
That’s about it! Thanks!
