A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 26

This is the 14th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.

Today’s story: How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity.

Hannah Upp disappears for weeks at a time, forgetting her sense of self. Can she still be found?

Hannah Upp had been missing for nearly two weeks when she was seen at the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan. Her friends, most of them her former classmates from Bryn Mawr, had posted a thousand flyers about her disappearance on signposts and at subway stations and bus stops. It was September, 2008, and Hannah, a middle-school teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public school in Harlem, hadn’t shown up for the first day of school. Her roommate had found her wallet, passport, MetroCard, and cell phone in her purse, on the floor of her bedroom. The News reported, “Teacher, 23, Disappears Into Thin Air.”

A detective asked Hannah’s mother, Barbara Bellus, to come to the Thirtieth Precinct, in Harlem, to view the Apple Store surveillance footage. Barbara watched a woman wearing a sports bra and running shorts, her brown hair pulled into a high ponytail, ascend the staircase in the store. A man stopped her and asked if she was the missing teacher in the news. Barbara said, “I could see her blow off what he was saying, and I knew instantly it was her — it was all her. She has this characteristic gesture. It’s, like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t you worry. You know me, I’m fine.’ ” Another camera had captured Hannah using one of the store’s laptops to log in to her Gmail account. She looked at the screen for a second before walking away.

The sighting was celebrated by Hannah’s friends, many of whom were camping out at her apartment. They made maps of the city’s parks, splitting them into quadrants, and sent groups to look in the woods and on running paths and under benches.

According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, which Hannah often referenced, she was an E.N.F.P.: Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving, a personality type that describes exuberant idealists looking for deeper meaning and connection. Five of her friends used the same phrase when describing her: “She lights up the room.” A friend told the News reporter, “Everyone you talk to is going to say she is their closest friend. She has no barriers. She was raised to trust and care for everyone, and she did.”

Two days after Hannah was seen at the Apple Store, she was spotted at a Starbucks in SoHo. By the time the police arrived, she had walked out the back door. The police recorded sightings of her at five New York Sports Clubs, all of them near midtown, where the detective on the case presumed she had gone to shower. In an article about her disappearance, the Times wrote, “It was as if the city had simply opened wide and swallowed her whole.”

On September 16th, the twentieth day she’d been missing, the captain of a Staten Island ferry saw a woman’s body bobbing in the water near Robbins Reef, a rocky outcropping with a lighthouse south of the Statue of Liberty. Two deckhands steered a rescue boat toward the body, which was floating face down. “I honestly thought she was dead,” one of the men said. A deckhand lifted her ankles, and the other picked up her shoulders. She took a gasp of air and began crying.

The article goes on to describe Hannah’s condition:

“She was given a diagnosis of dissociative fugue, a rare condition in which people lose access to their autobiographical memory and personal identity, occasionally adopting a new one, and may abruptly embark on a long journey. The state is typically triggered by trauma — often sexual or physical abuse, a combat experience, or exposure to a natural disaster — or by an unbearable internal conflict.”

As I scanned the article, my first thought was to focus the narrative point of view on the people searching for the missing person. Then I pivoted and imagined the story being told from the missing person’s perspective. And then I settled on this:

Tell the story from both perspectives.

A person (Melissa) suddenly goes missing. Wallet, cellphone, purse, car keys, all sitting on the floor of her apartment. Her girlfriend (Samira) and fellow graduate student friends search for Melissa. The narrative shifts from one to the other.

Three things interest me:

• The state of Melissa’s personality while under the influence of a dissociative fugue state.
• The use of dramatic irony in that the audience knows where Melissa is wandering, while her friends do not.
• How the city seems to “swallow” Melissa, one building to the next … one street to the next … here, then gone … then over there.

A couple of thoughts to add some tension:

• Melissa could be a diabetic and start to decline physically without her medication. This sets into motion a ticking clock in that Samira and friends need to find Melissa before she lapses into a diabetic coma.
• What if Melissa’s fugue state is a trusting, innocent soul who finds herself falling in with the wrong crowd, drawing her closer and closer to real danger.

There you go, my 26th story idea of the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would YOU do with it?

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.