Thinking about my next character for "B" Before and After

I did quite a bit of research for my first part, Susan Orlean, in Adaptation. She is a real person so there were tangible materials I could look at to get inside her skin or at least the skin that Charlie Kaufman wrapped around this character.

For the movie, Before and After, my character is a fictitious person. The plot goes like this. It involves a family, Dad, Mom (Dr.), teenaged boy and adolescent girl. It's entitled Before and After because they lead a somewhat normal life before a crime is committed. The son is accused of murder. He did, in fact, commit the murder but it was an accident and in self defense. He runs into hiding and during his absence, the father hides evidence, unsure of his son's guilt or innocence. When the police capture the son, he is silent. Eventually, the Mom is forced to close her pediatric practice.

Now I don't need to have a child who is a criminal to imagine how a mother would feel in this circumstance. To think of your child as possibly going to prison or losing your husband for hiding evidence would be devastating, not to mention the deep concern over whether or not your child had remorse. What I'm trying to grasp about this woman is her silence. She does little to stop her husband from hiding evidence. She waits until very late in the game before she finally tells the complete truth. My challenge here will be to get inside the head of a Dr. who is rather quiet. She is calm and even when panic stricken, unusually silent. I keep using words to describe her lack of communication and I think that's my struggle because that is so ANTI Nancy T. Well, as you can tell by my many posts, keeping the words to a minimum just isn't my style. I will continue to explore how a woman such as I've described here would finally express her emotions and the contrast between that and how I would do it. This should be really interesting.

Oh and guess what ... completely off subject... we now have 373 hits on the Adaptation video! Please send your friends and tell them to check it out. I want to make that number grow!

As I read and reread this post, it sucks. The writing is weak and I just don't feel like fixing it. See?! I can't even be quiet about that. Can you imagine me holding in all that secret stuff about my family? I think not.