Fiction Friday: Building a Plot

Okay, I think I've incorporated everyone's suggestions (and then some)!

Nicole Benson wants to appear onstage in a Broadway musical because it’s what she’s wanted since she and her identical twin sister took turns playing Annie at the local dinner theater when they were 7 years old AND she’s bored to tears with her job as a bookkeeper AND her ex-husband always scoffed at her dreams. So she packs up her two kids and moves to New York to pursue the dream, expecting the old friends from the dinner theater who are now famous to help her find work. But the only theater job she’s offered is working as the bookkeeper on a new production of Annie.

Disappointed, she hangs around rehearsals looking for opportunities to show the director and cast members that her true talent lies in performing, thinking that will get her a job, but instead a surprise audit by the play’s angel shows that money is missing, and in one day she gets fired, kicked out of her apartment, the cops come looking for her and Children’s Services takes her daughters.

Fortunately, an old buddy who’s playing Daddy Warbucks in the current production offers her a place to stay/hide out, and that takes some of the pressure off.

But not for long, because the cops are still looking for her and Children’s Services has her kids. At her wit’s end, she finally remembers the girls bringing their aunt down to the theater just before the money went missing and realizes she left her sister alone with QuickBooks sitting open on the computer. She sneaks back into the theater, where she discovers that the leading lady has had a nervous breakdown because she’s phobic about mice and someone released a shoebox of them in her dressing room. And she learns her evil twin is about to assume the role of Miss Hanigan. Once she proves that Nancy is responsible for both the missing money and the migrant mice (plus she tends to get a little pitchy in the upper ranges when the weather is damp), Nicole is given the role of Miss Hanigan, her own little girls are returned to her and Daddy Warbucks proposes after Opening Night, but instead of accepting, she finally answers the letter and agrees to go to France.

The one big difference in this version and any of the ones that were submitted is that things go MUCH worse for our protagonist in the middle. It's only by making her life pure hell that she'll grow as a character (and hold your audience's interest).

Thanks to Pseudonymous High School Teacher, Jim Styro, Jan, Rachel Cotterill and Ocean Girl for contributing!