Story Telling Unit: "The Meeting" Development

   After brainstorming for a couple of weeks and tweaking my ideas, I have finally come up with the storyline for "The Meeting". My initial idea was to have a boardroom meeting between some representatives of a company or some government officials, but while thinking of main characters and background information the story transformed and started to warp around the main character. The story now shows the main character's daily routine and how a boardroom meeting changes his life completely.

The story is set in a contemporary urban setting (London/Maidstone area) and shows a male in his mid-twenties woken up by his television and alarm clock. This young man is George Figgs, he has a wife and together are expecting a child in the next few months, he works for a company called "Enigma" who specialise in covering up the stories and secrets of celebrities, MPs and anyone else who is under the public eye as court acts like injunctions and super injunctions have become meaningless and useless against the media. One day George is called into a boardroom meeting about a new client, an MP who has spent thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money on his new condo and wide selection of expensive cars. George is put in charge of covering up this story and hiding it from the press and is told that this has to be done urgently and as soon as possible. Soon enough George gets cracking on with covering up the story but later gets distracted when he finds out that he has forgotten that today is his 1 year anniversary of being married to his wife. He quickly leaves work to find a present for Anna (his wife) totally forgetting about his assignment. George manages to find a present for Anna and takes her out to a 5 star restaurant for a romantic dinner and a couple of drinks. The next morning George wakes up dazed to find out that he is late for work and that his story has been leaked to the press and has caused public outrage. He rushes over to work only to get fired by his boss and violently beaten by security guards. He returns home to tell Anna that he has been fired, she asks him what happened but he refuses to tell. The couple break into an argument where George gets violent and physically harms Anna; she runs out the house in tears and phones the police. Meanwhile George shocked by what he has just done has a mental breakdown and crawls into a corner sobbing uncontrollably, police sirens are heard outside the house and the story ends with George on the floor still crying with his head buried in his arms.

The genre that I am aiming for is Dark Drama/Thriller which I tried to show through how a man started out with a happy family and ended up with nothing. This is only the first draft so can and will be edited. Hope the story didn’t bring you down too much.

James