Okay - so yes, you're got something getting stated here, but you don't have an ending as far as I can tell - or rather it's not an ending I understand as one. I think you've got to think about the sort of story you're telling - it's in a tradition. There is something creepy about a mother recreating her dead daughter, and if this was a horror film or similar, we'd soon learn that trying to 'play God' in this way is a dodgy quest. I can't help feeling that you're under-using the diary element, and also that a diary often contains secrets that parents no nothing about.
I'm just going to chuck some responses out there: the first is, logically, the mother would have to be a scientist or a roboticist to begin with; the idea that she's just 'building a robot' in the cellar is too much of an ask. I think this is easy enough to achieve as part of a flashback - i.e. you show us somehow that this is her line of work. In fact, making her an ambitious robot-scientist might be the key to making this whole thing gel completely...
I know this is a pretty dark idea, but what if there was a relationship between the diary and the death of the daughter: so, let's imagine that in the flashback, the teenage daughter's body is in fact found in the river - presumed drowned by accident. It's a total tragedy, because it was the girl's birthday - and the mother is guilty, because she was busy at work on her robot projects and was late home that night - so guilty in fact, she nicks stuff from the lab to rebuild the daughter in the cellar.
So, the mother remakes the daughter, but the robot is just a blank, beeping thing - she needs to give it more of her daughter's personality - so she goes to her room, finds the daughter's diary and in a bit of sci-fi shizzle, the diary is uploaded into the robot's brain. Success, the robot is like her daughter! The robot talks by quoting from the uploaded diary. Everything is great - until the moment when the robot leaves the house on what would have been the daughter's birthday: the mother follows, and watches, in horror, as the robot walks into the river: "Stop!" the mum cries. "What are you doing?" The robot says "My mum prefers the company of her robots. She never comes home. She never says goodnight. It would be better if I was around" - and with that the Robot walks into the river and drowns - in a recreation of what *really* happened to the scientist's teenage daughter... It wasn't an accident after all...
OGE 23/01/17
ReplyDeleteHey Paris,
Okay - so yes, you're got something getting stated here, but you don't have an ending as far as I can tell - or rather it's not an ending I understand as one. I think you've got to think about the sort of story you're telling - it's in a tradition. There is something creepy about a mother recreating her dead daughter, and if this was a horror film or similar, we'd soon learn that trying to 'play God' in this way is a dodgy quest. I can't help feeling that you're under-using the diary element, and also that a diary often contains secrets that parents no nothing about.
I'm just going to chuck some responses out there: the first is, logically, the mother would have to be a scientist or a roboticist to begin with; the idea that she's just 'building a robot' in the cellar is too much of an ask. I think this is easy enough to achieve as part of a flashback - i.e. you show us somehow that this is her line of work. In fact, making her an ambitious robot-scientist might be the key to making this whole thing gel completely...
I know this is a pretty dark idea, but what if there was a relationship between the diary and the death of the daughter: so, let's imagine that in the flashback, the teenage daughter's body is in fact found in the river - presumed drowned by accident. It's a total tragedy, because it was the girl's birthday - and the mother is guilty, because she was busy at work on her robot projects and was late home that night - so guilty in fact, she nicks stuff from the lab to rebuild the daughter in the cellar.
So, the mother remakes the daughter, but the robot is just a blank, beeping thing - she needs to give it more of her daughter's personality - so she goes to her room, finds the daughter's diary and in a bit of sci-fi shizzle, the diary is uploaded into the robot's brain. Success, the robot is like her daughter! The robot talks by quoting from the uploaded diary. Everything is great - until the moment when the robot leaves the house on what would have been the daughter's birthday: the mother follows, and watches, in horror, as the robot walks into the river: "Stop!" the mum cries. "What are you doing?" The robot says "My mum prefers the company of her robots. She never comes home. She never says goodnight. It would be better if I was around" - and with that the Robot walks into the river and drowns - in a recreation of what *really* happened to the scientist's teenage daughter... It wasn't an accident after all...