The Lab

I figure I can use this space as an exercise board - there probably won't be finished product here for awhile yet.

In that vein, I introduce Stephan ? Jack ? (I still don't really know his name yet). He's the protagonist of one of those story vignettes that was magically 'revealed' to me when I was in rehab and doing writing workshops as therapy.

I'll call him Jack for now.

Vignette - outline

An American-Beauty type wife stalks out of her suburban paradise after giving her routine-driven, though modestly successful, husband an ultimatum.

In the leadup to this we learn more about the wife and ballet career she left behind, and we begin to learn why the attentive, personality-type-Blue man she married is now personality-type-Gold drone.

Jack is very organised, detail-oriented, thorough, responsible. He is father to two young children (don't know their names yet), a girl (7) and a boy (3). He's a forensic accountant whose work with multinational companies frequently takes him abroad. His real-estate agent wife is very much driven, career-minded, ambitious - especially after her recent return to the workforce. They have the perfect Manhattan life: 36th floor duplex condo with a great view of the skyline and kidproofed Kohler furnishings, cocktail parties and trips to the Hamptons for her, nanny for the kids, poker nights and private gentlemen's clubs on the weekends for him.

Jack, at 36, is also coming to the end of a long and lucrative career as a professional assassin.

Jack joined the Army Reserves out of high school in order to make his way through college - on graduation he re-enlisted and joined the Rangers (5 years), with a subsequent stint as CIA paramilitary (2 years) before his return to New York.

Jack's occasional coke and hashish use (habits picked up in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) is becoming a problem at exactly the wrong time - his wife has just started a clandestine affair and it worries at the edges of his mind that something is missing from his marriage.

He observes his wife's slightly strange reactions in the presence of her suitor (flushing, rushed speech, overfriendliness) without realizing the cause. Inf act, he has so deeply submerged his intuition in domestic affairs that it only dimly intrudes upon his train of thought and he thinks her reactions are to do with something he's done !

Conversations with Jack follow. I need to know more about this guy. Question One: how did you get so good at compartmentalizing ?

You're narcissistic, phlegmatic at the core. But on the outside, you're a Bill-Clinton-type triangulator of men's moods, and a chameleon who adopts a mask to suit every situation.

In a flash-forward we see wife killed in a horrible, horrible auto accident.

Note on devices:

• write Jack from the outside in. No interior monologues to begin with; write the equivalent of a slow framing/tracking shot that pulls in close, all the way inside his head
• later, write from first-person perspective as he comes to realise that he is a jilted husband