The soap within the novel

The soap that features throughout my story is called The Parks. It is a critical part of the background, providing me with a continuing source of incident and character. It is, in short, an integral part of the world of my novel and so I need to have a fairly good idea of what it’s about. It’s important to get this right because I have a suspicion that I can use the story unfolding in the soap to help me advance the story of my chief characters.

The Parks is a daily soap opera broadcast in the early evening on one of the country’s most popular tv channels. It concerns the shenanigans of two families pitted against each other in classic soap style. The families each head architectural firms that, across the arc of my novel are in competition to design a major new skyscraper or perhaps retail development. The winner of the competition for the project will earn millions and millions and capture a long-term advantage over the other competing firms. For each of our two families, victory will also constitute a very firm poke in the eye to the other. It is, in short, a Montague and Capulet situation.

Juliette (Blair Fairchild in the The Parks) has just graduated from university with a law degree and is absorbed into the firm of which her uncle and aunt are head. Her aunt, in fact, is the series Super-bitch. Being new to the firm – and not having lived with her aunt and uncle – she is unaware of the details of the feud between the families, although she knows that there is bad blood between them. When she’s approached by a young and attractive man (Simon’s character posing as Track Barron – Track is one of the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin’s improbably named children – each one of them sounds like a character from a soap, don’t you agree?), she doesn’t realize who he is, and allows herself to be flirted with and finally seduced by him. He’s been instructed to find out through her what the concept for their design of the project is. He is, in short a spy – reluctant, as we discover, but a spy nevertheless. Blair only ferrets this out after she has fallen in love with him…

Okay, so I realize that I’ll have to write a number of scenes from the soap featuring Juliette and Simon’s characters. I can use these as is in the novel – in fact, I think I could even include them in their television script formatting: that would be novel and would add a certain air of verisimilitude to the story.

But what should the scenes consist of?

And then an idea strikes me: perhaps I could work out the beats of their on-screen romance, fleshed out in a series of five or six scenes, that trace the classic arc of a romcom relationship, from what in the parlance is called “the cute meet” through the complications and crises of their relationship as it is buffeted by the competing claims of other possible suitors and circumstances… I think this has great merit, because it’ll enable me to write scenes (from the soap) that contrast wonderfully – and frequently ironically – with the progress of Simon and Juliette’s relationship in “real” life. In other words, just as Simon and Juliette are at each other’s throats over her landing the role of Blair in the soap, Blair and Track can be flirting away as they meet in the soap… And so on.

I get so excited by this notion that I immediately sit down to write the first scene.