On April 28th, 2023, Joriemar released her 7th Episode story: "The One That Got Away" to an eager audience. However, the journey to this project began nearly 2 years prior at a time of bleak uncertainty for the author. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: a memoi...
Building the world of "The One That Got Away" consisted of many intricate layers that involved focused planning so that the story felt cohesive, easy to follow, and engaging. I definitely took my time putting the pieces together and rearranging things until it all assembled a completed picture. My first task was setting up the framework of the plot. Since this was going to be a story centered around the passage of time, I needed to determine from what time period the MC would be traveling from. It made sense for me to tap into our world today and use that as a the lens that would allow the main character and the readers to make sense the past -- life in the 1950's. Kind of like how my experience watching "Grease" unfolded. I time traveled to the past while watching the film with only my knowledge of our modern day living, thus making the journey of revisiting this time era enthralling.
TOTGA would begin in the present -- 2022 -- which honors the year in which this story first came into my thoughts. It was not difficult channeling the characteristics of our time and using it as the forefront of the story from which the bulk of the plot would build from. Unlike my previous stories, with the exception of "Soulmates" that highlights the events of the 2020 COVID pandemic, "TOTGA" would be my first story that explicitly sets the stage in a definitive time line. I used relevant events, pop culture, and everything that was "in" during 2022 and tried to emphasize it through the characterization of the MC and her issues and conflicts. My intention for dramatizing 2022 was so that the reader could really appreciate and see the strike differences between the 2 time periods when the shift happened.
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The decade of the 1950's in America is known as the "atomic age of science and technology". World War II had just ended and subsequently gave rise to a cultural boom that expanded our capabilities as a people and redefined the "American Dream" for many across the country. The immense economic growth that came after the war changed modern living for the better marking this era as "The Golden Age of America". One of my goals with TOTGA was highlighting these truths throughout the story for I wanted the reader to understand the space from which the characters were coming from. Researching this time period in history was enlightening in various aspects but I could not ignore the fact that many injustices did prevail and was something that was very real for millions of people -- specifically African Americans and people of color.
The Civil Rights Movement that began in the mid 50's attempted to address the systemic and cultural prejudice that existed against African Americans and colored people throughout the country. This movement really defined the trajectory of how race relations, politics, and the conversation of human rights would unfold till this very day. As a woman of color, I felt like this was something I could NOT ignore when writing TOTGA. Even though I was taking a bold new approach to story telling, I still wanted to conserve my integrity as an author by acknowledging these elements of truth when sharing this project with the community. It is a fact that African Americans and colored people were prohibited from being in spaces designed for Whites. It is a fact that schools were segregated and Blacks could not ride at the front of public buses because integration was a radical idea. Denying the truth and pretending these atrocities did not occur, in my opinion, is just as damaging as the acts themselves. When coding the story and visualizing this world, I was very intentional about every detail that went into creating this experience for readers.
