Darkness Falls

The Plot

Premise

1. Setting: The town is Brightly Colorful, Texas.
The time is Now.

2. Protagonist: Rally Witts, a world-class painter, whose self-image is wrapped up in his ability to paint on canvases.
His flaws include being self-absorbed to the point of being pompous and looking down on others.
His goals are becoming the highest paid visual artist in the world with the best of everything

The secondary protagonist is Jessie Fide, Rally's live-in girlfriend, is rather nondescript, except that she is pretty, which attracted Rally to her. Her life catchphrase is "I'm Rally's girlfriend. I'm not talented, like he is. I'm just glad he loves me."
Her flaws include discounting her own talents, while finding her identity and value wrapped up in Rally.
Her goal is to be the best girlfriend, "and maybe one day his wife," while trying to help him achieve his goals.

3. Conflict: Their "house of cards" folds when Rally Witts has to "feel" his way after work one night to the growing realization that he is going blind. The "Why" for both of them is completely wrapped up in the concept that "Life only has value when you're providing a service or a commodity that others want."

4. Antagonist: Karen Tumech, Rally's second-grade teacher, is his ever-present negative voice, showing up on the scene to pick apart Rally's paintings when he is at his best. She stays in his head to heap on depression, despair, and criticism when it comes time to reevaluate and re-coop his life, after losing his sight.

Just for Fun: "When giftedness becomes self-centered, The Lord often changes the playing field to turn our focus Godward."


Beginning:

1. Rally Witts is one of those interesting personalities who can paint anything he sees with a nearly photographic clarity. Even as a child, Rally could sketch the family dog onto a piece of drawing paper, usually in a half hour or less. He fooled his Mom early on to the extent, that she asked, "Where'd you hide your digital camera? I didn't know you had enough money to buy one. It has an amazing black & white mode." He waited to tell her the truth until Mom had told three or four of her besties. "Mom, it's not a photograph. I sketched that picture this morning." Then, her chin really dragged the floor.

Rally has been such a master at sketching, and painting,...in short, visual realism, since his childhood, that he wins every art competition that he enters. Sometimes his parents have had to gently persuade him, "Maybe let's not enter to competition this year. The organization leaders have told us they are losing money, since no one but you enters anymore."

Rally only needed to mention that he was looking for a job as he was talking with the President of Smithers, Harris & Adams Graphic Designers, when President Smithers rolled out the red carpet for him, giving him a corner office, while changing the name of the firm to Smithers, Witts, Harris & Adams Graphic Designers. Rally literally lifted the firm to first place in their large city of Brightly Colorful, Texas.

2. Rally is an athletic young man, along with being a gifted artist, whose identity is wrapped up in his art. His inciting incident happened rather gradually over the course of a couple of months, "October and November, as I recall. We only lived a couple of miles from the office. So, I'd take my work shoes in my backpack, leaving early enough to walk to work in order to save my shower, and then I'd run home. This saved on the cost of parking, and I finished my exercise by the time I got home. I'd have the whole evening free to be with Jessie."

Pausing to take a deep breath, he removed his dark glasses in order to put his face in both hands, and then pull at his hair in a nervous fidget. "I didn't think much of my dimming eyesight because it was the time of year for the sunset to grow earlier and earlier in the afternoon. Besides, we worked under bright lights at the office because we were fastidious about every nuance of color in our graphics, that had to be perfect, before we would send them to the printers. However, I started to get alarmed when I couldn't see the sidewalk under my feet as I ran home for the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. I got home, virtually by muscle memory because my feet knew every inch of the route, but when I walked through the front door, and couldn't see Jessie's face, I crumpled to the floor, and just cried. How am I going to provide for us? I'm blind. How will I ever paint again?"

Thus, we have the premise of the story, Darkness Falls. Life is the greatest challenge when we see no way out of a problem.


Rising Action:

Rally wanted to be more like a normal boy when he was a teenager. So, he played a lot of sandlot baseball after school. He developed into quite a good right fielder. However, one day he had to run quite a distance to shallow, right center because he had a better angle on it than the second baseman did; he, too, lost the ball in the late-day sun, backing away, covering his head with his glove. However, the ball hit him in the back of the head, a part not covered by the glove. This "rang his bell" pretty badly, and "he was out for about three minutes," according to the other players on his team.

When he came to, he had some trouble seeing because the hit affected the visual cortex at the back of the brain. He sat out the next fifteen minutes, until it was time for his team to take the field, again. He finished the game with no real issues, and he pushed concern out of his mind, thinking, "That was not all that bad."

At home that night, he painted an entire canvas in about an hour with no apparent detractions from his talents. So, he pushed the incident into long-term memory, forgetting about it.

Years later, as a named part of Smithers, Witts, Harris & Adams Graphic Designers, Rally Witts started to notice some anomalies in his work, imperfections that few could detect, but he could. He made the necessary corrections through muscle memory, but he began to wonder if there was a connection with his baseball incident.

After 18 months, the issues he found in his work were so pronounced that he felt he might lose his job. He told Jessie, who had to sit down at this news.

Rally continued to work, and he even painted at home to hone his skills despite his deteriorating condition, but soon the other partners, including the Big Boss, President Paul Smithers, noticed.

That night, that he had to make it home by muscle memory, he knew he was done. Jessie called President Smithers the next to tell him of Rally's condition, and Rally was summarily dismissed.

Now, Rally would have to find a new way in life without a great salary, prestige, and daily praise from his professional world.

Learning to create as a blind man would not be easy, but he was convinced that he could still support Jessie and be a great painter.


Climax:

Rally Witts permanently lost his sight 15 years ago, but in that amount of time, his spiritual eyes were opened. As a new creation in Christ Jesus, he married Jessie Fide, having been forgiven for the sinful life they were living, having been restored to new purity, making Jessie an honorable woman, and Rally an honorable man.

Rally still had a wealth of artistic painting skills and experience. Though blind, physically, his art was mentally vivid. Disability income provided for both of them, but not nearly to the level that Rally had become accustomed to in his former career. They had to "tighten their belts" for a few years, but the utilities and mortgage got paid. They even ate so well that Rally had to increase his mileage with Jessie as his running guide. He experimented with the various paint media, landing in the realm of acrylics mixed with gesso for a quicker-drying format, and oils for a longer-drying process. Gesso and Oils had the characteristic of being 3D to aid the placement of his hands and comprehension of the overall image, even though he could not see it himself. Still, he had to trust Jessie's eyes when tactile placement failed him.

The art of painting blind is probably the greatest success of this novel. Rally learned to rely on muscle memory regarding the application of paint on canvas. Seeing the image with his mind's eye, being aided by Jessie in the areas of auditory cues and hand-placement finesse, Rally learned how to create amazing paintings without ever seeing them himself. Though he had to give up on the idea that he could ever again be a painter of photographic realism, he did become one of the most sought-after impressionistic painters in the state of Texas, and the region of the Southwest.

All the while Jessie was being Rally's eyes in the process of Rally's paintings, she learned to paint through observation of his process and his actual lessons of how to paint. Jessie became a sought-after painter in her own right while collaborating with Rally to create a unique line of nearly real impressionism.

Darkness Falls is intended to be an allegory of relational trust and mutual benefit with the goal of honoring the Lord with all the heart, soul, and mind.