How's your aura? A window into Hallie's planning...

HALLIE EPHRON: It's What We're Writing week again and at last I have something to report. I'm planning to write... That counts, right? 

I’ve long wanted to write a character based on a family friend, a Hollywood screenwriter at a time when “woman screenwriter” was an oxymoron. A fascinating person, she wrote the 1954 movie ‘Father Brown – Detective” starring Alec Guinness. That same year her husband died of cancer just before she gave birth to their second child. She went into a deep depression. She was treated – saved she would say – by electric shock therapy and LSD.

She went on to get a doctorate, taught parapsychology at UCLA (yes there was a department in the 60s), and wrote extensively about electric force fields in the human body that could be detected through “Kirlian” photography.

I imagine my version of her(I call her Helen) quite elderly, reincarnated (I think she’d have liked that) in modern-day Brooklyn, living on the top floor a brownstone. In the apartment on the floor below lives her daughter, and her granddaughter lives on the parlor floor. Maybe there’s a communal kitchen and family room on the ground floor.

The walls of Helen's sunny apartment are hung with “Kirlian” photographs she’s taken of auras or unseen energy force fields. Shadowy hands with the fingertips and palms glowing with silver, cactus-like spines. A human head with a halo of glowing purple and gold tendrils. A maple leaf outlined in neon green. Some of the pictures she’s taken are so inexplicable that she’s convinced she’s captured energy force fields emanating from the astral plane – perhaps the dead sending messages to the living.

While Helen holds weekly séance-like gatherings in her apartment, her daughter is a scientist and a skeptic. Her granddaughter is a marketing executive for a company that manufactures and sells skin care products made of (ballparking here) natural quartz crystals.

Into their midst walks a woman who claims she’s been in communication with a beloved deceased relative who is desperate to share a secret.

As usual, I’ve got more house than story, but you can see how I’m trying to set up three characters like separate force fields in competition with one another.

So what’s going to happen? What's the secret? Whenever my mother didn't know the answer but wanted to pretend that she did, she’d say Nous verrons (we shall see). She liked to throw in the odd bit of French here and there. I think I’ll give Helen that same annoying habit.

So what do you think: electric force fields in the human body? Does it seem too farfetched, or might a smart but emotionally needy person believe in it?