Words to Live By

Creator: Brian Carmody
Genre: Drama
Age rating: 13 and older
When a widowed father of three young daughters faces eviction by his landlord, he races to save his family from homelessness while he juggles a sick child, new love, and his street gang past.
Project collaboration: By Permission
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Synopsis: Kyle Murphy, a widowed father of three girls, faces eviction proceedings by the end of the month unless he can bring his payments current. He is a former Army Sergeant, now working as a Warehouse Foreman. He’ll never catch up to his bills if he simply works more overtime hours or a night job. He considers returning to the street gang connections of his youth for the extra money he needs.

He has fostered a secret talent however, by writing love poems for his wife. For the two years since his wife’s death, he has visited her grave weekly to rest his latest love poem, sealed in an envelope, at her headstone. His wife’s death, and the mounting medical bills resulting from his youngest daughter’s battle with asthma, have buried Kyle under a mountain of debt.

In the midst of his rapidly-approaching eviction, Kyle falls in love with Summer, a younger, sassy co-worker. Kyle still loves his wife and feels guilty about falling in love with Summer. He’s not ready to move on from his wife’s death and start a new relationship, so rather than tell Summer about his feelings for her, he hides behind his poetry and secretly leaves poems for her at her desk.

Kyle fights the stress of managing a warehouse, raising his daughters, and the impending eviction.

Summer, by chance, learns that Kyle and his daughters will be evicted from their apartment at the end of the month unless he gets caught up on his rent. Summer tries to persuade him to sell his poetry to earn the extra money he needs to save his daughters from homelessness. They argue, but Kyle realizes that he is running out of options.

Desperate he tries a few things that he swore he would never do: return to organized crime on the one hand, and sell the love poems he wrote for his wife on the other.

Summer arranges for Kyle to meet with an editor-friend of hers. The editor has only one contract to award and he’s already been considering three other writers. As a favor to Summer, the editor allows Kyle to submit his work and compete for the contract.

Kyle has to write and submit a robust package of high-quality poems to the editor over the course of a single weekend, just to be considered. On the evening Kyle plans to start writing, he and his daughters are mugged at a local convenience store. His asthmatic daughter has a severe attack, and Kyle is forced to write his poems at her bedside in the hospital.

He writes them, and attempts to submit them in time to meet the editor's deadline. If Kyle doesn’t win this publication award, and the money attached to it, he doesn’t have any other way to save his family from homelessness.

Kyle opens his mail on his front porch and recognizes a letter with the editor’s return address. He opens the letter to learn if he was able to sell his poetry and keep his girls sheltered.

In the closing scene, Kyle, again stands at a grave. We discover whether Kyle's asthmatic daughter recovered from her latest hospitalization, if the family was held together, and what their future together will look like.

Latest Work

  • Script 2 - Brian's 2nd Draft
    12/28/11
    Creative Notes:
    In this revision, I incorporated several people's feedback.
    1. Fixed formatting issues.
    2. Reduced instances of "talking head" scenes.
    3. Revealed Kyle's violent side a bit earlier in the story, for balance.
    4. Made Kyle's "loan collection" scene more of an internal struggle for Kyle's soul, rather than simply a health set-back. This reveals more about Kyle's character.
    5. Modified ending.
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