A story is situation + characters. Your theme is mid-life crisis but you don't have a situation. Your Main Character explicitly has no goals. How could we fix that?
A story idea occurs to me as a situation, for example ISIS takes hostage a thousand tourists in a hotel, plane crash survivors in a life raft in the freezing North Pacific, the CEO of the world's biggest internet company has a stroke and although her brain is still sharp she's being treated as a child. You have to have what indie film maker Heinrich Dahms calls "a bitch of a dramatic dilemma." Start by thinking what is the worst thing that could happen to your Main Character, from her point of view, and think of ways to make it even worse. She hates losing, so make her lose. She thinks love is only a distraction from the main prize, so make her fall in love, and to turn the screws tighter, make her fall in love with the panhandler she ignores every day on her way into work.
It's unrealistic to suppose that overachievers ever run out of goals. Usually they are selfish goals, so if you want to write human drama, she could rescue her drug-addict grandson, having to get down and dirty to do so. She could back a private space venture that she's unaware is actually developing an intercontinental nuclear missile aimed at Washington. Okay, so nobody cares what happens to Washington anymore, make it New York.
I'm sorry, but your human-interest story about a woman at the top with no way left to go but down is too generic. Rediscovering childhood goals or a childhood sweetheart has been done over and over. Take away all the props beneath her and make her start at the beginning again.
Always look for stereotypes and turn them upside down. Your Main Character is rich, beautiful, ruthless, workaholic, and has a gym-honed body that can pull teenage boys. That's a stereotype. Give her Tourette Syndrome or something.
265 week(s) ago