Chapter 144: Thank you…John Wayne?

There are sports I watch every single day – thank you lord for giving humankind the gift of baseball - and sports I watch every four years. These include and are not limited to figure skating and gymnastics. What I love about Olympic sports is a) the women are the stars and b) I learn, and almost immediately forget, a whole new sporting lexicon. Sow Cow, Triple Lutz, Double Axel, and…Back Salto? 

Yet of all the terms that flood my consciousness every other year (given that the winter and summer games are on alternating schedules) my favorite is: sticking the landing.

Sticking the landing, like Velcro and aspirin, is useful in so many ways, and not merely for dismounting from the balance beam or completing a Triple Toe Loop. It does not require familiarity with Olympic sports or even a hyperbolic commentator to tell when someone has stuck the landing like, say, Simone Biles: both feet planted deftly and simultaneously. Nor is it difficult to discern when someone does not – a slight shuffle of the feet and worse still, a plotz on the backside.

I have been using the term a lot these past few weeks with my students. They’ve spent two months reporting their stories and filing weekly reporting memos.  Again, the idea of the class is to choose a photograph of anyone but yourself and report the story in that frozen moment. By now they have written thousands of words, and because I have them write their memos like letters (Dear Michael, this is what I discovered this week…) they have been able to write in their own distinctive voices, unencumbered by the burden of “writing.” 

The penultimate step comes with their writing the first hundred words of their stories; I intentionally do not use the familiar terms of lede and nut graf, because I want them to write as they’ve been writing and not default to what they think journalistic writing should sound like. I read their hundred words aloud – not to workshop, a practice I’m not a fan of, but as an audience test: Is it working? Do you want to hear/read more? 

To those questions I’ve added a third: does the writer stick the landing?

The term came to me indirectly, given that the next Summer Games are not until late July. It was inspired, like so much in life, by a movie: the opening scene of John Ford’s 1939 classic western “Stagecoach.” Take a look:

The sequence takes just under two minutes and several things happen: we see the cavalry; we see a stagecoach; we hear a gunshot; we see the cavalry again fording a river; we hear a voice calling out: hold it. And then, at the 41-second mark we see a man on a horse. The camera zooms in and his face fills the screen. Look right here and no place else, John Ford is saying. He is anointing his new star, John Wayne. 

To quote the late John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist: “Nothing seems wasted, or labored, or tentative.”

Ford is accomplishing a great deal in those two minutes beyond introducing his star. He is planting ideas, seeds in the audiences’ mind and, with them questions: What’s with the cavalry? Where is the stagecoach going? Who fired the shot? All of these are necessary in building toward that closeup; otherwise it would feel empty, without context, without stakes. Ford cannot stick the landing without building toward it. Simone Biles, after all, has to perform lots of remarkable feats before she arrives at the landing.

The same holds true for writers. The landing cannot work if it exists in a vacuum. Essential components have to inform it. And that, in turn, requires a writer to make choices, often hard choices, about what is essential and what can go. It is especially true in the beginning when we are still working to convince a reader to stay with us. Too much going on leaves the eyes darting hither and yon – an unsettling and often off-putting experience for a reader. Too little and we are left with a climax that comes out of nowhere.

Ford’s scene is a classic Rule of Thirds: Cavalry (ok, twice); Wagon Train; Gun Shot. It’s all we need before landing on his star. First look here. Now look here. Then here. Okay, here it comes….

And while I am loath to be overly prescriptive when it comes to form, I do think there’s some value in drawing on the economy of Ford’s choices: three images. Two would be fine. Four I can live with. Five verges on being too busy. Not a requirement, but a good discipline.

But there is something more: Just as Ford builds to that closeup he also pulls us forward. He lands on John Wayne in a way that tells us where the story will go from here: it’s about this guy. 

So it is with stories. We are drawn to a destination but unless it is the conclusion of a piece that is not where things end. A good landing is a springboard – forgive the overwrought metaphor – to what will come next. 

Sticking the landing is not limited to the opening sequences or the first hundred words. Stories succeed when writers stick the landing in paragraph after paragraph, scene after scene, chapter after chapter. You can tell, for instance, when a writer isn’t quite sticking landings when their stories are a series of one or two-sentence paragraphs. It’s a sure sign that ideas are not being fully developed, and as a result the story reads choppily. The paragraph or scene or chapter lacks momentum. It does not build so much as it stops. The landing, such as it is, is not a spectacular fall – as an editor I can live with a big miss; it shows ambition and risk – but rather a one-foot-at-a-time, thank-heavens-I-didn’t-face-plant tentativeness.

My job is to help students make the great leap from letters to those first hundred words to full drafts. I remind them that they’ve been writing their stories all along, and they need only to go back to the Google docs which they’ve been writing every week to see and read how their stories have taken on lives of their own - in their voices. Yet they second guess, doubt, lose faith in themselves, even in the face of the evidence of what they have already done.

Sometimes, as a teacher, words do not suffice. 

That is why I sent them the opening of “Stagecoach.”

And damn if they didn’t stick landing after landing.

I suspect they did because that sequence was less a revelation than a reminder of stories they’d been reading, or seeing or listening to for twenty years: stories, or in this case, sections of stories each of which have an internal logic: build, build, build, land. Then do it again. 

They knew it. 

They felt it. 

And then they wrote it.

Much obliged, Duke. Much obliged.

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