Chapter 176: Hollywood to the Rescue
It is spring, the season of crocuses, daffodils, seasonal allergies, Opening Days (please, please let this be my Mets’ year) and, if the past is its usually reliable guide, panic among my students.
The moment has come, as it must each semester, when – with apologies for a springtime metaphor – my students undergo their own process of fledgling, which like aviary hatchings means breaking out of their shells and preparing to take flight.
The shell in their case takes the form of the reporting letters they have been writing for each of the past eight weeks, letters of between 500 and 1000 words that open with Dear Michael, this is what I learned this week… (yes, Michael; Professor Shapiro is my brother, Jim) that allow them to a) distill the week’s reporting b) see how the path of their story’s coming to life twists and pivots and c) write in their own unique voices, unencumbered and unafraid of not getting it right.
The writing becomes what writing should be – a means to an end, not the end in itself. Year in and year out I find myself thrilled at how the voices many of them have begun to doubt as they try to accommodate to journalistic conventions, re-emerge – strong, vibrant, lyrical. Their own.
All well and good. Except for the moment when – okay, one more – they have to leave the nest, and write not a letter but a story. Heaven knows what can go wrong. A lot? Everything? Imposter Syndrome exposed? An absence of talent? A clarion call to chuck it all and take the Law Boards?
My job is to help them make the leap. And too often I feel I have come up short. I have tried encouragement: YOU are the writer of those letters and you’ve been writing the story for months without worry. I have encouraged work-arounds: write yourself a Dear____ letter in which you ask yourself what the story is about. I have overhauled my approach to teaching writing, eschewing what the wonderful and endlessly quotable Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts,” and instead have them write the first hundred words of their stories, the idea being that if you can nail the opening and commit to it, the writing that follows will be far easier.
These techniques have worked for some, not all. I wanted a solution for everyone. I was open to experimentation. Which led to what is key to any experiment: a hypothesis. What if instead of distilling their stories as if they were pitching to an editor, they instead imagined they were pitching to a movie producer?
They’d been pitching to editors/teachers since they arrived at school in August and have absorbed what journalism expects and demands. But what if they pitched to someone whose sometimes harsh judgment (think ancient Rome: Thumbs up. Or thumbs down. Cue the lions!) did not matter? What if they could see the pitching not as a test but as a game? A game they would, given their nature, play to win.
Only one way to find out. I told them to come to class prepared with an “elevator pitch” of no more than 50 words. They had my attention from the first floor to the fourth. And then I’d be off to talk to an agent, or screenwriter, or heaven forbid, an actor.
The first one landed within a day. I will confess that I opened the email anxiously but hopefully. I was, after all, asking them to do something brand new. My worries were unfounded.
The pitch read: An eight-year-old boy is forced to abandon his village, trade his homeland for a city where he's merely a shadow. Will the exile bounce back, or lose himself in the fall?
I replied immediately.
I wrote: BOOM. Then followed, in keeping with the spirit of the experiment, with “this will sell a lot of popcorn.”
She had written 8804 words of letters that ranged far and wide in time and place, drawn from personal narratives, history, and complex timelines. Yet here was her story distilled into 31 words. A character, a mix of key nouns and more importantly verbs – abandon, village, trade, shadow – all leading to a question: Will the exile bounce back, or lose himself in the fall?
As it happens, this student, a lovely writer, has a tendency toward an overuse of adjectives, a classic “tell” of a writer doubting herself and her command of her material. But here there were none. She knew her story. And in those 31 words she said so, and invited readers to join her.
It did not stop there. In class a couple of days later I had the students read their pitches aloud, rather than have me read them. I wanted them to own those pitches, and while many began with a low and rushed mumble, it took little persuasion to get them to read them out loud, if not quite in a clarion voice than nonetheless with ease and confidence.
Here are a few.
Two inner city teenagers cross paths in high school. They are faced with an untimely pregnancy forcing them to navigate the real world, love, and their past traumas together.
And
Overshadowed by his ten siblings, a devoted son chooses an unconventional path to win his mother’s love. Amidst the battle of brothers, will he prevail?
And
A beautiful girl begins a relationship with her first love, but her fantasy romance quickly becomes her worst nightmare. When her world falls to ruin, how does she piece back together the jagged shards of her heart?
Some came close but didn’t quite nail it. Sometimes a few too many words, or cluttering a simple and compelling idea. But what was clear was that they knew their stories – that the long weeks spent identifying the animating question at the heart of their stories, rediscovering that thread after they were sure they’d lost it, gathering the material that would breathe life into their stories had been time well spent. They were, without necessarily aware of it, doing so much of the creative work of writing – making connections, amassing fact, the unseen work that is so often overshadowed by the response to what they ultimately put on the page.
Writing is not rational work; day in and day out we assemble words, sentences and paragraphs that, we hope, the world will see and better still, appreciate. We do not write for ourselves, not really. We write to be read – which means leaving ourselves exposed and vulnerable.
So it is that a rational solution to addressing the fears we experience in the mad, exhilarating, terrifying work of writing will often fall short. Sometimes you need to fight terror with tricks, with artifice, with games designed to fool our all-too-powerful inner critics into thinking nothing to see here.
Like pitching to an imaginary movie producer in an imaginary elevator, going from the first floor to the fourth.
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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.
Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture