Straight advice

Carlton Cuse, father numer 2 for Lost, was recently in Madrid to teach a course on television.

If you have something to write, write it.

To the point, huh?

He insists that creativity is more important than technique. I guess we could say his best friend Damon Lindelof made good use of the lesson when he often came up with genial twists that, analyzed in retrospect, don’t really fit.

Although, depending on how we look at it, we might be forgiving:

While he [J. J. Abrams] finished 90 minutes of film, we made 46 hours. The really creative work is now on television.

To our desks, then!

Source: Lostphiles
Press conference videos here.

Dead fathers III, the living grandpa

Mr. McCourt, you’re lucky. You had that miserable childhood so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the two point three kids you’re always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like fifty percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.

Jonathan, that is the most miserable scenario of American life I’ve heard in a high school classroom. But you’ve supplied the ingredients of the great American novel. You’ve encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

They said I must be joking.

This is the big difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. In literary fiction the content doesn’t matter as much as the vision. If you can portray everyday events in a unique way, like only you can express them, you’ve earned a place in writer’s heaven.

So go out, live life, unplug the antenna from the TV and do everything that Jonathan says and quite a lot more besides, as much as you can. And if you still want more things to experience, take over everbody else’s life.

Image of the "Rent Collection Courtyard" sculpture group exhibited at Schirn Museum, Frankfurt (2009)

So, sit with your grandmother. Let her tell her story. All the grandmothers and grandfathers have stories and if you let them die without taking down their stories you are criminal. Your punishment is banishment from the school cafeteria.

Yeah. Haw, haw.

Parents and grandparents are suspicious of this sudden interest in their lives. Why you asking me so many questions? My life is nobody’s business, and what I did I did.

What did you do?

Nobody’s business. Is it that teacher again? […]

Others come in with stories of how they ask their elders one question about the past and the dam bursts and the old people won’t stop talking, going on till bedtime and beyond, expressing heartache and tears, yearnings for the Old Country, declaring love for America. Family relationships are rearranged. Grandpa isn’t taken for granted by sixteen-year-old Milton anymore.

In World War II Grandpa had adventures you wouldn’t believe. Like he fell in love with the daughter of an SS officer and nearly got killed for it. […] All these years Grandpa sits in the corner and I never talked to him and he never talked to me. His english still isn’t good but that’s no excuse. Now I have him on my tape recorder and my parents, my parents for Christ’s sakes, are saying, Why bother?

Even us, writers, are like our Grandpas: we don’t believe our stories matter. Do they matter? McCourt’s story mattered, his books selling by the millions.

Write on. You’re next.

Dead fathers II, moon landing

Yesterday we saw how an apparently trivial scene -an almost unbelievable one- can carry a strong emotional load.And that isn’t achieved through big abstracts words to emphasize the characters’ feelings. Instead, the emotion comes from what we know about the characters and how, through our own experiences in the world, we can relate to that -the pain of losing a parent, the contrast between the dinner and the hospital room, the loneliness. It’s the old “show, don’t tell”. This is how we build stories, scene by scene, adding on what we know from the previous one. No need to underline what the characters feel. Note how the dialogue doesn’t include any speech notes, yet from his words we know that the teacher does not believe the story.

Here’s another of McCourt’s students’ stories about dying fathers, from “Teacher Man”, chapter 16:

photo by Álex Hernández-Puertas

Phyllis wrote an account of how her family gathered the night Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, how they shuttled between the living room television and the bedroom where her father lay dying. Back and forth. Concerned with the father, not wanting to miss the moon landing. Phyllis said she was with her father when her mother called to come and see Armstrong set foot on the moon. She ran to the living room, everyone cheering and hugging till she felt this urgency, the old urgency, and ran to the bedroom to find her father dead. She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, and her problem was how to return to the happy people in the living room to tell them Dad was gone.

This could be a micro-story in itself, because it tells more than it contains: it starts before the beginning (we can imagine a long sickness, the arrangements for the family gathering) and it continues beyond the end (when the news are passed and the smiles fade).

But don’t mistake a scene and microfiction and a novel. They are different things. You can hardly build a novel out of great scenes unless they are logically (and emotionally) connected and you can hardly say you master the techniques of narration if all you play is the guessing game of microfiction.

If McCourt’s books lack anything it’s direction, but we forgive that because they’re non-fiction. Autobiographical elements can bring colour and feeling into your story, can bring -quite literally- life into your writing, but real life rarely has a purpose, a plot, a direction, a meaning, a theme. Fiction feeds on these. Juggle them all at your convenience. Or as the saying goes, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I’m sure even McCourt didn’t.

Dead fathers I, the mahogany table

Frank McCourt’s “Teacher Man”, chapter 14:

Whenever a lesson sagged, whenever their minds wandered, when too many asked for the pas, I fell back on the “dinner interrogation”. Government officials or concerned superiors might have asked, Is this a valid educational activity?

Yes, it is, ladies and gentlemen, because this is a writing class and everything is grist to our mill.

First he asks James what he had for dinner the previous night, who cooked it (the mother), who set the table (the sister), what they talked about, whether they used a tablecloth, every details of the process. All the girls are shouting at him, the discussion is lively. McCourt moves on.

Daniel, what did you have for dinner last night?

Veal medallions in a kind of white-wine sauce.

What did you have with the veal medallions in white wine?

Asparagus and a small tossed salad with vinaigrette.

Any appetizer?

No, just the dinner. My mother thinks they ruin the appetite.

So, your mother cooked the veal medallions?

No, the maid.

Oh, the maid. And what was your mother doing?

She was with my father.

So the maid cooked the dinner and, I suppose, served it?

That’s right.

And you dined alone?

Yes.

At a vast highly polished mahogany table, I suppose?

That’s right.

With a crystal chandelier?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

Did you have music in the background?

Yes.

Mozart, I suppose? To go with the table and the chandelier.

No, Telemann.

And then?

I listened to Telemann for twenty minutes. He’s one of my father’s favorites. When the piece ended I called my father.

And where was he, if you don’t mind my asking?

He’s in Sloan-Kettering Hospital with lung cancer and my mother is with him all the time because he’s expected to die.

Oh, Daniel, I’m sorry. You should have told me instead of letting me put you through the dinner interrogation.

It doesn’t matter. He’s going to die anyway.

It was quiet in the classroom. What could I say now to Daniel? I had played my little game: clever and amusing teacher-interrogator, and Daniel had been patient. Details of his elegant solitary dinner filled the classroom. His father was here. We waited by a bed with Daniel’s mother. We’d remember forever the veal medallions, the maid, the chandelier, and Daniel alone at the polished mahogany table while his father died.

Is this a story?

Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, page 224.

The class is commenting a poem (“My Papa’s Waltz“, by Theodore Roethke). A student called Ann speaks.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

That’s one thing, Mr. McCourt, but we have to be careful. If you say something negative about anything, English teachers take it personally and get mad. My sister got in trouble with an English professor at Cornell over the way she interpreted one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He said she was off the mark entirely, and she said a sonnet can be read a hundred different ways, otherwise why would you see a thousand Shakespeare criticism books on the library shelves, and he got pissed off and told her to see him in his office. This time he was nice to her and she backed off and said maybe he was right and went out to dinner with him in Ithaca and I got pissed off at her for giving in like that. Now we only say hello to each other.

Why don’t you write about that, Ann? It’s an unusual story, you and your sister not talking because of a Shakespeare sonnet.

I could, but I would have to get into the whole sonnet thing, what he said, what she said, and, since I hate getting into deeper meanings, and she’s not talking to me anyway, I don’t have the whole story.

David?

Make it up. There are three characters here, Ann and her sister and the professor, and there’s the sonnet that’s causing all the trouble. You could have a hell of a time with that sonnet. You could change the names, get away from the sonnet, say it’s a big fight about “My Papa’s Waltz“, and next thing is you have a story they want to turn into a movie.

Jonathan?

No offense to Ann but I can’t think of anything more boring than a story about a college student arguing with a professor over a sonnet. I mean, Jesus, excuse the language, this world is falling to pieces, people starving, et cetera, and these people have nothing else to do but argue over a poem. I’d never buy that story and I wouldn’t go to the movie if they let me take my whole family for free.

Who’s right?

There’s a story here

Angela's Ashes

'Tis

Teacher Man

Frank McCourt's trilogy

Frank McCourt ended his career as a teacher of creative writing without having written a single book. They would only come afterwards. Reading Teacher Man, one would think that it was through his pupils that he learned that the best stories are often hidden behind everyday events.

His students tended to understimate their own experiences as writing material. Who cares about my life, they would think. In this monographic week devoted to McCourt we will review some of the scenes these young boys and girls shared in his class, and we’ll dig for those stories that McCourt brings to us even though their own protagonists could not see them.

But today we’ll talk about McCourt himself and where he found his stories. I might spoil some details, but the books are portraits and not plot-oriented, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Last Friday I already summarized what each novel is about – they’re all strictly autobiographical. But there’s a nice detail that weaves them together.

The first novel ends when, after many tribulations, teenage Frank finally manages to find a passage out of Ireland.

I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of American twinkling. He says, My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn’t this a great country altogether?
Thus ends the chapter and apparently the book. However, when you turn the page, you find a final chapter, number XIX, whose full text I copy here:
‘Tis.

With this last sentence, McCourt (the author and the character) makes an assertion which is a wish: that it be, that America will be the promised land he’s longed for. Those two words encompass a whole story, from the hoping to the checking and we don’t know if to realization or disappointment. That’s why these two words are the title of the sequel, which tells this story.

Last week I finished the third volume, Teacher Man, whose ending follows a similar pattern. After teaching his final class before retiring, as he walks away along the corridor, a voice calls:

Hey, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book.

After passing the page, the final chapter reads:

I’ll try.

Isn’t that sentence a wohle story? That could have been the title of a fourth volume telling the event after his retiring, the process of writing Angela’s Ashes and getting it published, the massive reception, the success, the incredulity of the author himself, encoumbered from high school teacher to media star. Isn’t that quite a story? Frank McCourt knew how to find it, and surely only his demise kept him from telling it.

Death will be a recurring theme this week. For now, start ordering these books and asking yourself if your life couldn’t be good enough for several novels as well.

Clear as vodka

Writing shouldn’t come between the reader and what’s being described.  It should be as transparent as possible.

Diana Athill

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

Ezra Pound