Posts

Letters From Alex
Posted on

Through the Smoke

We process things through stories. The ones we read or watch. Or write. Or remember. 
The smoke of war has enveloped us the last few years, not to mention centuries. Lately: Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Myanmar, Iran.

Which makes me recall my time as a teenage busboy in an Italian restaurant in Dallas, Texas. All the other busboys were Iranian. They were nice enough to me, but I was definitely the outsider, as they all knew each other and lived in the same community and they were young men while I was still a kid. However, one of them, Ali, befriended me—and I recall the time he noticed the high stack of plates I was carrying was about to topple over and he raced to save me (or the plates) in a nick of time. Through my friendship with Ali, the others eventually welcomed me into their circle.

Through that memory, I feel a connection to the people of Iran, and I’m wishing them the best.

Which makes me think of the middle grade series by Bruce Colville I’m reading with my daughter. In the first book, My Teacher is an Alien, it turns out that the new substitute teacher is really an alien sent to Earth to “borrow” five kids the other aliens can study—a mix of the best, worst, and average. When the alien must beat a hasty retreat, it only manages to take one kid, Peter, who wants to go because his home life is not so great.

In the third book, My Teacher Glows in the Dark, Peter discovers the reason the aliens want to study the earthlings. The aliens fear what will happen once the humans discover how to travel great distances from their home planet. Humans, despite their marvelous brains, are far more destructive than any other interplanetary species. The aliens must determine how to stop humans from wreaking their deadly wars throughout the universe.

Which reminds me of the poet Rumi, who fled his home in 13th century Persia to escape the Mongol invasion. He created pearls of wisdom that have not lost their luster through time. Here’s one that applies to us writers:

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly
Posted on

The Art of Mortification

In our never-ending quest for authenticity, writers make a lot of the same mistakes — avoiding the words “I don’t know,” for example. Or writing every story like you’re a WWII radio journalist, reporting from the European front.

Just as common, but more counter-intuitive, is the belief some writers have that over-sharing, or amping up the salaciousness factor of their stories, makes them truer.

Gotham teacher Rax King sees and hears that a lot, she said at our recent Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference. And it’s a mistake.

“I think there are people who read my work, or other work that feels very confessional, and their takeaway is, ‘If I want to do this well, I have to expose all my secrets,’ ” Rax said. “No! I’m an incredibly secretive person. I formulated nine new secrets since I just started talking just now. For a lot of us memoirists and personal essayists, our work reads as very honest, and it is. But it is a curated honesty.”

You don’t have to buy authenticity by sharing your darkest secrets, or by loading your novel’s characters down with shady pasts and painful secrets. Authenticity comes from things like being honest about what you are comfortable sharing or being willing to admit when you’re wrong or don’t know something. It comes when you don’t swerve when facing up to hard truths.

“My usual measure for whether an embarrassing detail stays is: Does this make me feel squirrelly and uncomfortable, but not mortified?” Rax said. “If I read this and I’m like, this is mortifying, that has to go. I’m not going to mortify myself for an audience.”

I noticed a similar philosophy at work recently in the novel Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey. In Rax’s recent essay collection Sloppy, she writes about drinking too much, saying the wrong thing, and shoplifting. Maggie, the protagonist of Heisey’s novel, reeling from a divorce, drinks too much, says the wrong thing, and attempts a disastrous threesome with two people she barely knows in a port-a-john.

The novel climaxes in a scene that would be painful to live through, but is not so over-the-top it strains credulity, or mortifies the reader.

“I’ve been forced in my career to lightly tap at the borders of my comfort zone,” Rax said. “But I’m not going to just go barreling past it because it feels the fastest way to a book deal. First, that’s not true, and also, it would be damaging to me in a way that I would not be able to live with.”

Upping a story’s mortification quotient is often just another way of swerving just before you’re finally about to confront something hard. When you’re thinking of confessing something really painful, or putting your protagonist through another disastrous three-some in a public bathroom, tap the brakes and ask yourself: Does the reader need to be more scandalized here? Or do they need to know something more meaningful, and more true?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex
Posted on

The Madness of Attraction

I’m at the opera house falling under the spell of Tristan und Isolde, a transcendent musical marathon that’s not exactly a rom-com, but…

They meet cute: In disguise, he comes to her in Ireland so she can use her powers to heal the wound he got when he killed her fiancé in battle. 

They don’t get along so well: Later, she’s furious that he’s taking her on a ship to marry his king in Cornwall, to bring peace between their countries, mostly because she fancies him, against her will. 

They fall for each other: A love potion allows them to unleash their passion for each other, which leads to obsession, tenderness, sex, and eventually death. 

Romance in life and literature may not always be so heightened, but whenever there’s a powerful romantic attraction—there’s a touch of madness. 

The fear of starting it up, or ending it, or failing to entice the other person. Something about the partner is deeply troubling. The fiery jealousy you can’t quell. Even when you’re bursting with desire that’s reciprocated, it’s lovely but it’s also overwhelming, almost too much for the heart to handle. 

Madness, always. 

Good stuff to keep in mind when you bring any kind of romance into your stories. 

So many great examples to look at: Wuthering Heights, Casablanca, Heated Rivalry, Normal People, Much Ado About Nothing, Bridgerton, Before Sunset, In the Dream House. You may have a fav. 

In Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, we get a betrayed wife at the end of her rope:  

I would rather die than sit here figuring out how to get you to love me again, I would rather die than spend five more minutes going through your drawers and wondering where you are and anticipating the next betrayal and worrying about whether my poor, beat-up, middle-aged body with its Caesarean scars will ever turn you on again. I can’t stand feeling sorry for myself. I can’t stand feeling like a victim. I can’t stand hoping against hope. 

Perhaps the challenges that arise—from fury to fighting off boredom—are what make the whole thing so damn intoxicating. Perfection is impossible, and would we even want it? 

To cite the song “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” by Richard Rodgers (music) and Lorenz Hart (lyrics):

The broken dates,

The endless waits,

The lovely loving and the hateful hates,

The conversation with the flying plates,

I wish I were in love again!

No more pain,

No more strain,

Now I’m sane–but

I would rather be gaga!

If you’d like to listen...

And here’s the prelude to Tristan…

Alex Steele

Gotham President