Agents, publicists, publishers, and various professionals in the film industry often ask for writers to “pitch” their projects in a couple sentences or less. Last weekend at the New Jersey Council for Teachers of English (NJCTE) conference, I told a room full of writers and teachers that I’d like to know my couple-sentence summary before I start writing. This morning I was working on that pitch for the book I’m writing next, a book I’m at the moment calling Waiting For Julie. I’m going to share a couple versions of my summary and I’d love to hear if you’ve got suggestions or if one of these appeals to you more than the rest:
Meet Zuke: a young man who wants to be married and jumps at the chance when his buddy offers to introduce him to a woman he says will be perfect for him. Zuke meets Julie and he falls for her hard, but as the relationship progresses, he begins to wonder just how long a man can wait for a woman to start loving him back.
In Waiting For Julie, Zuke is a basketball coach who wants to be married. When his buddy tells him he knows just the right girl, Zuke is all for meeting her. After a rocky start, Zuke falls hard and asks Julie out. When she says “yes,” Zuke is ecstatic, but as they begin to date, Julie doesn’t seem like him as much as he likes her. Zuke wonders how long a guy ought to wait to be loved back.
Zuke’s buddy Cheese thinks he knows the perfect woman that Zuke’s got to meet. When Zuke meets this woman named Julie, it’s clear to him that she’s in love with Cheese. Eventually Zuke asks Julie out on a date, and he’s pumped when she says yes, but as the relationship progresses, he begins to wonder just how long a man should wait on the woman of his dreams.
Possible Script Logline: Just How Long Can A Man Wait on The Girl of His Dreams?
Rhetorical Problems for Me: This could be a man’s book in that Zuke’s a basketball coach with manly feelings that he keeps to himself as he gets involved trying to woo this gal Julie, but I’m not sure a man would buy a book called Waiting For Julie. Hmmmmmmm.
When I began reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, I sort of thought I was reading the work of Patty Smyth, former lead singer of Scandal, performer of “The Warrior,” and now wife to tennis star John McEnroe. My excuses for such ignorance include that I’m straight out of the decade of the eighties, from the Midwest, and was likely under a Hoosier basketball spell during the time Smith came to prominence as an artist. Saying that, you might wonder how it is that I ended up reading Just Kids. I do a Music and Movies book club and pressed by the community relations director for a selection for the month of March, I browsed the store looking for a text that might fit our theme. The clincher for me were the jacket blurbs written by Joan Didion and Johnny Depp. Not that Didtion’s “true rapture” or Depp’s “treasure” do much to tell you what the book is about, but in the work of those two there are several books and movies that I love. I trusted Depp and Didion and so off I went to reading.
I became re-inspired as a writer in the pages of Just Kids. Smith begins her story with the meeting of her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe and by sharing how they both wanted to be artists. Between the first pages and the last, you see Smith transform from someone who hangs around art—she draws a little, writes poetry, begins to move toward singing—and who eventually strolls down 5th Avenue and hears her song (that she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen) on the radio. Her buddy Robert tells her that she got famous first.
What I mean by inspiration is that as a writer I feel sparked to work even harder to tap into what I care about, to tap into what matters most. Smith writes, “I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter” (153). I feel determined to give myself over to whatever it is that I’m working on. What else might I do? What sometimes gets in the way? I can think too much about what readers might want to read, about the craft of the lines, and about trying to do something especially smart or funny. These are goals—sideline concerns—but not at the top of the list of what I’m after. Faced with less than enthusiastic audiences (perhaps with less than soaring book sales) Smith’s friend tells her, “When you hit a wall, just kick it in” (170). Not bad to remember facing an audience full of people checking their cell phones.
The National Book Award Winner: Just Kids
Life at my house often feels more Midwestern or Southern than it does Northeastern, but in reading Just Kids, I felt for the first time a bit more like a New Yorker, or at least more interested in what it might be to live in New York City. Perhaps this is what Depp meant when he says Smith gives us an “invitation to unlatch a treasure chest never before breached.” In Depps treasure chest (hey, does he mean Pirates of the Caribbean?) I found an interest in The Hotel Chelsea, Max’s Kansas City, The Factory, Fillmore East, Reno Sweeny’s, and Electric Lady Studios. It used to be that I didn’t care to know about the Velvet Underground. Now I do.
An Important Book to Me: Donald Murray's Write to Learn
Let me start by giving the writer and teacher Donald Murray props for introducing me to the Daybook in his fantastic research for writing and teaching, Write to Learn. Along with Stephen King’s On Writing, Murray’s book was a text that caused me to think being a writer was something I could actually accomplish. For me, the daybook (think black and white Mead composition notebook) is something I use day-to-day in my life and entice (force?) my students to use during the length of the time we work together. What I love about the daybook is that it enables me to capture many of the intellectual seeds that would otherwise drift into my thinking and then go scattering off into oblivion.
I’m sure a lot of ideas still come and go, but with the daybook, I’m able snag at least a couple and jot them down for later use. Many of my ideas (especially for teaching, writing, and reading) come while I’m working on something else: I’m reading student work and I’ve got an idea for next semester or something I need to share with the class. I’m reading a story and I have an idea for a story of my own or a lesson for class or something I want to tell my wife. Pre-daybook, the idea would come and go and be forgotten. With the daybook, it’s down on paper fastened to a place where I can come back to it and take action.
Remember Knox Overstreet's poem to Chris?
As for Love on the Big Screen and Murray’s daybook, one day while writing with my students, I wrote the following sentence: “Everything Zuke knew about love he got from the movies.” That was the seed that led to Love on the Big Screen. Of course there is a lot of me in this book, but it became an act of the imagination as soon as I accepted the mental premise that Zuke did things because of movies he’d seen. That became a hook that might sell a book and something that would be a great pleasure for me to write. I’m thinking of two immediate reasons: (A) I could revisit all those movies I loved as a teenager and (B) once I made the decision to set it at a fictionalized Olivet Nazarene, I got to use my college experiences as an imaginative catalyst for a plot and characters that caused me to recall many moments I’d long forgotten. The moments go through a sort of truth to fiction converter once I give them to Zuke’s story and the controlling premise that he does things because of the movies he’s seen. For myself, back when I was making lots of love mistakes, I certainly had an overly romanticized view of love (who doesn’t?) and I was unconscious of all the influences (media and others) that had helped shaped my romantic paradigm. In fact, it wasn’t until I wrote the book that I realized what a number films such as Say Anything, Dead Poets Society, Sixteen Candles, and When Harry Met Sally did to my expectations for romance.
With the first readers finishing up Love on the Big Screen, questions like this one have begun to roll in via Facebook, email, and text: Did the Sunday meetings in underwear/helmets really happen? Am I right that Moon is actually_________? Isn’t The Dini based on______? In other words, these readers want to know from me How much of your actual life is in Love on the Big Screen?
Let me start to answer this with something I wrote at the request of the publisher, Cherokee McGhee: While many people I know would be able to claim they see parts of themselves in the characters I have written, they would also have to admit that I’ve told a lot of lies about them. In this case, for me, if my book is some sort of fruit smoothie, then my life and all the shades of personalities I came across in college are all a bunch of different berries. I’ve taken them all up as a part of a creative recipe, added a bunch of additional ingredients I either made up or collected in the years since my undergraduate graduation, and I threw all of that possibility into a giant writing blender and created my book.
Me back in my "Billy" days rocking my Bon Jovi Concert t-shirt
My main problem with my own Smoothie Metaphor is that it is too violent; otherwise, I think it does the job. Take for example my protagonist Zuke, whose last name is Zaucha. The last name of one of my good college friends is Zaucha and we used to call him Zuke. In choosing that sort of nickname, I am going for something I’ve experienced in my own life: people who know me tend to call me Torg. This happens even when I move, and I move often: it’s like secret DNA social code that people call me “Torg.” Unless my dad is around and then I’m Little Torg or Billy.
The personality of my friend Zaucha does not additionally seep into my protagonist. As I recall, my friend did have a new car and he wouldn’t let us eat in it and he wouldn’t let us roll down the windows. I also remember him keeping to the sidewalks to keep his sneakers clean. Sure, I’d make fun of him for that, but his car and sneakers stayed immaculate long after mine had been “trashed.” I gave that aspect of the real Zaucha’s personality to my character Moon. Another friend of mine has emailed me and noted that he thinks Moon is a combination of himself and the guy with the last name Zaucha. Writing this, I recall that I’ve often heard the writer Sedaris talking about this aspect of his writing. That he is always thinking about what he will use and that his friends and family seem to try and watch themselves because they know they are likely to show up in the next book. Recently, some people have started to point out to me when they say something clever and they suggest that maybe that should go in a future story.
Here are some similarities I have to my protagonist Zuke: we were both English majors for non English-y reasons (me because my parents were English teachers and Zuke because he wants to be around “Glory,” we were both bench-warming college basketball players, and we both went to plays in Chicago where we were surprised by nude witches. Certainly we share exactly the same taste in movies.
What is very different about us is that Zuke learns his lessons much more quickly than me. I think I’m still learning but it probably took me until around the age of 32 to pretty much get what Zuke gets at the close of Love on the Big Screen. I certainly did not experience any “love storms” of the sort Zuke experiences in the book. There were no balcony collapses in my ONU life but I’ve come to learn (I think) that there was one of those in ONU’s history. Not sure if I repressed that or if it’s just coincidence. I read once that Stephen King made up a pornographic cartoon magazine for The Green Mile and that later in his life someone sent him a copy of the publication that he made up. I think if you can dream it up, it’s probably out there. (and much more!)
A bit about the names and the nicknames. Some names I’ve made up but most are from my life. It was a common criticism of my work in just about every writing workshop I’ve been in that the nicknames were confusing. Readers, what did you think? However, I find that in my life, nicknames are everywhere and I list a lot of those in the book. i.e. Charles Barkley was the Round Mound of Rebound or most of us have heard of the NY Yankee, A-Rod. When people pick at your work, instead of editing it out, that might be something that can become MY STYLE. Part of my style could be an affinity for nicknames. I notice that Chekhov uses a lot of them.
While revising Love on the Big Screen, I knew I had a novel-in-stories called Horseshoe (Zuke’s fictional hometown) and I had in mind that someday I wanted to write a modern-day tragedy that I was thinking about calling Knucklehead. I knew this guy with the last name Nuckles, and obviously if a character is going to have a tragic fault, Knucklehead has some nice play in it to work with. So I made up this guy Knucklehead in the revision thinking down the line of books I might write, and now I’ve got people identifying who they think Knucklehead is. For example, I have him being the son of a school superintendent, and so now for every place I’ve ever attended or worked (this list is kind of long: at least nine schools) there are suggestions from each geographical area that they think they know who I’m writing about. I guess writers of fiction always answer these sorts of questions? In Love on the Big Screen, I have Zuke hitting a last-second shot and the homecoming queen is waiting for him after the game. Later, there’s another surprise in the form of a young lady. None of this happened to me. It represents what I’ve experienced about being a basketball player but as with the lessons of the novel for Zuke, my experience took much more time to unravel.
I’m glad to have the questions about the book, and it’s been fun to try and think where the ideas come from. To understand, I think you have to work with language daily and experience the surprise of what occurs to you to write. I lived a life and everything I’ve experienced is certainly fair game for any situation or character that I’m trying to create. I’m sure some things creep from my mind to the page without me realizing their origins. Maybe most of what I write is like that? But to answer the question about the helmets and the underwear: yes we did have matching boxer shorts with our nicknames embroidered on them. Yes they shrank and were obscenely tight. Yep, you had to play naked if you missed but unlike the novel, I don’t remember there being any legitimate excuses. If you missed, you were naked the next time. We had Toys R Us-bought medieval helmets too small for our fat twenty-something heads, and something not in the book, we even borrowed hymnals from the dorm’s prayer chapel and sang ourselves an opening song. That, I don’t think, was my idea.
