Tag: Love on the Big Screen

One Way (of the many) To Try and Write a Draft of a Short Story

I’m doing a workshop soon that has as its goal that we all finish a draft of a short story in three hours.  Here’s my handout so far.  Thought it might interest some of you:

You Can Finally Do It:  Write the Story You’ve Been Meaning to Write

A. Can the idea come from your writing territories?

  1. Make a list of places you know well.  Perhaps one of these spots would make an ideal setting for a story.
  2. Make a list of topics you know a lot about.  These might represent areas of knowledge where you’d be able to lay down the needed details to make the fiction true.
  3. List the main parts and/or roles in your life.  For example, I’m a teacher, a husband, a father, a runner, and much more.   Can I tell a teaching or husband story?
  4. Do a sample schedule of your life.  Try out a school day, weekend, summer, and a holiday?  What possible stories are there in all that?
  5. List some political/social issues relevant to your life.  Rather than telling kids to not use the word “fag” at school, I wrote a short story of the same name.  I wrote a golf course story that captured cultural tensions I experienced while working in Queens in a pro shop.

B. Can you look back into your writing territories above and brainstorm some story ideas?  Here’s a few stories of mine, published and unpublished, that will give you an idea of what I mean.

  • “Every Word I Said.”  A man runs into an old high school classmate and remembers something ugly he did to her. This triggers an apology.
  • “Ye Olde Trading Post.”A grocery store love triangle leads to some Biblically serious egging.
  • “Fag.”  Two “fag” incidents at school told through four perspectives.
  • “Friends at the Table.”  To tell or not to tell?  Adultery among Friends.
  • “Bloody Bucket.”  How can a woman murder her husband and name her new bar after the act?
  • “Sanctuary.”  A man whose daughter has cancer sets up the church for a healing service.

C. Use published stories (fiction and non) as voices which help you think of your own stories.  I don’t mean you read Upike and you copy him.  His “A & P” is a work story and I wonder what a work story of yours might be?  for ideas of your own.  Can you tell a…

  • work story?  John Updike’s “A & P.” In walks these three girls…
  • relationship story?  Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter.”  The notice informed us…
  • story that fills in the blank?  “A ______’s Story.”  Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story.”  My name is Luke Ripley and here is… (this is also a test of conscience story)  The narrator is faced with a difficult moral decision.
  • a story of faith?  Langston Hughes’s “Salvation.”  I was saved from sin going on thirteen.  But not really saved.
  • story that goes slow and describes an action you know well?  Richard Selzer’s “The Knife.”  One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip—by the stem.
  • a time you learned something?  A family (mother/daughter) story?  From Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. I was six when my mother taught me…
  • a story of place?  a moving story?  a road trip story? (examples not included)

D. You could pause here to look up and refine your idea/s.  How can some of these stories come together and enhance ONE idea for a story?

E.  Some questions to consider when building a story:  Not THE way, but material for possible use. (I’m thinking/hoping you are starting to get an idea for a story you might want to write)

1.       Who will the characters be?  (make a list of some of the most interesting people you know or can imagine)

2.       Who is in the story?  Do I want some people I know to help me?  What about my grandmother at 17 going out on a date with that kid in my first class who drives me crazy?  In other words, some truth and fiction in the character.

3.       Is there a surprising or startling event out there that would fit into this?

4.       What dilemma might a character face?  Should he/she _______ or ________?

5.       Where will the story be set so that I can make it interesting for the reader?  What images (sight, smell, touch, hear, taste) might evoke the place my story is set?

6.       What’s the point of view?  An outsider?  First person?  If it’s third person, does the teller of the story know anyone’s thoughts?

7.       What valuable part of myself as a human being or what insight into living will I be able to bring to the story?  I am a teacher…I’ve been divorced…I have kids…I’m angry when…

8.       Are there social problems that this story deals with that I could highlight/bring to the surface?

9.       What forces might oppose each other in this?  Boss, administration, weather, competing loves, desire for the other to…

10.   What stress is wearing or has worn on the characters up to this point?

11.   Where will the language come from?  New England, school, ocean, farm, cold weather, church

12.   Will anyone move from one emotional and geographical place to another?

Before we write:

A few craft-related ideas to think about:

1.       Write a lot of active subjects with dialogue and resist explaining:  Bill swept the pile of papers off his desk.  “I’m tired of it,” he hollered.   Write your own active sentence here that might go into the story somewhere.

2.       Multiple subjects or verbs to mix up structure.  Bill swept the papers off his desk and turned to the class.  Write your own sentence with two subjects or two verbs.

3.       Load slots.  I mean if you think of a S-V-D.O. sentence, between each part of the sentence there is a slot you could load with more words.   My attempt:  Hands trembling, Bill, who had spittle on his chin, swept the papers off his desk as if he would wreck the whole classroom.

Note: you probably wouldn’t load all the slots, and my example is not so hot, but I used to like to load slots as a warm up and a way to get to know my story.

4.       If I feel lost, I try to write active sentences with action verbs and I try to go back to writing in structural units:  description, dialogue, action.

For  example:  (active sentence with some description) Hoop and Laura walked in the rain along the edge of the cemetery.  (dialogue) “I just don’t think you should put yourself in that sort of situation.”  (some action)  Linda stopped walking, and Hoop raised his hands in exasperation.

At the risk of ruining what we’ve accomplished so far, I’m going to lay out a pretty conventional structure with hopes we can finish a draft.  My opinion is that there is an infinite number of ways a story can be put together and succeed, but if you don’t know how to start, you can start with this:

F.  Write the beginning of the story.  What do beginnings do? Introduce characters, setting, and situation.  Intro the conflict.  Jump into the action.  Anyone bring or know of a story that starts in a particular way that you can share?  What are the different ways that writers begin?  What choices do you have as a writer starting a story?

G.  Write the middle.  Jump ahead if you have to and write the crucial moment where something BIG happens in the thoughts and/or the action.  It might be that all you have to do is keep going with your start.

H.  Write the end.  Try and arrive at your emotional and/or physical destination.  End with key images?  End with a line of dialogue from a character?  How do the stories that you admire end?

Of course stories are written in all sorts of ways.  This handout is my attempt to write a draft of a story in the company of others.  If you try any of this out or have suggestions for improvement, I’d love to hear from you.

Adaptation of Love on the Big Screen selected for grand prize at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival

Love on the Big Screen tells the story of a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by late-eighties romantic comedies.  The novel is forthcoming from Cherokee McGhee Press in early 2011 and the script adaptation has been selected for the Grand Prize in the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival Screenplay Competition.  Click the picture below to read more about the festival and the selection of Love on the Big Screen.
William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen adaptation selected for Grand Prize at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival
Love on the Big Screen adaptation selected for Grand Prize at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival

In Answer to Some Questions about John Hughes and Love on the Big Screen

William Torgerson Love on the Big Screen Cusack Say Anything
Cusack Works the Phone For a Date in Say Anything

Part of the pleasure of writing Love on the Big Screen was that it caused me to revisit many of the films that I watched between the ages of 14 and 19, and many of those films are mentioned in connection to movies that my protagonist Zuke admires:  Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, Weird Science, Dead Poet’s Society, and Pretty in Pink. The idea for writing this book came as a surprise and it came during one of the writing classes I teach at St. John’s University.  We write almost every class session and most of the time I write along with the students.  Some days we write whatever comes to mind, (actually that’s always an option) and some days I make suggestions.  For example, I might ask students to try a moving story, a relationship story, or perhaps that they write about a place they know well.  Sometimes these experiments are specific to a part of writing as in the opening paragraph.  I think on the day I conceived of Zuke’s story, we were talking about writing a sentence that could be amplified and by that I mean that I open with a sort of summary sentence which I can then spend the rest of the writing trying to explain and develop.  I wrote something like this:  Everything Zuke knew about love he knew from the movies, most of them late-eighties romantic comedies.  Even though I’d already done the research for another book, I thought I had something with that sentence. I could see it being set at the fictional version of where I earned my undergraduate degree.  It would be some sort of love story, and all I had to do was figure out who Zuke was, who he was in love with, and who the other characters in the story would be.  One other short note:  A friend of mine has the last name Zaucha and so that’s where “Zuke” came from, but there isn’t much else about my Zuke that is like my friend.

William Torgerson Love on the Big Screen Weird Science Anthony Michael Hall
Gary and Wyatt Work Their Magic

I’m reluctant to call it research (maybe the lesson here is that research is fun and interesting if you’ve chosen the right topic) but what I did next was to go back and watch all those movies that had been my favorites growing up.  Here’s a couple of my first reactions:  I thought many of the movies were much sillier than I’d remembered.  A movie such as Weird Science held up for me pretty well in the sense that when the guys create Kelly LeBrock’s character with the bras on their heads, that was still pretty funny, and one of my favorite scenes is when the boys are at the mall, they’ve brought LeBrock with them, they’ve got some new duds, and for the first time in their lives they don’t feel like total dweebs.  Then some of the most popular guys in the school stand over them (one is Robert Downey Jr.) and drop giant frozen slurpees onto their heads.  Moment in the sun over.  On the other hand, that I was into this movie enough to go to five nights in a row with my buddy “Tank” as a middle school student was kind of embarrassing.  I didn’t find as much in the film to be devoted to as I would, say, in one of my favorite authors.  Mostly, I’ll give myself a break.  I was probably fourteen when I first saw it.

William Torgerson The Breakfast Club Molly Ringwald Judd Nelson
The Kiss at the End of the Movie

My memory of the 80s romantic comedies was that a boy spotted a girl he fell in love with, he pursued her, there was a spot of trouble, the rival was vanquished, and then there was a happy-ending kiss at the end.  Part of me wants to say that the movies were more complex than that.  Judd Nelson’s burnout character was physically abused.  I think Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club considered suicide.  There was the suicide in Dead Poet’s Society, but also there were so many kisses at the end.  And then I think the really key factor for me was that they never showed what happened after the first kiss.  I didn’t really think about that much until I was about thirty and divorced.  Certainly Zuke doesn’t think about this at first.  He only goes for the gal and hopes for the kiss which will signal the start of a good life.  Now, at least for those of us who have been in long relationships or been married or divorced, we’ve learned to think of that kiss at the end of the movie (the first kiss of a relationship) as just the first baby-step of a tall mountain climb.  I don’t mean to make it sound so hard–often it isn’t–I just mean that the first kiss is far from the end.  Duh, but somehow my teenage self didn’t know it.  And, although what I’m saying here is so obvious, how many people do we know who seem to long for that movie romance that they don’t feel they have in their real-life relationship?

The Real Life Inspiration for my Fictional Pison College (picture from kingtypepad.com)

As far as John Hughes’s movies and Love on the Big Screen go, what I set out to do was subvert what I thought were the conventions of romantic comedies.  I wanted to suspend my own understanding of life and try to become Zuke in my mind, a twenty year old who thought if he worked hard enough and displayed the right amount of romantic spirit (see Cusack’s boom box over his head) that he would in the end, “get the girl.”  I wasn’t particularly obsessed with the Hughes movies.  I think my favorite films were Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, Peter Weir’s Dead Poet’s Society, and Sixteen Candles because I really enjoyed Anthony Michael Hall’s character.  So I don’t see myself as someone who comes after Hughes and only after Hughes, but as I re-watched his films and learned about his life, there started to be more connections between my protagonist’s Zuke’s story and the stories John Hughes told.  I think one of the most significant might be the Midwestern/Chicago area setting.  Hughes lived in Chicago and he set a lot of his stuff in fictional Shermer, Illinois.  So as I wrote and continued to learn about Hughes, I was able to–I think–put in a lot of little “treats” in the book for those who know their Hughes.  For example, my character Pee Wee names his pet after the big brother in Weird Science, Chet.

 

William Torgerson Weird Science John Hughes Chet Kelly LeBrock
"Chet" as transformed in Weird Science

Enter a You Tube Contest?

Keegan Laycock's rendition of Love on the Big Screen's "Brothers in Pursuit"
Keegan Laycock's rendition of Love on the Big Screen's "Brothers in Pursuit"

Here’s the basic idea for a You Tube Contest:  my protagonist Zuke and his buddies have this group they call “The Brothers in Pursuit” and they meet on Sunday nights to discuss their four pursuits:  God, Knowledge, Compassion, and Women.  As a sort of “book trailer” I’d like to ask any veteran or rookie You Tube (ers) to post a video of their own version of this sort of meeting.  I’ll read the section of the book with the passage about the meetings in it and those who want to enter the contest can post a comment to my You Tube post as their entry.  Deadline is Dec. 1.  Respond to my video with a video of your own to enter.  Here’s the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKfFSkakGK0

Love on the Big Screen and Illustrator Keegan Laycock’s Work

Flabby from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Flabby" from Love on the Big Screen

Keegan Laycock was in one of my first seventh grade classes back in the mid to late nineties at North Miami High School in Indiana.  When I was teaching back then, I mostly gave assignments.  I assigned stories and students answered the questions at the end.   I went over grammar rules and students worked exercises.  We even had this book where the students faced a grammar question, worked it on their own paper, and then they turned the page to see if they got it right.  I gave the students credit for doing the work, and I remember not knowing the answers to quite a bit of the questions.  Did anyone else ever work out of a workbook like that?  Each page looked like a big chart with different shades of white and gray. Boring!!!

Cowboy from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Cowboy" from the novel Love on the Big Screen

As bad as a teacher as I remember being, Keegan’s father once sort of suggested that possibly one of the reasons Keegan would want to be an English teacher was related to a not awful experience in my class.  This I didn’t think possible.  I guess if I did anything right, I was at least nice to people.

It had been at least eight years or so since I’d seen Keegan when he sent me a note on Facebook, and one of the first things he wrote to me about was that he remembered a comment I’d left on one of his essays:  “Funny.”  I wrote it next to some clever phrase he’d applied to the  NHL penalty box. (can’t remember what he called it)  I think even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I somehow knew to respond to people and not texts.  I wrote little personal comments more than I was someone who would write “-5 sentence fragment.”

Moon from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Moon" from the novel Love on the Big Screen

Thinking back to my own high school days, I remember my sophomore or junior year that Ms. Stone of Winamac High wrote, “Not your best effort.”  It’s a comment I think was excellent for who I was and the amount of work I’d put into the assignment.  I remember that instance being one of the first times I realized that when I turned in work there was somebody on the other end of the words actually reading the sentences.   I’m not saying that my other teachers didn’t read my work; it was just the first time I’d considered that people were actually looking at the assignments. This revelation is probably akin to the shock sometimes students show when they see their teachers out at a grocery store or, heaven forbid, out to eat. If you’re a teacher reading this, do you let the students see the human side of you?

So Keegan is tackling the job of doing some illustrations related to my novel.  What I’ve especially enjoyed about this is I convinced him that it would be fun for me (and I hope some of you) to watch the drawings come to life.  As someone with a regimented writing process, it’s interesting for me to watch his drawing process.  I asked him what he thought about drawing one scene with the boys paying their respects to–among other people–Cyndi Lauper.  Rather than draw them all at once, he began by sketching them one at a time to get a feel for who they are.  He’s just doing a little work, posting what he’s got, and then doing some more drafting.

Keegan and I don’t really know what we are going to do with these, if anything, but he’s enjoying the drawing, and I’m watching the characters take on a life of their own independent of the text of Love on the Big Screen.

"The Brothers in Pursuit" from William Torgerson's Love on the Big Screen by Keegan Laycock
"Share" this post if you think your friends would enjoy the pictures. Click this picture to see more of Keegan's art work.