If you know my character “Zuke” from Love on the Big Screen, I wrote that he was from a small town called Horseshoe. In my mind, Zuke’s hometown is a fictionalized version of Winamac, Indiana. The word “horseshoe” as the title of my novel-in-stories comes from the way my small hometown of Winamac sits on a horseshoe bend of the Tippecanoe River in North-Central Indiana. This geographical feature is something you can see for yourself on Google Maps:
From Google Maps: See the Horseshoe Bend in the Tippecanoe River?
Winamac is the town where my parents are from and their parents are from before that, and even though I wasn’t born there, it’s the place where I graduated from high school and the place I say I’m from if anyone ever asks. When people in Winamac say the horseshoe,they mean the road that runs along the outer edge of the town park which is almost pinched into an island by a sharp-hook bend of the river. I lived in two different houses when I lived in Winamac: one right on the river where I could look across the water, see the road everyone called the horseshoe, and also the basketball courts. I was a bad cross-country runner in high school, and practice was often held in the park where we ran in packs and did repeats of the three-quarter mile loop. The second house I lived in is the house where I placed the character Matthew Walker’s family. Pam Scott, a woman haunted by the sound of a knocker, lives in the house my grandmother lives in today.
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.
