Pushed to the Limit

I’ve learned to suffer the slings and arrows of life with a fairly even temper.

With one exception.

Dealing with automated phone support.

Recently, I wanted to speak with my phone provider to make sure we were all set for calls on an international trip. So I’m trying to speak with a real person, but the automated voice needs some kind of code from me, which I don’t know, and so it assigns me a new code (I’m so discombobulated I’m not sure if I gave them a code or they just picked one.) Anyway, I get a new code, but have no earthly idea what it is.

Then, after much wasted time, I manage to get a real person on the line, but they say they can’t help me unless I give them the code, which I don’t know. At the end of my rope now, I scream, “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!”

(BTW, this will never happen at Gotham. If you call or write us, you’ll be talking to a real live person, with little or no delay.)

Push your characters to the limits. It makes for great storytelling, and we’ll get to see how they handle the heat of their personal crucible. Will they stay true to form or find something new inside themselves? Will they break (like I did) or rise to the occasion? Will they somehow turn the story in a new direction?

I’m a fan of old movies and Jimmy Stewart is a favorite. He got pushed to the limit a lot—with obsessive lust in Vertigo, with despair at unfulfilled dreams in It’s a Wonderful Life. But I’m thinking now about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Jimmy plays Jefferson Smith, the head of the Boy Rangers, who is appointed as a replacement in the U.S. Senate. He’s a wide-eyed optimist expected to vote in lockstep with his state’s senior senator, who is mired in all kinds of corruption.

When Smith refuses to go along with the corruption, the political machine besmirches Smith’s name with fabricated letters and news items, and the Senate is set to vote on his expulsion. Smith is almost broken—too good for cruel politics—but his aide, Clarissa, convinces him to stage a filibuster to delay his expulsion and prove his innocence.

For 24 hours, Smith holds the Senate floor, talking nonstop, barely able to stand near the end, when he proclaims hoarsely:

You all think I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked. And I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause.

Fantasy? Maybe. But I might look to Mr. Smith next time I’m pushed to the limit.

Alex Steel,

Gotham President

New Year Surge

Another January, another season of watching my fellow writers experience a surge of energy for their work. Sometimes, it’s brought on by the downtime over the holidays; in others by the shiny, fresh feeling of a new year. 

Perhaps you’re among these writers, for whom the January reset comes with a little extra gas in the tank. I hope so. And if you are, let’s talk about how you can make the most of it while it lasts. 

  • Don’t squander your surge on research, unless it’s the most important thing your project needs right now. 

As a former newspaper reporter, I’m particularly susceptible to this one. “How can I write if there’s more reporting to do?” I think. The truth is, there is always more reporting you can do. The real question is: Is it necessary? Or is it just procrastination?

If that “research” involves social media, it can probably wait. 

Instead, make a list of the questions you’re thinking about researching. Then switch to your project and start writing. If, once you’ve got your writing done, those questions still feel urgent, by all means, dive in! 

  • Do create a bridging ritual. 

The writer Sheryl Garratt says that between fast-paced lives and constant distractions, many of us have forgotten the value of performing a ritual as we shift from task to task. 

“Ritual can be a way of reclaiming space, of bringing … ourselves fully into the present moment in order to do our best work,” Garratt writes. “Bridging rituals are the tiny things we do to move from one role to another, to shift from one task to a different one, to change our state of mind and find focus in a world of constant distraction.”

Garratt suggests small, easy rituals like making yourself a cup of tea, or clearing your workspace. You can, like Mister Rogers, take off your jacket and put on a cardigan. She also suggests taking three deep breaths and then saying aloud, “I am now here to make art.”

OK, that one might not be for everybody. 

Find one that does work for you, and then do it. (Ignore your dog giving you the side-eye.) 

My last suggestion comes in two parts, which may at first sound antithetical: 

  • Don’t write for 5 minutes, then give up. AND, make time for breaks.

You need to give your mind time to simmer down, to shed the world, to reach The Zone. If you get impatient because it’s taking more than a few minutes to find, you’ll never actually get there. 

You also need to respect your poor beleaguered brain when it’s tired. Gotham teacher Angela Lam has written about this, and says that our minds are like nutrient-rich soil — they need rest to remain fertile. 

“Sometimes,” Angela says, “while laying fallow, a seed germinates and sprouts, out of control, into an award-winning story.” 

Let that be a benediction for us all— ride your new-year wave, and let us read your stories!  

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Awe

As you may have seen, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris has been revived after a devasting fire almost six years ago that sent its iconic spire tumbling to the ground.

Amazingly, it’s been rebuilt, mostly using the exact same materials and techniques that were used when construction began in 1163. Some of this is unseen, such as the oak support beams, and much of it radiates to the eye, like the erasure of time’s grime to the stone, stained glass, and pipe organ. 

About the restoration, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, wrote:

For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure—that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.

This past year, I read Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the first time, a breathtaking tale that takes you high and low through the cathedral, often following Quasimodo the bell-ringer who scales and descends the building both inside and out with muscular arms and deaf ears. At the end, I gasped when I discovered where Quasimodo ended up. If you’re in the mood for melodrama mixed with history, give it a go.

The cathedral comes alive in the book, a place of sin and sanctuary, as here:

Only the great rose window of the façade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling reflection to the other end of the nave.

Hugo partly intended the book, published in 1831, as a cri de coeur for preserving the cathedral, which had fallen into disrepair. The story so captured the public’s imagination that the King ordered a major restoration, which goes to show the power of a good tale.

I’m also reminded of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” which I often revisit, about a closed-off man who finds his life cracking open when he draws a cathedral on paper with a blind man’s hand atop his, to give the blind man a sense of what a cathedral looks like. The story is included and deeply analyzed in Gotham’s book Writing Fiction.

And why this matters to you and me…

Creating a work of art—be it a painting or poem or pyramid—is a miraculous event. People have been doing it for, well, who knows how long? You may be doing it now… or hoping to. It can be done. The results may be magnificent. Yet even if they fall short of that mark, there’s an overpowering beauty in the act of aspiring.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President