Gotham Writers Blog

In the 1948 British film The Red Shoes, Boris Lermontov, a famous ballet impresario, poses a question to Vicky Page, an aspiring ballerina whom he has just met:

Boris: Why do you want to dance?

Vicky: Why do you want to live?

Boris: Well, I don’t know exactly…why, er, but I must.

Vicky: That’s my answer too.

Vicki is a brilliant dancer and Lermontov casts her as the lead in a new ballet called The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, about a woman who acquires red ballet slippers that will never let her stop dancing.

Which mirrors Vicki’s life—as Lermontov demands total devotion, eventually making Vicky choose between dancing and the man she loves.

It’s all terribly melodramatic, but it raises a tantalizing question…

Why is Vicky so compelled to dance?

Why is my daughter so compelled to sing and play the guitar, which she recently did in the school talent show? (She was great, thanks for asking.)

Why are so many of you compelled to tell stories, working furiously to make them excellent?

All these things take a toll on our bodies and psyche. They pull us away from our friends and family. They seldom pay off with good money.

The challenge, I think, is part of the appeal. There’s something called the Effort Paradox, which means despite our natural aversion to taking the hard way, we find something appealing about working hard for something.

If a mysterious stranger gave you a gem of a poem or story and said, “I want you to have this, put your name on it, publish it, sell it,” and you did so to much acclaim, would that be satisfying? Probably not.

The arts are especially seductive, but the Effort Paradox can apply to anything, from science to coding to athletics to spelunking.

And it’s not just the difficulty. In these pursuits, we become possessed with a wild desire to push and push for an unattainable perfection. The quest holds at least as much pain as pleasure, but it makes us feel thrillingly alive, flying right over the mundane parts of our lives.

It’s like when you’re watching a game, it’s close, seconds left, and you’re glad you’re not the one handling the ball because that’s way too much pressure, but this moment is exactly where that player wants to be, in charge of their high-stakes destiny.

That might be how you feel when you’re conjuring a piece of writing out of the empty air.

Also…it’s a chance to create something significant. Something that makes your mark. Something that’s yours and yours alone.

It’s a way to write your name on the universe.

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly

April 15, 2025April 14, 2025

Your Beginning is a Hologram

“Beginnings, I think of them as like holograms. If you cut any piece of a hologram, it contains all the information of the whole. And so I think the beginning of a piece should also contain all the information of the whole.”

That was the author Nick Flynn, speaking to my Memoir 2 class recently about Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A student asked why he chose to open his book with a scene that some readers find off-putting:

(1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen.

Suck City recounts what happened when Nick was working at a homeless shelter, and the father he’d only met once before in his life showed up as a client. His beginning does contain important pieces of the larger story — Nick’s father, his homelessness. It puts the reader into the nightly struggles of unhoused people, as it shows them trying to stay warm in an ATM vestibule.

But also, Nick said, it was representative of the larger story because some readers would find it off-putting.

“Yeah, there were sections I could’ve started with where you definitely would have had an easier time,” Nick said. “But then, I would have been selling you a false bill of goods because the rest of the book would confuse you anyway. So why not just confuse you right at the beginning so you know what you’re getting into?”

OK, he’s kidding there. But only kind of. Because the beginning is a bit disorienting, just like Nick’s father.

“You’re getting introduced to his character, not from my point of view, but from his point of view. You’re in his life, in his mind.”

But the author is not wholly absent from that beginning. Because it challenges the reader, which is how Nick likes to write a story.

“There’s a difference between passive art and active art, and for literature, I think you want to be actively engaged. I really wanted the scene at the beginning to feel like the reader is now complicit. Anyone who’s been in a city has gone into an ATM, and there’s been a homeless person there. And what is your experience of that? I just wanted the reader to have that experience, be part of it, and to consider the other side of it while you’re in it.”

Each of these aspects, they really do sound like they could drive readers away right? But they didn’t. When it came out, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won a PEN Award, made the New York Times Bestsellers list for a hot minute, and has stayed in print for 20 years. In fact, Norton just released a new edition to mark the book’s 20^th anniversary. What some might call off-putting are actually the story’s strengths.

OK writers, your turn: Open your work in progress, and look at your beginning. Does it, like a hologram, contain the information of the whole? Does it engage the reader the way you will engage the reader for the entire story? Is it as daring as you are?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex

April 2, 2025March 31, 2025

Playing Through the Pain

Second star to the right and straight on till morning.

Those are the directions from London to the Neverland, the path followed by Peter Pan as he flies through the night sky with Wendy, John, and Michael.

I recently read the original novel, Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie, for the first time with my daughter, which is surprising because the Peter Pan story has always been important to me. From the day I saw a stage version when I was six, I knew I’d never grow up beyond chasing a creative life.

Peter runs off to the Neverland when he’s a baby (never mind how) because he overhears his parents discussing his future, which quite turns him off. And Peter has a marvelous time in the Neverland, never growing up, living underground with the Lost Boys, watching the mermaids at sport, and fighting the pirates, led by the fearsome Captain Hook.

However, Peter does think about his parents. One night he flew home, expecting the window to be open for him, but it was closed and he saw another boy sleeping in his bed. Peter realized that his parents no longer wanted him, and he bears this pain as he adventures through the Neverland.

Peter is playing through the pain. It’s something most of us do. Carrying on the best we can despite an ended relationship or a personal disappointment or the death of a loved one. We’ve all got something. Often we’re playing through the pain in a positive way, and sometimes we’re running from a pain that will never stop chasing us, much like the crocodile is always following Captain Hook, hoping to chomp on his other hand.

Consider what pain your characters are playing through. Even if it’s never revealed, it’ll make them more dimensional and relatable. You can do this for major characters, but also for the minor parts.

The pain comes back to Peter in the final chapter. One night he flies into Wendy’s house, hoping she’ll come play with him, but she no longer can because she’s now a married woman with a daughter of her own. Enraged…

He took a step toward the sleeping child with his dagger upraised. Of course he did not strike. He sat down on the floor instead and sobbed; And Wendy did not know how to comfort him, though she could have done it so easily once.

But then Wendy allows Peter to take her daughter, Jane, to the Neverland for a while, and years, later Jane allows Peter to take her own daughter.

It’s not the worst fate for our characters—or ourselves—to parry the pain with something we love.