Letters From Alex

I’ve never quite understood Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is probably the point because it’s pretty much an exercise in nonsense. Alice follows a white rabbit with a pocket watch through a rabbit hole where a potion shrinks her to the size of a doll then a cake makes her nine-feet-tall and she cries a lake of tears and…

It gets crazier from there. Ever play croquet with a flamingo?

But I’m reading it now with my daughter and it’s resonating for me. Alice becomes totally disoriented—and lots of people (including me) are feeling disoriented by the weather and the world and what not. And sometimes disorientation becomes the norm for a while. 

Feeling disoriented can be unsettling in life, but it’s great for stories. For example…

“Cathedral” – a short story by Raymond Carver in which a curmudgeonly guy is thrown off balance when his wife invites an old friend, a blind man, to come stay with them.

Coming to America – a movie in which a pampered prince from Zamunda comes to NYC to search for a bride, posing as a commoner, a classic fish-out-of-water story. 

The Year of Magical Thinking – a memoir by Joan Didion in which Joan’s husband of 40 years suddenly passes away, leaving her very much alone. 

Think of the really disorienting times in your life, like…

You bring home that baby from the hospital and you’ve got no earthly idea what to do and hopefully it doesn’t turn into a pig like the baby in Wonderland. 

You’re driving along and the sky is an eerie pastel shade and the radio tells you to stay away from a certain intersection because a tornado is heading right there and you realize you’re at that very intersection. 

You travel to Marrakesh and you’ve been told repeatedly not to let a stranger act as your guide, but you’re wandering through the labyrinthine medina jet-lagged and you do just that and who knows where this guide is leading you?

Yeah, those things happened to me.

What’s really interesting is how your characters handle the disorientation that overtakes them. Do they find themselves drowning, or learn to ride the waves, or discover how to reach a saving shore? Or…something else?

And, hey, we have the perfect contest for these disorienting times: Invent a Word. Words help some of us make sense of things, and we’re giving you permission to add something entirely new to our language. Lewis Carroll was quite good at inventing words. Like galumph.

And as the Mock Turtle in Wonderland says, “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Frightening things are swirling around us, more frightening than what we see on Halloween.

Hurricanes. Wars. This election.

I was curious to see what I wrote about this time four and eight years ago.

November Letter 2020 (about the climax of that super stressful year)

November Letter 2016 (about anxiety—mine, yours, ours)

Is there wisdom that can guide us through this? The universe recently tossed me these useful thoughts:

“Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.“

Khalil Gibran

“We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.“

Rumi

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.“

Frida Kahlo

If you seek shelter, you are always welcome to be with us, in one of our classes or our free Friday Write-Ins. Perhaps we can help each other through theses tides and tumults.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President

Hey, this is part of a series on writers who kicked down a metaphorical door with their writing. Like Marie Curie with science and Little Richard with music.

Some years ago, I hired a Screenwriting teacher for Gotham who turned out to be great in the classroom and also one of the nicest people I’ve worked with. She had to leave for a while to help a film school friend write an animated Disney movie, Wreck-It Ralph.

She planned to return to teaching in NYC when the Hollywood gig was done—she really missed it—but then they got her co-writing and co-directing a new project, Frozen. She assured me she’d be back soon as she wrapped up her work on that movie.

Ha, ha.

Her name is Jennifer Lee, and she’s now the Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation. 

Disney had been kicking around ways to adapt the Hans Christian Andersen story The Snow Queen for decades, but the project didn’t come into its current form until Lee jumped on the sled. She freely adapted the Andersen story, and, more importantly, she redrew the paradigm for a Disney princess, while also becoming the first woman to direct an animated Disney feature.

Instead of the focus on romance, Frozen revolves around the relationship between two sisters (both princesses) with romance being only a side feature. The younger sister, Anna, craves romance, but discovers her true love is with her sister, Elsa. And Elsa, showing no interest in romance, is wrestling with her innate power to turn things to ice, which is massively destructive until she learns to embrace the power, to let go of the fear, which allows her to control her icy talent rather than allowing it to control her.

And control it she does, with super-cool deftness and style. Which includes a glamorous hair and wardrobe makeover in shimmery ice-like tones. And an ice castle to kill for.

The impact of Frozen was like an avalanche. It became the highest grossing animated film of all time, and since its release over a decade ago, you can’t go far without seeing little girls (and many boys) dressed in Elsa gowns and feeling a semblance of that Elsa power. 

I can’t think of any character before or since that has inspired that kind of confidence in kids on that profound a scale. My daughter was certainly an Elsa acolyte—she didn’t merely watch Frozen, she lived it—and now she’s moved on to another glamorous woman showering girls with empowerment: Taylor Swift.

And we might soon have a woman as president in the US.

Did Jennifer Lee have anything to do with that? Maybe so.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President