Letters From Kelly

The song “The Show Must Not Go On” by the band Harvey Danger, has this couplet:

You can bash your head against the wall, forever, the wall will never change

But if you start to like the bloody bruises, the wall cannot be blamed.

It cracks me up every time I hear it, but it also puzzles me. Is it about reveling in your own stubbornness? Or is it about persistence?

Recently Gotham teacher Teresa Wong suggested an answer, when she visited my class recently to talk about her new memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, because writing that book took her 20 years.

She wrote the first draft when she was in her mid-20s, after taking a trip to China and Hong Kong with her parents. She knew there was a story there, about that trip and her parents, but she couldn’t find the right way to tell it.

“It was just fundamentally flawed in a way that I couldn’t understand at that point and that I do kind of understand now 20 years later,” Teresa said

She put it away, came back, put it away, came back, trying out new approaches, none of which worked.

Meanwhile, Teresa did some other things:

• She became a mother.
• She became an artist and cartoonist.
• She experienced post-partum depression and write a book about it, which became her memoir Dear Scarlet.
• During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, she started her Substack, Closet Dispatch, where she draws and tells a story about one item of clothing in her closet.
• She became an Artist in Residence at the University of Calgary.

“I needed to add that extra layer of my having my own kids before I could understand my parents as well as I could in the book, to add the depth and perspective to everything,” Teresa said. “I needed to become a cartoonist, because I really needed the imagery and the interplay between image and text to really bring out my parents’ experiences in vivid detail.”

No doubt, trying and failing to write All Our Ordinary Stories helped Teresa write Dear Scarlet. And completing and publishing Dear Scarlet helped her solve the riddle of how to write All Our Ordinary Stories.

For some stories, when we say they need time what we’re really saying is they need you to keep living your life. You need to go to Hong Kong, have one more conversation with your mother, drive cross country, take and quit that job with the crazy boss, write other essays or poems or scripts or books. You need to come back again and again and hit that wall again. You need to fail.

And then, the miracle happens.

“What I ended up doing was just listing out all the stories that I wanted to tell, and then trying to group them into loose themes,” Teresa said. “Once I had that, it made it doable in a way that I hadn’t figured out for the many years I had been working on this.”

Persistence sometimes feels like bashing your head against a wall. But it’s not. It’s a vigil you hold for your story, so that when the right way to tell it finally shows up, you’re there, ready to usher it in.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

In 2001, I volunteered for the post-September 11^th disaster recovery, and one of the first things I learned from the crusty, kind-hearted career FEMA workers there was not to use “endurance” and “resilience” interchangeably.

It’s embarrassing to admit (because I’m persnickety about word choice!), but I did use “endurance” and “resilience” interchangeably. Big mistake.

Because they are so, so different.

Endurance is simply withstanding adversity, often at length. That’s it. It’s Kate Winslet in Titanic, clinging to that door.*

Resilience is something more. It means a person or community has met adversity, absorbed its blows, adapted to it, and recovered. Someone who is resilient may change, but they’ll still preserve the most essential aspects of themselves. It’s Margot Robbie at the end of Barbie — she reclaims her home and her community, but she will never return to life as she previously knew it.

Because stories are all about adversity, it’s important to ask: Are your characters (and maybe their communities) merely enduring the plot? Or are they resilient?

And if it’s the latter, it’s important to understand, resilience doesn’t just happen. Like any good story, it’s created.

What do you construct resilience out of? I’m glad you asked! Three main components:

• Preparedness. A community in Oklahoma’s tornado alley is more resilient if it’s got a state-of-the-art early-warning system and enough sturdy shelters.
• Easing Suffering. The more relief someone gets from their misery, the more quickly they can heal. (Breaks from all the suffering are often appreciated by audiences, as well.)  
• Speeding Up Healing. The faster you clear debris, counsel the bereaved, and treat the wounded, the faster the recovery.

You can see that if a character is resilient, they enter a story on p. 1 with traits, resources, or connections that will enable them to absorb the blows and emerge more or less intact. The trick is identifying them.

Some questions to ask yourself about your resilient characters:

• Were they well-prepared for their trials? Or did they possess a previously unknown (maybe even secret) advantage?
• What will help ease their suffering through their crises?
• What will help them heal? What will make things worse?
• When they emerge from their adversity, what aspects of their previous lives or of their deepest selves will be lost? What will be preserved, or restored?

Hint: One of the most surefire, reliable ways that people ease one another’s suffering is through  comfort and joy — food, love, friendship, laughter, community. It’s why the mass assault of people rushing in to help survivors after a disaster is so moving. All of that kindness and camaraderie is a balm—literally.

Your characters may not have 1,000 strangers swarming in to help them clear away debris, but if they’re resilient, they, like Barbie, have loyal friends, ardent fans, a cool pink convertible, creative instincts, and Rhea Perlman. (Or the equivalent.) Look for the places your characters will find joy, or where they found it before their troubles started, and you’ll find the key to their resilience.

*Yes, I am on the That-Door-Was-Big-Enough-For-Two team.

A mistake that I make often as a teacher (and I suspect other writing teachers make, too), is we don’t explain in enough detail one of our favorite exhortations: Writers must read a lot.

I don’t dig into it much because writing students are usually avid readers already. They’re the ones who stayed up way past their bedtimes as kids, to read just one more chapter. They’ve got at least two books on the go at all times. They complain their TBR list is too long. (They assume everyone knows TBR means “to be read.”)

But at Gotham’s recent Children’s Book Writers Conference, literary agent Samantha Fabien said something that made me sit up straight: “I encourage folks to do more forensic reading.”

“Obviously we’re all readers, but I don’t know that we always sit and read a page or a chapter and examine what it’s doing and how it’s doing it,” she said.

Before this, “forensic reading” to me meant teaching high school students to improve their reading comprehension and to read critically. I hadn’t thought of it as what we do when we read as writers.

Fabien made me realize, it’s not enough to tell writers to read more. We need to talk more specifically on what we’re doing when reading forensically, as opposed to when you’re reading for pleasure (which you should keep doing!).

For example, Fabien suggested pulling books off your own shelves or shelves at the library and reading just the first chapter (or two), and then asking yourself:

“What kind of voice am I getting? What’s the tone? How much do I know about this character? Why am I interested in reading more? Why am I not? Especially why am I not?”

It’s that snag in the brain — for good or ill — you’re seeking when reading forensically. You want to re-shelve the book before finishing the chapter, and you search for what triggered that impulse. You realize the author transported you from one idea to another so smoothly you barely noticed, so you hunt for their transition. You admire something, you get bored, you realize you’ve been enraptured, you feel a little manipulated and not in a fun way. Each time, you go back and look for the why.

But there’s another way to read as a writer, too, as novelist Matt Bell describes in his fabulous craft book Refuse to Be Done: You read to replenish your supply of inspiration.

“The bigger you make your art life, the more possibilities your imagination will generate,” Bell says. “You want as many possibilities floating around you as possible especially in the earliest and wildest stages of your draft.”

Reading as a writer is about more — more moves, more ideas, more inspiration, more permission, more grain to pour into that whirling mill of your mind. The more you take in, the more you create, and also, the more fun you will have, too.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty