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Letters From Alex
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Funny Stuff

Sometimes we just need a laugh. And writers can be especially helpful with that. Here’s two passages I like…

First, the episode of Seinfeld called “The Deal,” written by Larry David. Jerry is good friends with Elaine, of course, but years back they dated for a while. One night they decide they can start having sex with each other so long as they keep it only sex, nothing else, not even sleeping over.

All goes well until Elaine’s birthday comes up. Jerry goes shopping for a present in a second-hand store, taking his buddy George along for help. Jerry hopes to get the right balance—a gift that won’t upset the spirit of the deal. Here they’re sifting through the bric-a-brac:

George: I got it. You wanna get her something nice? How ‘bout a music box?

Jerry: No, too relationshippy. She opens it up, she hears that Lara’s theme, I’m dead.

George: Okay, what about a nice frame? With a picture of another guy in it. Frame says I care for you, but if you wanna get serious, perhaps you’d be interested in someone like this.

Jerry: Nice looking fellow.

George: What about candle holders?

Jerry: Too romantic.

George: Lingerie?

Jerry: Too sexual.

George: Waffle maker.

Jerry: Too domestic.

George: Bust of Nelson Rockefeller.

Jerry: Too gubernatorial.

The situation’s funny because most of us have dealt with relationship precariousness. And it’s topped by that last word—amusing even if you don’t know it means “relating to the office of governor,” which Rockefeller was.

Next, we have Dory Dory Black Sheep, from the Dory Fantasmagory children’s book series, written by Abby Hanlon. It’s reading time in Dory’s first grade-class, and she’s paired with George because, well, neither one of them has come too far reading-wise. Dory considers George a friend, even though he’s on the goofy side. Here’s what happens:

Our teacher comes over. “I think you two are going to love the new series I chose for you. It’s called Happy Little Farm.”

We pretend we are reading until she leaves.

“If I was the farmer, I would just eat all the animals,” whispers George.

“If I was the farmer, I would move to the city and get an apartment with an elevator,” I say.

“If I was the farmer, I would run around naked and put mud all over my body and then stick things to it,” says George.

“But you would do that anyway,” I say.

The writer is a former first-grade teacher, and she knows how to capture these kids in all their very-real hilarity.

Now… go read, watch, or write something funny.

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly
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Getting Nostalgic

It’s graduation season, and you know what that means: For the next six weeks, high school and college campuses will be clogged with people stopping in inconvenient places, staring off into the middle distance, misty-eyed.

They’re only sort-of present in those moments—part of them is visiting the past. It’s involuntary, likely to happen when you return to a place where you did some of your most important growing up, (an alma mater, for example), or you find yourself gazing out on a sea of young people ending a big chapter of their lives and beginning a new one. These are moments almost guaranteed to clobber us with nostalgia.

Nostalgia, and the stories it inspires, get a bad reputation, because so often they don’t have much point to them. It’s your mom driving you around her hometown, pointing to a house that looks exactly like every other house, and saying “That’s where your grandma grew up.”

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about how nostalgia is actually really useful to writers, because the magazine of my own alma mater asked me to write an advice story on how to turn your college memories into actual stories.

Basically, they paid me to indulge my own nostalgia while advising writers on how to make it matter.

Along the way, I learned some things about nostalgia that are downright fascinating:

  • Humans are (as far as we know) the only species that can feel nostalgia for the future.
  • Nostalgia is contagious — you can spread yours to people, even if they don’t share the memory.
  • It cultivates empathy.
  • It makes us likely to seek out connections to other people. We are even more likely to ask for help.

Most importantly for writers, when we sink into nostalgia, far from being a self-indulgent waste of time, we’re making meaning of our past.

And all of that—the warm fuzzies, the vivid details of memory, the empathy, the reaching out to old friends, the meaning—all of it can be used to create more vivid, more emotional, more meaningful stories.

“Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion,” wrote the novelist Michael Chabon. “Most truly and most meaningfully, [it] is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, … of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.”

Most of the memories that flood us with nostalgia involve other people, according to researchers. Which means that when you explore why some memories carry you away while others don’t, you can better understand your relationships at the time, both to the people in your immediate orbit, as well as to humanity more widely.

Take this nostalgia-inflected story, “You Still Wouldn’t Trade It For Another Lap Around” by Abby Alten Schwartz. Graf after graf reads a lot like this one, memories of her childhood interwoven with the experiences of others her age.

At a party the summer after you graduated, you got high and turned to your friends and said, “Do you ever think about nuclear war?” and then you all busted out laughing and for years after that someone would bring it up and it still cracked you up in an embarrassing way. But really, the threat of being wiped out suddenly (or worse, surviving) was the biggest danger you faced next to strangers or hitchhiking or Ouija boards at slumber parties.

Alten Schwartz shares that moment with her friends at that graduation party, but the vulnerability in it, when she shared her fear, connects her memory and her story to many others in her generation, it makes the story more meaningful, because it’s no longer a “do-you-remember?” but a story of growing up under a shadow, and surviving.

OK, writers, your turn. I’ve put together an exercise for you to stir and hopefully harness your nostalgia. Don’t be afraid to indulge in it. Remember it not only gives you grist for stories, it can help make you a better person.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex
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Wild With Desire

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