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.
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.
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.
