HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Guest blogger Jon James Miller will tell you he loves the written word even though most of the time it doesn’t love him.
This love/hate relationship, he says, began back in film school when he decided to become a screenwriter because buying pen and paper was cheaper than film stock and allowed him to eat, too.
Out of this pragmatic career choice came a true passion for writing which led to executing his first novel, Garbo’s Last Stand, based on, of course, an original script. The book follows silver screen movie star Greta Garbo as she secretly boards an ocean liner bound for Nazi Germany on the eve of WWII to assassinate her biggest fan – Adolf Hitler.
I will pause now, while you swoon at the brilliance of his idea. Anyway, today’s blog is not about his iconic heroine. But we’ll invite him back when the time comes! Today: one of the tougher writing-life lesson’s Jon learned while transitioning from a nomadic scribe into a first-time, terrified author.
Fun with Widows and Orphans
by Jon James Miller
When I first decided to try my hand at writing a novel, I took an adult education class at a nearby high school. This was a big deal because I had just been released from a long-term relationship by my significant other and was feeling more or less unsure of myself as a human being let alone writer. In hindsight, I should have taken the pie-making class next door. It had a better instructor and the product they turned out every class was far superior for the tuition. But everyone who starts over in life needs to start somewhere so I dug in and committed for the next twelve-weeks.
The fiction-writing course was intensive in a sadomasochistic attempt by our instructor to thin the herd. Little did I know she was going through her own mid-life crisis at the time and had little patience for window-shoppers who wanted to talk about writing more than do any actual heavy-lifting. This was fine by me.
I didn’t want to talk to anyone, either. I simply wanted to learn the ropes of my new craft, become a best-selling author with my first effort and show my ex that yes, I had what it took and she could kiss my sour grapes. As it would turn out, however, my instructor and I were a match made in hell.
Things started out innocently enough. Our Instructor doled out weekly punishment in the form of writing exercises that were intended to intimidate and demoralize. I met each one head on, fighting to not look like the frightened beginner she made even our one seasoned, published author feel like.
One month into the course and the class shrank from 21 to 12 souls. I hardly knew my remaining classmates but already felt closer to them than I had anybody in years. We had survived the first cut and lived to write about it. I even liked some of their writing and was beginning to find my own, early voice. But the biggest lesson - trusting in that voice – was still years away and I would soon find out just how naïve I was when it came to having others tell me how I should and shouldn’t write.
I became a prolific writer as the course wore on. I found the only way to please my Instructor was to draft, write and rewrite every assignment. Consequently, she saw the raw talent and effort I was bleeding on the page and I quickly became her favorite student. We began to talk about writing after class and I soaked up her knowledge of how to structure paragraphs, transition chapters and craft a compelling character arc. I began to see how novels were constructed and she opened my eyes to a world of storytelling I had never seen before.
After awhile, even the smell of fresh-baked, warm pie coming out of the class oven next door wasn’t as intoxicating as what I was learning about writing.
Months went by and my obsession with all things writing never abated. I had discovered a life-line to a new life and became an adherent. I wanted writing to be my new career and believed all the hard won lessons I had learned as a screenwriter were finally paying off in the form of novel writing.
The maddening, often arbitrary limitations of writing a script had been stripped away and I could finally indulge my love of character and story in a format that encouraged word count over white on the page. I was at the mid-point of my novel (such as it was) and could see myself finishing it. Even my Instructor began to heap praise on my efforts – something I’d never experienced in all my years in Los Angeles.
Throughout the course we had been learning lessons on craft by triaging one another’s work. Our Instructor would break out the high school’s old opaque-projector and proceed to red-line the hell out of someone’s homework. Invariably, however, the painful process was rewarding for the entire class. And thorough as ever, our Instructor would make us stand and recite mnemonic devices to remember certain concepts. I still remember most of them to this day.
Our next to last class covered the craft topic of Widows and Orphans, words or short lines at the end of a paragraph which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a column, separated from the rest of the paragraph. We even had a choice of three mnemonic devices to remember them by:
"An orphan is alone from the beginning; a widow is alone at the end. An orphan has no past; a widow has no future. Or, an orphan is left behind, whereas a widow must go on alone."
The lesson started out innocently enough. The Instructor chose a chapter of one of my classmates, a 21-year old woman who showed tremendous talent and commitment, to illustrate how to kill off ornery widows and orphans. Yet unlike what we as a class had read in the Chicago Manual of Style on suggestions for eliminating them, our Instructor chose the harshest of solutions. She made the young woman stand with her beside the projector and force her to rewrite each paragraph real-time, while the class watched her in the darkened classroom.
I’ll never forget seeing my fellow student, looking panicked like a deer caught in the head-lamp of the opaque projector, forced to rewrite her meticulously-crafted paragraphs for the sake of making random widows and orphans disappear from the page. What was obviously a very private and solitary activity for her had become an invasive, violent public act. She began to glisten with sweat, tremble under the effort as our Instructor pushed and cajoled her to comply with the butchering of prose to fit the page.
When the exercise was over, the woman picked up her backpack and left class before the overhead lights had even been turned on. I looked at my teacher’s face for any indication she was aware of the harm she had inflicted on the young lady. There was none.
So I confronted her after everyone had left. Explained that I thought there was another way she could have gone without doing any harm. She simply stared back at me with a “my way or the highway” attitude she had held over us since the beginning. My adoration of her intellect had been diminished by the harsh reality of her tactics. Apparently, there was no crying in fiction writing. If I didn’t like it, well, I’d be better off baking pies for a living.
Our last class was anticlimactic. But I’ll never forget looking over and seeing the young woman’s empty chair and having the sickening feeling that her passion for writing had been trampled, tempered, and possibly even destroyed by an overzealous writing instructor dead set on instilling her own set of inflexible and inviolate rules on her students. My take away from her and that class was to always to do my best when it came to my craft, yet never at the expense of my own (or someone else’s) enjoyment of the process. Because God knows there will always be people who think they know better than you how to write. But what nobody has the right to criticize is your process and joy of writing – because that is the one thing that cannot be taught.
HANK: What a terrible story! Humiliation as a teaching tool. Hmm. One can only hope that woman is now—oh, I don’t know. Paula Hawkins. JK Rowling. Right?
And good luck with your book! Cannot wait to read it--right, Femmes?
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Jon James Miller began his career writing short stories and screenplays that explore the rich cinematic history of the 20th century. Garbo’s Last Stand, his first novel, follows silver screen movie star Greta Garbo as she secretly boards an ocean liner bound for Nazi Germany on the eve of WWII to assassinate her biggest fan – Adolf Hitler. Jon’s novel is currently being submitted to publishers and is the culmination of years of research on Garbo’s real-life spy exploits for producer Alexander Korda. Jon has won numerous writing awards and is a frequent presenter in subjects ranging from novel and screenwriting to works based on true stories and film adaptation. His webinars can be found at The Writers Store and Writers Digest University online. When not writing, Jon loves to travel, research and go to the movies. He is represented by Jill Marr at Sandra Dijkstra Literary and Kevin Cleary of Pooka Entertainment. For more, go to www.jonjamesmiller.com and www.garboslaststand.com