Chris’s breakthrough
She was writing about a fight with her mother.
We’re in Chapter Two of the textbook. Chris is from far away; everyone else in the class is from here , so we adore Chris, we think she is spectacularly interesting and she is.
She explained how she felt, and she had these great insights on the dynamics of being far from home and not, because the fight is still in her, and she’s missing these people and its so complex because she left on a bad note and so their great qualities show up now, as she trudges around our snowy little ivied campus, in Technicolor.
I had her come to the board. She drew her living room, where the fight took place. I kept trying to get her to say what she heard that night, say what she saw. “Focus on a feature,” I said, trying to get her to look at her mom.
(I wonder what the class was thinking during all this. I should ask them. I should ask them to say here.)
Chris said, “I stormed out of the room and ran upstairs.”
This is what we do as writers. We write all around the edges of the hard thing, the true thing, the real thing. “Never avert your eyes,” Kurosawa says. So I had her rewind the scene, again and again and again. She used all the gorgeous avoidance strategies we all use regularly to avoid the real moment:
–describe emotions and feelings
–describe insignificant things
–claim remembering is impossible
–draw blanks
–sum up the event from a great distance/abstract the moment
We zoomed in on the dialogue. “What did you say.” She couldn’t remember. Then she summarized a previous conversation, regarding a sibling, something that had happened earlier. She was bound and determined not to stay in that moment. This is what we do as writers. It’s such hard work to nail yourself to the moment, the one that will reveal everything. It’s very very hard.
But by now, we’d all caught a whiff. We were on the trail now. Her voice had changed—you could see emotions on her face now. Instead of processing them, she was reliving and re- experiencing the moment.
I asked her to listen. Could she hear anyone speaking?
No.
Listen closer. What did you say, what was the last thing you said before you rushed out of the room?
And then she said it.
The words came out in a rush—totally real and felt and pure. It was a great line of dialogue – the best one in the class, to date. We laughed because it was so true, so dead on accurate and all the sudden we could see the characters and know the nature of the fight and all the emotions on both sides in a way we hadn’t been able to before. Just that one real sentence. It spoke volumes more than all the other writing, which pointed towards this moment, but didn’t ever really capture it.
It was a great moment.
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