Learning to Be a Writer
In the fall of 1997, I joined a creative writing club that I didn’t really want to join at the insistence of a teacher I spent far too much time trying to please. The English Department had given this teacher, Mr. Hart, the opportunity to take over their barely existent creative writing department, which consisted of one class and an after-school club. I didn’t want to join because I figured it’d be made up of a bunch of weirdos. I wasn’t wrong, although it turned out they were exactly the type of weirdos I wanted to hang around with.
By the spring of 1998, we had turned into the dorkiest group of friends imaginable. It was the first time anyone my age had ever read (or heard read) my stuff, and they were pretty encouraging. The only big problem: I’d been under the impression what I was writing was pretty serious and dramatic. It surprised me to learn they all thought it was hilarious and ironic. It’s just one of those things, I guess. This isn’t bragging because I honestly hate it and would change it if I could, but the only time I’m able to not be funny is when I’m trying to be funny, at which point I spew forth jokes so lame Fozzie Bear would grimace in disgust.
I rationalized that I have a skill most people don’t — and if they do, it’s not so effortless — but that didn’t make me feel as good as you might think. It did reach a point where I found myself able to merge legitimate, dramatic emotion with my comedic weirdness, but that’s the closest I’ve come to straight, unfunny work.
But in this story, the “funny” takes on some importance, so keep it in mind.
One morning in early March, Hart mentioned he’d been approached by a teacher who coordinated the annual Earth Day Jam, which is about as lame as it sounds. This teacher was kind of a touchy-feely hippie kinda guy who wanted every single club or activity in the school to be represented, if possible. To that end, he wondered if maybe the creative writing club would like to put together something for the Jam.
“What?” I asked. “Like a reading or something?”
“Well…” Mr. Hart said, taking that hushed, confidential tone that made idiots like me feel like we had a “friendly” rapport rather than just the normal student-teacher relationship. “Phoebe and I came up with this idea, and we’d like you to write it.”
Phoebe was another member of the club, someone I’d both befriend and developed a moderate crush on. In retrospect, I have no clue if she was involved in this or not. I know that he knew I had a crush on her (it was pretty obvious), so he might have figured I’d join up with anything that had Phoebe’s name attached to it. He wasn’t wrong.
The idea went like this: a group of stoners use Earth Day as an excuse to get high, but they discover the true meaning of Earth Day. It was edutainment: it teaches you while you learn. Hart wanted some kind of sketch-comedy from this premise, and it sounded like an idea I could work with.
Things went wrong almost immediately. Although I didn’t get a negative vibe from it at the start, I got annoyed with Mr. Hart’s insistence that this was my project, even though it wasn’t my idea and he’d impede what little I contributed. Sure, I wrote the script, but when I tried to cast it, Hart didn’t seem to care about anything…until I started bringing in my actor friends. He jumped in to tell me that I had to cast it using members of the writing club, none of whom had any acting experience. I forced a compromise because the script had two male parts, and the only other male in the club refused to participate, so I had to get one of my actor friends to do it.
He, in turn, palmed the script off on another friend, who was funny enough and nice enough, but it sort of blurred the line between truth and fiction because, basically, he didn’t have to act to play the part of lazy burnout. During our minimal rehearsal time, he start ad-libbing. A lot. And it was funny, so I went with it. I had some minor concerns that his ad-libs might cross a line between “good-natured pothead satire” and “saying things that a person can’t get up on a high school stage and say without getting suspended.” When I mentioned this to Mr. Hart, who insisted on being there for all rehearsals (despite the fact that this was my baby and he was just there to “observe”), he just shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not my sketch.”
Worst of all, saddled with non-actors for key roles, Phoebe opted to play the person who teaches them the meaning of Earth Day. The second half of the sketch turned into a direct spoof of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Phoebe was Linus — with dimmed lights and everything, she steps up to explain the true meaning of Earth Day. The only problem: she wasn’t an actor, and our performance wasn’t going to be miked. My solution was to grab one of the mics for another performance and have her use that, but Phoebe and her friends all insisted that she “can be loud.”
Then, the day arrived. Here’s something you have to know about Earth Day and the Earth Day Jam: every single stoner at our school really did use this day, and this event, as an excuse to get high. As I recall, this was the year our school experimented with “modular scheduling” (an absolute disaster), which made the Earth Day Jam extra-long and may have accounted for why the coordinating teacher was hard up for acts. I remember it running during lunch periods for most years, but that year it ran all day. With the modular scheduling, students had open blocks at any time of the day. Since attendance was nearly impossible to enforce (the modules made hall passes irrelevant), stoners just holed up in the tiny theatre. The audience was more like a shitty concert than a shitty school event, with a thick haze of smoke drifting toward the ceiling at all times, the acrid sweetness of marijuana in the air. You’d think somebody would smell that and start tossing people out, but in my four years, it was the same thing every year and nobody seemed to give a shit that kids were smoking both cigarettes and joints during the festivities.
I’m writing this a decade later, knowing the hoary aftermath and just basically knowing the stupidity of everything leading to the Earth Day Jam performance. You have to understand the utter cluelessness I felt leading up to it. I had my reservations, but I had no clue it would turn into the disaster that it did. The worst part about it is, I realized how bad it’d be within the first 15 seconds of the sketch.
Because I found it funny at the time (and still find it funny) to portray and character on drugs as some kind of Maynard G. Krebs-style Beatnik, the sketch opened with a Dylan-mocking folk song. I remember nothing about it except that it ended with the line, “So let’s all get stoned!”
The entire theatre erupted in enthusiastic applause that lasted for what felt like five minutes (it was probably about 15 seconds, all told). I looked up from my guitar, trying to peer past the lights into the shadowy sea of faces, but I didn’t need to see the faces of the applauders to realize what would happen next. All the stoners looked to my ad-libbing friend, who stole the show. Phoebe went up to deliver her soliloquy, but she refused to take the provided mic. My sister and a couple of other friends, up in the lighting booth, later told me they couldn’t hear a word she said from the back of the house. I’m pretty sure they would have had the same complaint if she’d been in the front row. Phoebe is a quiet, mousy person who apparently thinks she’s louder than she is.
So the end result: kids lured in by the hilarity of drug-based humor, without grasping the underlying point because they couldn’t hear it.
The real lessons came from the aftermath. A week later, another teacher took me aside after class and explained to me that, during the most recent faculty meeting, the teacher gossip-mill was abuzz with the news that I’m a giant pothead. I was a dorky sophomore who, at that time, hadn’t felt anything better than a contact high. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t use drugs, yet they were branding me a Lot Troll* without basis. Okay, maybe the sketch served as basis enough, but what the fuck?
So I went to Mr. Hart and told him I’d heard a rumor that teachers are saying I’m a burnout because of that sketch. He shrugged and unconvincingly said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
And suddenly, the body language and evasiveness of the past month made total sense: he rammed this idea down my throat, but then he either had second thoughts or always knew that this would be something to distance himself from, and if he received any negative criticism about the sketch, he’d blame the writer.
Yes, this was the first moment in my life that I felt like a real, professional writer.
I didn’t have many options, so I did the best thing I could think of: I wrote a two-page letter discussing my intentions for the sketch, the flaws in the casting/rehearsal/performance process, and the gross misinterpretation both of what I’d written and the misperception of myself and my character. I attached a full copy of the sketch (pre-ad-libs) and made copies for every teacher in the school.
Not many people remarked on it. Mr. Hart was pissed off. Another teacher in the English Department seemed genuinely concerned until I explained to him that I didn’t want to go through two full years of new teachers with them all thinking I’m a burnout and treating me accordingly. I had a bad enough time with that in junior high — I didn’t want the trend to continue.
More impressively, two teachers to whom I’d been fairly indifferent (and who were equally indifferent toward me) thanked me for the explanation and honesty and kinda acted guilty for either believing or spreading the rumors.
So I learned another lesson from the experience: words have power, both good and bad.
*As in “smoking lot.” [Back]
Posted by Stan on May 26, 2008 11:03 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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