Mirror Mirror

Damn it has gotten warm at night in Pittsburgh. I just lie sprawled out, no heavy comforter keeping away the cold, no chill air to cool the blood. Now it's just balls-out allergies and heat, wipe the snot somewhere, take a Benadryl, and sweat. Well okay, maybe not all at one time, but there are moments, damn you. Moments.

Aside from the transforming world, I am doing the best I've been doing since I started doing anything at all.

I am now officially a professional Avid editor. The polio movie brought me onto the project, and my task for the next three weeks is to deliver a trailer so sparkling that no one with change in their pocket will be able to watch it and not throw money at us. Aside from the creative challenge, the miracle is that I'm getting paid, generously so, which is unbelievably satisfying because I earned this opportunity. I worked my tail off in class, and I delivered on my promise of a development trailer.

A little backstory to make the mountain peak seem higher:

When I was a freshman at Pitt back in, lord help us, 2003, I took a screenwriting class. It was a graduate-level course, and looking back now, and on how poorly I did, I understand just how out of my league I actually was. That said, I found the class amazing. My professor, Carl Kurlander, seemed like some kind of demi-god, having come from the land of Hollywood and with real credits under his belt. He dissected stories and pitches for stories like a chef flays carrots, and he had people in tears, myself included, in the war of ideas that was the class.

He encouraged us above all to tell personal stories. I remember proposing a biography of Scott Joplin. Surely, I thought, Joplin's life would make for good drama: chance encounters, lost loves, tortured genius. Carl obliterated the idea, saying it was much too difficult for a first screenplay and that I needed to find a more personal angle. I agonized over what to do - then, as now, I had a lot of trouble with conflict, with raising the stakes. I am, by nature, a peacemaker, and in writing I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to do bad things to good characters. A lot of my stories, without outside expectations, would be like oil paintings, detailing out all the colors and shapes of a singular moment, unconcerned with the stirring clouds to the east. As a person I avoid conflict, and as a writer I do, too. That's why, when I went to shit a couple months ago, I was actually delighted to have so much conflict to write about (and, frankly, the blog has been missing some antagonism, don't you think?). It made for much better, easier writing. The conflict drew out and supported the language.

After agonizing over it for some time, I developed an idea about a young boy who, estranged from his divorced parents and picked on at school, finds a haven in his love of Scott Joplin's music. It was called "Solace," named after one of Joplin's best pieces, and I wrote the first ten pages of it for Carl. He told me it had real promise - that if I didn't write it, he would, and he'd make a lot of money.

I realized, though, that I couldn't write it; that it was actually my story, and I wasn't mature enough to talk about that yet. It's impossible to write fiction when you haven't figured out the truth yet, if that makes any sense. Until you know what something is in your own heart, it's hard, if not impossible, to take it to the page. Fiction requires distance and detachment just as much as it requires connection, and I wasn't mature enough to do it.

So, instead of turning in 30 pages of "Solace" and getting an 'A,' I turned in the first script for "Hunt for the Holocron."

I got a C-minus.

Fascinated, I signed up for another class with Carl. Here was someone who didn't like my writing, who didn't like me or the things that I created, and it was precisely because of this that I felt compelled to be around him, compelled to subject more and more of my creative self to him. The second class I took was introductory Fiction writing. I finally wrote something there that had real, genuine pathos, the only problem being that the conflict, at the end, was haphazard, even kind of disturbing and out-of-place. I did a little better in the class.

B-minus.

So imagine Carl's surprise, as we sat in the offices of WQED the other day, to be offering me, Martin, a job working on an important documentary. It was the greatest comeback in life's history as far as I'm concerned, and it only happened because I made a promise and kept it. I worked my tail off for free to show Carl that I was serious, that I was competent, that I was dedicated. It's one of those things for which you'd find a cliche like "If I had a nickel for every time..." or the like, you would use it here.

(to be continued...)