Screenwriting 101: What Fiction Writers Learn from Star Wars

Essays Screening Room
July 28, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read

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For the last twelve years I have taught fiction writing at Delta College in Michigan. For six of those years I have also taught Introduction to Screenwriting as part of Delta’s Film Production program. Arguably, screenwriters and fiction writers are going about the same thing, even if in different forms: they are trying to tell a good story. I certainly can’t say that the ways I teach screenwriting and fiction writing are universal, but I have noticed that, while the two courses essentially focus on storytelling, my pedagogical approaches for each are very different.

When I teach fiction, I usually focus on the “craft” of fiction. I use words and phrases like “conflict,” “character development,” “backstory,” “interior landscape,” and “dialogue.” When it comes to plot, though, I find myself saying something cryptic like, “Plot comes out of character. Whatever your protagonist does must be true to his or her character.” It’s good advice, I suppose, but it doesn’t really help students understand what makes for a solid plot. When I talk about fiction writing, the vibe is mystical: “You don’t need to know where you’re going. Just sit down and write. Discover what you have to say sentence by sentence. Let the journey surprise you.” Sometimes I’ll even quote E.L. Doctorow who said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love that simile, but the more realistic side of me notes that it’s also a perfect situation for crashing and going nowhere.

Screenwriting often seems so much more practical and story-oriented. Right out of the gate, I am talking with students about the importance of movie-mapping. Much more time is spent on the plotting of the story to make certain that “something happens” and that the movie is always escalating tension and conflict as it moves toward the climax. For such a modern form of storytelling – barely 125 years old – screenwriting seems to draw much more of its understanding of plot from Plato’s dissection of narrative structure.

Before my students begin to learn screenplay format, I first ask them to consider their film’s major dramatic question, or MDQ. In screenwriting, the major dramatic question is a yes-or-no question that is answered by the climax. For instance, in the 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope, the MDQ would be, “Will Luke blow up the Death Star?” Before ever writing, my students are encouraged to know their MDQ and to know the answer. They have to know what they are writing towards in order to make every scene lead the audience there naturally and believably. To understand how movie structure works, we talk about a movie’s Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Mid-Point, Plot Point 2, and Climax. Screenwriters are encouraged to know their ending before anything else, which seems very different from all of that driving blind in the fog business.

Star Wars: A New Hope provides a good example of the rest of the plot points. The inciting incident of a movie is the event that is necessary to get the movie going. Usually the first ten minutes of a film focus on character and situation introduction, but right about ten minutes in, something happens that calls the protagonist to his or her quest. In Star Wars, the inciting incident occurs when the droids escape Princess Leia’s ship with the plans to the Death Star inside R2-D2. (Notice how the inciting incident already alludes to the MDQ.) If the droids don’t escape Leia’s ship, then we don’t have Star Wars…or at least not the Star Wars that we know.

Right around 25 to 30 pages into the script, the screenwriter must begin to think about Plot Point 1. This is a moment in the movie that makes action on the part of the protagonist necessary. In Star Wars, Luke isn’t really sure what he’s doing with the droids. He’s chasing R2-D2 rather than making his own choices. Even when Ben asks Luke to join him, Luke says that he can’t leave his uncle’s farm. It’s only when Luke races back to the farm to find his uncle and aunt dead at the hands of the Empire that he can commit to his quest. Nothing is holding Luke back, and his hatred toward the Empire has been fueled.

About halfway through the script, screenwriters need to give thought to the Mid-Point. The Mid-Point often shows us a strength in the character that we have not seen up until this moment. In the first half of Star Wars, Luke takes a backseat to the much more interesting Ben Kenobi and Han Solo. It’s only when Luke is free of them that he can truly shine. Rescuing Princess Leia, Luke faces a daunting chasm. Storm troopers are slowly opening the door behind him. Across the chasm, stormtroopers fire upon him and Leia. Oh, and as you’ll remember, the bridge across the chasm is no longer functional. Probably unknowingly using the Force, Luke flawlessly tosses a grappling hook up to an overhead pipe and swings himself and Leia to safety. He does this on his own. That’s the movie’s midpoint, which helps the audience believe what happens in the climax because it reveals that strength of character that the audience had yet to see.

Finally, to escalate conflict and to make success that much more difficult, a screenwriter has to think about Plot Point 2, which is a major setback to the protagonist. In Star Wars, the setback happens when Ben is killed by Darth Vader. It’s a major blow to Luke, and it makes their entire mission against the Death Star seem that much more hopeless. Watch nearly any movie, and right around three-quarters into it, something really bad will happen to the main character. That event serves to escalate tension and keep the audience uncertain.

The rest of the movie now plays out toward answering the MDQ. If the movie has been plotted well, the climax is not only satisfying but believable.

It’s my belief that no novelist would be hurt by taking a screenwriting course or by studying a screenwriting text, not for jumping ship and becoming a screenwriter, but to understand storytelling from a new vantage-point. At Delta College, the students who take creative writing courses represent a small but passionate pool. They often take every creative writing course available. In Screenwriting, I will sometimes get students who want to adapt a novel that they are working on into a screenplay. More often than not, they actually end up learning what they have to do to make their novel work as a novel. It is the strict attention to plot involved with screenwriting that helps them see how they can make their story work better in prose form. At the end of the class they’ll tell me, “This class helped me understand my novel so much better, and now I’m going to rewrite the entire thing.”

teaches English at Delta College and writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays. His books of fiction include Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), the novel Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press), the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press), and Threatened Species and Other Stories (Whistling Shade Press). His third novel, American Poet, won the Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Writing by a Michigan Author and a Michigan Notable Book Award from the Library of Michigan. In 2016, Whistling Shade Press released his new novel, Detroit Muscle. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com.

Reviews Screening Room

Preacher Problems: John Huston and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Reviews Screening Room
May 20, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 3 4 min read

“I think I’ve been had,” John Huston remarked when he finished filming his adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Or at least that’s the story the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald tells. Huston’s take was that the film had a darkly comic heart, dressed in religious trappings. He was not convinced that the main character, the staunch atheist Hazel Motes, finds God in the end. That is, until the Fitzgeralds persuaded him otherwise.If anyone other than O’Connor was aware of her intentions, the Fitzgeralds were. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald provided her with a room for two years while she wrote the novel, parts of which she shared with them. Robert became the executor of her estate after she died and Sally edited volumes of her letters and nonfiction. Wise Blood stayed in the family, so to speak, when their sons, Benedict and Michael set out to turn the novel into film, for which they recruited John Huston as the director. The brothers and their mother were present on location during the filming in Macon, Georgia, and among other things, made sure Huston’s depiction remained faithful to O’Connor’s vision.If Huston was had, it was only because Hazel Motes was too. Haze wants more than anything to out Jesus as a liar and false prophet and to found his own religion, the Church Without Christ, as a response to the evangelism that he grew up with and has thrived around him. The grandson of a circuit preacher who would park his car, climb atop the hood, and start preaching hellfire and redemption, Haze determined early on to become a preacher too – but one who speaks against belief, who disabuses its converts of the false notions, needless guilt, and notions of depravity.After a stint in the army, Haze makes his way to a small southern town called Taulkinham, where he finds a whore, buys a ramshackle car, and sets out to start the Church Without Christ. As O’Connor explained in a letter to the novelist John Hawkes, Haze’s striking out against Jesus was a rebellion against a deep-set faith within him: “There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would ultimately be possible or not.” With the same fervor that Haze rejects Christianity and the street preacher’s refrain, he crashes into it head-on.So it goes with Haze, that in spite of his valiant efforts to discern what is true, he’s often unable to see what lies directly in front of him. And he’s not the only one. Much is made of eyes and vision in Wise Blood; appearances are often merely facades. The blind street preacher, Asa Hawks, who Haze follows when he first arrives in Taulkinham and later becomes obsessed with, isn’t really a man of God and isn’t really blind. Asa’s bastard daughter, Sabbath Lily, gives Haze “fast eye” when they first meet, and of course there’s Haze, whose penetrating eyes, according to Sabbath, “don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep looking.” That Haze continues to look becomes his saving grace. When Wise Blood’s characters believe they have clarity, it’s often the point where they’re led most astray. Take Haze’s car. He has great pride in his decrepit jalopy with one door attached by a rope; even when it breaks down, he claims it’s as fine as any. And as they’re sputtering along, Sabbath corroborates, telling Haze it runs “as smooth as honey.”In this vein, Huston’s partial blindness to O’Connor’s ultimate vision while filming Wise Blood may help explain why the film stays so true to the novel’s tone and intent. The Fitzgeralds’ guiding hand made sure Huston didn’t stray too far from the course, but the eccentric characters and the humor of their foibles could easily have slipped into caricature. Instead, they strike O’Connor’s unique pitch. Thanks to Benedict Fitzgerald’s screenplay, many of the best lines remain untouched, such as Enoch Emery’s description of his foster mother whose hair was so thin “it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull.” Perhaps the only off note is the musical score, that inserts a punchy banjo riff a la the Beverly Hillbillies during interludes and whenever the town’s desperate newcomer Enoch Emery appears, as if to cue laughter. In contrast, Emery’s on-screen presence – disheveled, lonely, and naively enthusiastic – is nuanced and pitiably comedic. Had the director been more attuned to O’Connor’s religious vision, the depictions could easily have become more-heavy handed, and lost some of their comic potential if not their humanity.To speak of O’Connor without touching on religion is missing the point, but to focus so intently on religion that the story is sacrificed would be the greater loss. O’Connor’s genius was that she could perform the balancing act and execute it with near perfection. As she confided to John Hawkes, “I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel that is not of the greatest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe with the air of our times.” That O’Connor’s characters so believably grapple with disbelief makes them more human, and their struggles more profound. In the best sense, Huston’s film breathes life into O’Connor’s characters, with a single-minded Hazel Motes, a befuddled Emery Enoch, and an elfin Sabbath Lily, along with a host of characters from this small southern town, trying to find their way as best they can.John Huston’s Wise Blood was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Bonus goodies include John Huston interviewed by Bill Moyers, an essay by Francine Prose, and an audio track of O’Connor reading her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Reviews Screening Room
| 2 books mentioned 3 4 min read
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Essays

Just for the Thrill of it?

Essays
March 9, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read

“Oh there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work with someone who bullies me,” Colm Tóibín recently declared in response to M.J. Hyland‘s question about the enjoyment he derives from writing books. He was emphatic that this has always held true, and that the one pleasure of his career is, “The money.” He quickly clarified: “It is such a surprise.”Tóibín’s dour response surprised many a reader, would-be-novelist, and practically-minded parent, as he bit his thumb at the general notion that one writes for pleasure – pleasure generated by writing, but if not, then at least in having written – and that the writer’s sacrifice lies in the resulting financial instability and lack of recognition of his work. And yet, Tóibín’s devotion to writing isn’t bound to the remuneration, or really, to any pleasure at all; he claims he writes, “Because I have things that will not go away.”Spurred by Tóibín’s interview, the Guardian this week queried nine more authors who make their living at their desks. The pleasured writers were the few. Will Self is one of two; his assuredness and satisfaction, I suspect, is the envy of the lot: “I gain nothing from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay; novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte.” A.L. Kennedy’s analogy, “Sex=nice thing. Sex for cash=probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise,” oddly complements Self’s response by partially restoring writing’s sexy veneer. This might help explain why each author has a unique set of titillations and hang-ups. John Banville’s response is more balanced – he admits the pleasures, but emphasizes the failures: “The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope is to ‘fail better.'”The sense of failure, anxiety, and uncertainty that plagues writers reared its head again, rather mournfully this time, in D.T. Max’s article on David Foster Wallace in this week’s New Yorker, which Garth responded to in a previous post. Max chronicles Wallace’s struggle with anxiety over his literary output and completing what he set out to achieve. He writes that Wallace confided, regarding writing The Pale King, “I’ve brooded and brooded about all this till my brooder is sore.” And Don DeLillo, in response to Wallace’s inquiry about a writer’s anxieties, reassures him with a quote from yet another master, Henry James: “Doubt is our passion.” Garth raised the question whether writing fiction fueled Wallace’s mental instability, as Max implies at times, or rather, if Wallace’s depression and anxiety somehow enabled his fiction. (Avital Ronell’s understanding that,”Anxiety is the mood, par excellence, of ethicity,” would support the latter.)So much for the idea of fun. Javier Marías also recently touched on the tortured lives of writers, albeit somewhat tongue-in cheek, for he speaks of writers’ lives as if he were merely a spectator and not an author himself. (Marías’s life I imagine, will provide fertile ground for future biographers, beginning with his identical Madrid apartments, one decorated in white, the other in black). Marías proceeds glibly, listing abhorrent traits of artists – the megalomania, the addiction – and their basic inability to handle whatever befalls them: “They find it equally difficult to cope with either success of failure and require unhealthily large doses of attention.” However humorous the satire, a shard of truth lies beneath.Marías knows writers intimately, not only because he is one, but because his fascination led him to compose a series of brief biographies of dead writers as if they were fictional characters. His accounts of their tumultuous lives are collected in Written Lives. In the introduction, Marías warns, “the one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals,” and follows to prove his point by recounting many a tormented life and death, including the disembowelment and decapitation of Yukio Mishima and how Malcolm Lowry’s wife found him in a whorehouse drunk, without clothes – because he sold them to buy a bottle of gin. Marías pays heed to the quotidian pains of writing as well: Djuna Barnes “would sometimes work three or four eight-hour days just to produce two or three lines of verse,” and spent the equivalent of 40 years alone in her apartment, with her typewriter as her sole companion. Oscar Wilde accounts for a difficult day: “This morning, I took out a comma, and this afternoon, I put it back in again.” Conrad at least took some pleasure in his displeasure: “nothing consoled him more than being shut up in his study, writing with agonizing difficulty.” Of the calamities that befell the writers, these are just a few.Why then, does Tóibín’s claim that he doesn’t enjoy writing leave us dumbfounded? Perhaps as readers, we like to believe we’re sharing the delights of a good book – a witty remark, a linguistic pirouette – with the author, and that we’re partaking in a camaraderie of the mind, when instead we’re more like children scurrying along on an amusement park ride. No one expects the person who creates roller coasters to enjoy the labor of building them as much as the patrons enjoy riding them. Perhaps it’s enough to say that the act communication, of telling “what it’s like to be a fucking human being” – Wallace’s professed aim in fiction – lies at the core.

Essays
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5 comments:

  1. Ah, so THIS is why almost all the new novels I read (for 20-50 pages, then toss out the window), read like paper televisions!

    I think the article-writer’s formulae work best with Space Operas, Bodice Rippers and Dan Brown Books (which combine the former and the latter, sort of) but, well, let’s try this stuff out on a few of my favorite novels:

    1) Roth’s SABBATH’S THEATER. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… will Mickey Sabbath live or die? Answer: YES. Inciting Incident: shit hits fan! Plot Point 1: more shit hits fan! Mickey Sabbath’s Mid Point Strength: huh? Plot point 2: shit/ fan. Climax: idem
    2) DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… erm. Inciting Incident: erm… erm. Plot Point 1: a baseball…? Sputnik… ? H-bomb…? erm…?
    3) Sebald’s AUSTERLITZ (shrugs)
    4) Nabokov’s LOLITA. What’s LOLITA’S “MDQ?” Will Humbert… erm… will he…?
    5) Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER… yup. Climax? Yup.
    6) Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. What’s the “MDQ”? Will Billy PIlgrim… … will he… have stuff happen to him? Answer: YES! Inciting Incident: WW2. Plot Point 1: … he’s kidnapped by… Tralfammadorians… ?

    But so what? The character might just as well have fallen into a giant vat of butterscotch pudding and floated for a week while recalling high-points of his adolescence. Because, UNLIKE in a one-dimensional hardware-epic like Star Wars, in which ACTION is the essence of the attraction, what counts in Slaughterhouse Five (and all the above-cited books) is not so much what the character does or must do as what the writer says about what the character does or must do, and how the writer says it, and all the collateral details and quirks and jokes and clues with which the writer repays the reader’s attention.

    In a movie, the plot is an excuse for fireworks (explosions and/or boobs); in a book… a good book… the plot is just an excuse for good writing. It is the least-important aspect of the text’s mechanics and is often little more than a sop to conventional expectations; a pacifier for the literal-minded. A good book, like Life, is a jumble of colliding sub-plots fleshed out with enlivening particularities. What’s the “Plot” of *your* Life?

    Just as photography took over the chore of visual reproduction, freeing painting to do what photography *can’t* (no photograph gets closer to the core of its subject, or of the viewer’s subjectivity, than a Lucian Freud painting did or would have), TV is very good at bringing basic narrative to the narrative-hungry. Which should free The Novel to do what even cinematography (armed with CGI) cannot: read back to you the organized contents of a literary genius’ mind in your own inner voice. Miraculous.

    I can remember reading the “hooks” on the dust-jackets of the books in my grandmother’s library: “The shocking story of…!” “The inspiring story of…!” “The True Life story of…” Back during the last gasp of the novel’s high responsibility to Plot, before Character and Style (aka, how the Novel runs rings around Film) took over.

    Sure, an occasionally not-badly-written book comes along with a plot-driven Story to tell… but aren’t these usually examples of an amusing reversal of the old dictum that the Book is always better than the Film? In these cases, I actually wait for the film. In fact, ironically (speaking of Roth), Barry Levinson’s film of “The Humbling” took Roth’s uncharacteristically-thin book and rewired its Plot into something better. But that’s only, mind you, because the Novel wasn’t at its best there.

    Please, good Ladies and Fellows: stop diminishing the Novel by teaching it as “Plot”! Reducing it to “Story”! Very much like reducing any given painting by Modigliani to a matter of colors. The color is as much the point as plot is.

    Oh, and writing can’t be *taught*, anyway. It can only be *learned*.

    It’s about reading. Lots of reading. “Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.

  2. @steven augustine

    ‘“Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.’

    Do you seriously think you’re gonna get away with this? I may not know anything about curmudgeonly comments section submissions, but I know it when I see it.

    In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding. When I requested “chocolate”, they told me, without apology, “chocolate is not in the spirit of our seminar.” And like second sun of the planet Tatooine, it was suddenly double clear to me that writing is about not compromising your values. Capote was just damn wrong: writing is almost always typing. And Star Wars vs Austerlitz? Am I *really* the only person who can never keep them straight?

  3. @il’ja

    “In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding.”

    Okay, I admit that THAT particular writing seminar is pretty damn good (obviously)… but learning to write at what cost, Il’ja? A yeast infection…?

    (scratches)

  4. A yeast infection or watching a bunch of damn movies, apparently.

    THE CHOCOLATIER – MDQ? Is aspiring student/author sufficiently committed to hurdle every obstacle for the sake of his craft? Answer: YES! inciting incident: pudding immersion added to prerequisites for graduation. Plot point 1: Butterscotch ONLY! Plot Point 2: Author-student confronts anti-chocolate pudding prejudice, placing certain fame in jeopardy. Key Scene: Moving soliloquy before student disciplinary panel exposes institutional hypocrisy. Epilogue: future students create powerful internet meme involving being filmed while standing on head in bucket of chocolate pudding.resulting in a wave of pudding-themed literary fiction issuing from mid-tier MFA programs.

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Essays

Laugh, and The Book Club Laughs With You

Essays
January 8, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 20 5 min read

At Book Club, I’m a spy. I’m the only writer in this group of a dozen women. The others are scientists, doctors, social workers, winemakers. I’ve enjoyed the company of these smart, opinionated women immensely for nearly ten years, but I’d be lying if I said the camaraderie (and the pinot and the cheese) were the only reasons I participate. You see, my membership in the group gives me a real window into the reading habits of the very audience I’m trying to capture with my own fiction, a way to conduct a living room focus group, if you will, without anyone being the wiser. I can report that, over a decade, the tastes of the group have changed dramatically, in a way that doesn’t necessarily bode well for my own emerging career.

At Book Club, I’m also the secretary. One of my annual jobs is to compile a list of recommendations for the coming year. Every member offers a couple suggestions — title, author, and a one paragraph description typically cut and pasted from Amazon. Before sending out the list, I read through it closely, excited about all the interesting possibilities. And yet, my mind gets stuck on particular phrases in the descriptions that I know, from years of experience, will likely push the book out of contention.

I’m in the heads of these ladies, imagining the silent demerits they will offer to words like “heartbreaking,” (too sad), “epic” (too long), “thought-provoking” (meh, could go either way). Any book that features the loss of a child is out, no debate. Spousal abuse, cruelty to animals, anything hinting at a conservative world-view (unless it’s written by someone who abandoned that world-view), nope, nope, and nope.

It wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago, most of us were just reaching our thirties. We’d yet to have children. We were career-focused, new transplants to our little town (brought here through our or our spouses’ jobs at the local college), and we were eager for friendship and mind-stimulation. We used to read at least a dozen books a year for the club. We read literary best-sellers by Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith. We read classics, such as the collected stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read topical nonfiction, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. We had a night solely devoted to poems we loved. We read cookbooks. Once, just after Obama won his first election, we kicked off a meeting with a reading of Goodnight Bush, a parody of the classic Goodnight Moon we’d all soon enough be reading to our own children.

I vividly remember a meeting, about six years ago, when half of our small group was pregnant, myself included. We were propped uncomfortably on couches and chairs, using pillows strategically. Those who weren’t pregnant had left their infants or toddlers home with spouses. One nursed her newborn while we discussed my top pick for that year, Lorrie Moore’s bestselling story collection, Birds of America. I was the discussion leader, another relic that’s been lost.

Recommending this book was perhaps a mistake, not because I didn’t love it, but because I loved it too much, to the point of challenging anyone in the room to a knife fight lest they claim Moore was anything less than the greatest living writer. The trouble started when, one by one, members admitted they could not read the book’s show-stopper, “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” a gut-wrenching story, yet full of Moore’s characteristic wit and humor, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the setting is a pediatric cancer ward.

“Does this kid die?” someone asked. A roomful of frightened eyes asked me the same question. My arms were crossed over my expanding belly. I knew that Moore’s story, though billed as fiction, was largely autobiographical. I knew, from some interview or another, that Moore’s son was alive and well. I urged people to go back to the story, said they’d be glad they did, but I’m not sure that anyone did so.

A similar thing happened when we picked Emma Donaghue’s Room. Thankfully, during the meeting to pick that year’s books, someone was there who had already read Room and could assure everyone that the boy and his mother do escape from their captor and survive. Without that member’s impassioned plea, it would not have been chosen, despite its stellar reviews. I worry about what our picks say about us, myself included. Although I might read more widely due to my profession as a writer, I, too, have found myself on many nights, once the children are finally asleep, the dishes washed, reaching for a decorating magazine by the side of my bed rather than the stack of National Book Award nominees. As I’m currently battling insomnia, my doctor warned me against reading anything too “heavy” right before sleep. And so, the books must wait until I have a swath of time during the day when I can absorb myself in something more challenging. But with two young children, that just isn’t going to happen.

Is that a lame excuse? Have I, and our other club members, become lazy? Complacent? Has motherhood made us incapable of putting literary tragedy in its proper perspective? Or are we just…tired? Are we victims of the mentality that says we must do it all or die trying? (Books on this topic will almost always get the nod.) Is it so wrong to simply want to zone out with a magazine, or a Will Ferrell movie, instead of the latest Oscar nominee for Best Picture?

This year, we will pick only five books. It was a decision made last year when the club was on life support. Attendance had dwindled to nothing, and something had to be done. We threw all the former rules aside. Can’t make most of the meetings? That’s okay! Come whenever! Come to the meeting, even if you haven’t read the book! Bring a friend, who also hasn’t read the book! We now have two purely social meetings each year, one a potluck that includes our families. The other five meetings feature discussion of a brief magazine article of interest to the group, usually something from The New Yorker or The Atlantic, which can be read over lunch the day of the meeting.

Though membership has changed, the Book Club has been with me since I started writing my debut novel five years ago. I’m finally done and showing it to agents, but will I show it to club members? I’m not so sure I can just yet. I worry about their reaction. Though there is humor and lightheartedness scattered throughout, my book is about serious themes, a controversial mix of religion and politics and science, all the things one is not supposed to talk about in polite company. If I anonymously offered a description of it in the list of recommendations, would it get chosen? I’m afraid I know the answer to that question, and it makes my eye start to twitch.

In any case, we’ve gravitated from novels to mostly non-fiction, titles that impact our lives directly, such as books examining child-rearing, work/life balance, or books that show us the science of our decision making. If they’re going to take the time to read them, members want books they can use. I read the list of recommendations again before sending it to the group. “Hilarious,” (check) “Unputdownable,” (this is a word now? check) “Eye-opening” (could go either way). I look over the books I’d personally like to read, even when they inevitably don’t get chosen. These are books that might make me sad, but that I think ultimately will give me an understanding of what it means to be human. These books will be my non-required reading, should I be ambitious enough at the end of a long day to put down the decorating magazines.

And so the voting begins. I feel bad for the excellent authors who won’t make our list. Laugh, I want to tell them, and the Book Club laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.

Image: Sean M. Freese/Flickr

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 20 5 min read
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