I want to turn a book I wrote into a screenplay so I sign up for a screenwriting class.
Great, the teacher says, when I tell her my goal. It’ll be like you’re translating a book into a movie.
**
I go with my actor friend to observe the acting class he’s taking. When we get there one of the actors is sitting alone, facing the class, ready to do his scene.
Occasionally this actor leans his head back, opens his arms wide, and flaps his arms up and down like a condor.
That’s the technique, my friend whispers to me.
**
Writing a screenplay is FUN, I discover. It requires me to write the characters names in ALL CAPS, which feels like YELLING IN A TEXT, which is something I do A LOT OF THESE DAYS.
**
The only way I want to watch a movie is at home, on my laptop, with the captions on and the sound off.
But that’s not so much watching a movie, I think, as it is reading a book that’s vividly illustrated.
**
I whisper to my actor friend: It’s alarming how beautiful everyone is in this class.
The model to actor pipeline is real, he replies.
**
Turning a book into a screenplay is not exactly a translation, I discover. It’s more like a transformation. Can I make a transformation?
I’ve had sex, become pregnant, and birthed a human. I’ve gone through that sequence three times. But I’m not sure that is making a transformation so much as enduring one.
But maybe making anything is primarily an enduring.
**
In my dreams, I fly often and easily. It’s glorious.
I can’t fly, of course, but if you asked me if I know what it feels like to fly, I would have to say honestly, yes, I do.
**
In screenwriting class I have finally figured out why it’s so hard to write dialogue. The way people actually speak is insane. It’s a miracle that anything ever gets communicated at all.
I tell this to my actor friend. He says, Oh, yeah, you learn pretty early in acting that the words you say aren’t that important.
I’m surprised. What’s important, then?
What you do while you’re saying the words, he tells me.
**
Acting class begins. The actor who was previously flapping his wings stands up and starts his scene. It’s the “To be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet.
He’s only a couple of lines in when the acting teacher interrupts and rips into him.
The actor stands there and takes it. Finally the acting teacher stops and lets the actor explain himself.
The actor begins a monologue that sounds just as tortured, I think, as the one he’s supposed to be reciting. Only this monologue is about how he’s breaking up with his girlfriend and his life is falling apart.
The acting teacher cuts the actor off and says that none of that is the issue. The issue, he says, is that the actor is not prepared.
**
Under hypnosis, I meet a huge and majestic lion who offers me a ride on his back. I climb on and hold onto his mane as the lion begins walking. As we move, I start to cry. I feel like I have waited my whole life to meet this incredible animal.
I ask the lion through my tears, Why couldn’t you come to me sooner?
You weren’t ready, the lion says.
**
The actors do not flap their wings while they are acting. Only while they are sitting in their chairs, waiting to act.
I decide that this is the part of life that art can never fully imitate. All the best stuff happens when it’s not supposed to.
**
I get a new phone and decide not to get a case for it. Phone cases are ridiculous accessories meant to convince me that my phone is more precious than it is.
Look at rugby players, I think. They don’t wear helmets. They play the game like people not wearing helmets. Whereas football players wear helmets and then twenty years later they’re shooting themselves.
My phone in my pocket feels so light without a case. It’s like a piece of paper.
I walk along the Hudson River. Suddenly I think, I should throw my phone in there.
**
In my dream I fly through a white tunnel that I somehow know is my own spine. I see valleys and lakes below me, and people outside little houses, tending to farm animals. It’s like my body is composed of many 18th century villages.
When I wake up, my bedroom seems unreal to me, like a stage set.
*
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer, wrote the famous diplomat, Dag Hammarskjold.
Who wrote: If only I may grow: drier, brittler, weaker, colder?
No one. But that’s what happens.
**
Didn’t I write poetry, and when I wrote poetry, didn’t I say I would never write nonfiction?
And then didn’t I write nonfiction, and when I wrote nonfiction, didn’t I say I would never write fiction?
And then didn’t I write fiction, and when I wrote fiction, didn’t I say I would never write a screenplay?
And now look at me, in screenwriting class, the person who resists everything.
How much easier it would have been if I had just said from the get-go, I love everything and I am going to write it all.
**
When my sons were small, my husband and I took them to an auto show where they sat in the driver’s seat of many expensive cars and pretended to drive them.
Wandering around the show, we came upon a twenty-foot-high replica of the Transformer known as Bumblebee. Bumblebee is a giant robot comprised of yellow-and-black Chevy Camaros.
My sons could not drive Bumblebee. They could only stare at him and hope that he would start walking.
They did that for a long time.
Bumblebee never walked. It was their favorite part of the show.
**
I am reading a book about the levitating 17th century saint, Saint Joseph of Cupertino.
According to witnesses, Saint Joseph’s levitations always occurred without warning. The only way they knew that he was about to levitate was that he would shout uncontrollably.
**
AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!
This is the text my husband sends when he tells me he’s missed his flight.
***
My uncle and I sit in his study shortly before his death. He has recently decided that he wants to be cremated.
There is a small cardboard box on the floor.
My uncle smiles at me as he points to the box. I’m going in there, he says.
**
I finish my screenwriting class. I condensed about 25 pages of my book into about seven pages of screenplay.
I slide the document into a folder on my desk labelled WORK.
**
I wonder about that expression, into thin air.
Air is not thin, I think. People are just impoverished in what they believe can happen there.
**
I am afraid of this acting teacher. He has stopped yelling at actors for a minute.
Our society denies the power of words, he says. That’s why there’s no diplomacy anymore.
A new actor sits on the sidelines, flapping their wings.
**
After acting class, my friend and I go out to lunch.
Why are writers so mean? he asks me. They’re the worst of all the creatives.
I tell him the truth: Because we’re vampires.
**
I am pretty sure art is supposed to help people love more—both the people who make the art and the people who experience it. I’m not sure how well it works, though.
But maybe that’s how everyone feels about their religion.
**
Part of the big excitement about AI, it seems, is that it acts like a cognitive partner.
But anyone who is an artist already knows that everything is conscious, that it responds to us in real time, and that it loves it when we ask it questions so that it can make mistakes on purpose and then act like they’re not mistakes at all.
**
I asked one of my sons, who is no longer a child: Can Bumblebee fly?
Probably not, because he’s made of cars, my son said. But you never know.
***
