Irrational Love
A short aside on teaching and learning...
My sophomore year of college, I made a drastic change. After a year and taking politics courses with the dream of someday becoming a politician (ew), I switched my major to English with the hope of becoming a comedy writer (yay!).
Whether I had the talent to write professionally was a giant question mark. I had been the editor of my high school newspaper and was writing for our college humor magazine, but my talent beyond those two small bubbles was very much in doubt.
So I signed up for a theater course entitled “Introduction to Playwriting.” The professor was a visiting New York playwright named Christopher Durang. If you’re a fan of theater, you’re currently thinking “NO WAY.” If you aren’t—like I wasn’t when I started the class—you’re thinking, “Get on with the story.” But it’s worth pausing to say that Christopher Durang was a Tony Award winner and possibly the funniest living playwright at the time and the fact he was spending a semester of his life taking a train to New Jersey to teach us idiots how to write was inexplicable.
There were only eight of us in the class. There was no syllabus. Twice a week we would gather around a rectangular table in the theater department and read each other’s scenes. Out loud. That was the course.
When it was my first time to share, I was nervous. By this point, I had read some of Durang’s plays and had a growing awareness of his genius. This many years later, I don’t remember what my scene was about. I don’t remember him actually teaching me anything.
But I remember him laughing.
And that was all the instruction I needed.
Knowing that one of theater’s funniest writers thought—on some micro level—that I was also funny was enough to make me want to keep going. To get better. To risk failure. To get back up. To turn an absurd passion into a legitimate career.
Which brings me to my point.
We all need people in our life who will deliver hard truths. Who will tell us when we are being stupid. Who keep us honest.
But there is something to be said for having someone in your life who loves you irrationally. Who thinks you’re more talented than you currently are. A person who moves you forward not with the crack of a whip but by grabbing your hand and joyfully pulling you up the hill.
Because when a person like this comes along, you become motivated by something other than fear. You actually become motivated by love. Both their love for you and your love for them.
I’m currently writing a screenplay about a ragtag college basketball team that went from worst to first. A true story. And as I’ve spoken one on one with the players, all in their late 50s now, they each explain the dramatic turnaround that year in the same way: “I just wanted to win for coach.”
Whatever you’re currently trying to achieve, maybe the answer is not one more instruction book. Maybe you just need a champion.
And if you can’t find one, then go be someone else’s.1
I have a friend who read one of my novel manuscripts and started comparing it to "Lawrence of Arabia." My manuscript fell far short of such a comparison...but having that comparison and at least one person who saw the seed of something great in my storytelling has helped me to keep writing and improving. Knowing you have just one dedicated audience member gives an infinitely powerful boost over having no audience at all.
I can't think of anything more inspirational than to be given credit by someone for being an inspiration, so I am going to bask all afternoon in "myself-ishness"... BTW, I used to visit the classrooms of your fellow screenwriter Brad Copeland to do cartoon lessons when he was an elementary school student. For all I know, he may have been listening and inspired. Until I hear otherwise I will think so and start looking into the notion of billing myself as a mentor. (Great post, BBTW)