Oh Dave! Now

Let me tell you a story. A true story. Simply put, it goes like this.

I had a light, easy day at the office. Eric had a challenging, frustrating day at school where he teaches. We talked over the phone in the afternoon, and he asked me to prepare his favorite new homemade dinner, Chicken Piccata. I stopped at the market on the way home and got the ingredients. It was delicious and we ate off of trays in front of the TV. By this time I was exhausted and just wanted to veg. I set my tray on the coffee table. Either my foot or our dog Nia’s nose nudged the tray and it slid off the table. The plate—with residual sauce of butter, wine, lemon juice, capers, parsley, and chicken fat—fell onto an expensive area rug, staining the rug and my leather slippers.

Perturbed, I jumped up out of my recliner, shooed the dog away, and started blotting the rug with a paper napkin. While Eric guarded the rug stain, I searched the house upstairs and down for Resolve stain remover. Couldn’t find it, must be out. Found an all-natural substitute, wetted a paper towel, and dabbed at the stain.

After taking Nia out for her walk, I played ball with her, downstairs from the accident. I threw the ball to the top of the stairs and she ran up to get it from the TV room. I heard a sound like she had stopped to chew on the ball for a moment as she is accustomed. When she didn’t come back down, I raced up the stairs. She had gone back to the treated stain—obviously not treated enough—and had eaten a hole in the rug!!

I blew up, yelled at her which sent her scurrying, and yelled down to Eric who was in his office and who came up to see the tragedy for himself. Nia got sent directly to bed. Eric and I bemoaned another incident of dog-driven household décor destruction and blamed each other—he blamed me for knocking the tray off the table, I blamed him for not replacing the Resolve when it ran out. I vowed never to make Chicken Piccata again. After pouring, not dabbing, more stain remover on the area around the hole, I got ready for bed at 9:00 p.m. and took the newspaper to bed. The lead article was about devastating tornados in Arkansas that had destroyed not just expensive rugs but several hundred entire homes. Just then, Eric came in and apologized for getting upset, that it was really a minor thing. Maybe we could superglue some of the rug fibers into the hole. The dog was just being a dog—we would have to be more careful in the future no matter how tired we were.

Cute story, isn’t it? But there’s not enough to it to turn it into a novel, a feature length movie, or a TV series. No, to really grab attention and box office, it would have to be taken to an extreme. Perhaps turn it into a story about:

A sexy high school cheerleader (that would be me) goes out on a first date with the star basketball player who takes her to a fancy restaurant. She orders Chicken Piccata—as the waiter sets it down, it slips off the plate and in slow motion, falls onto her new pink dress from Ann Taylor. The whole restaurant explodes in chaos. Apologies are given, dinner is ruined. The hot couple storms out. In the parking lot, the basketball player strangely eyes the Piccata stain on the dress. As soon as they get in his Humvee, he transforms into a wolf with yellow eyes and drooling fangs. He eats a hole through his date.

I bring this up to illustrate the writer’s dilemma. Writers are taught to “write from their experience,” at least I was in school. And yet, there has to be conflict, major conflict. Fiction in any form can be described as showing how people act under crisis so most fiction tackles extreme situations. Even stories about seemingly everyday life tend to ratchet up the dramatic or comedic predicaments—soap operas and “The Office” come to mind.

The problem is most people, including writers, lead generally mundane, uneventful lives in that we’re not out thwarting terrorists from setting off a dirty bomb in Times Square or rescuing hot babes clinging to the edge of a cliff. Certainly there are people who have experienced kidnapping, murder, courtroom trials, war, natural disasters, and serious illness; and write about those experiences. More likely, writers take their day-to-day experiences of falling in love, raising children, training pets, running a household, forging a career, or going on vacation; and with imagination, exaggerate their experiences into major crises. It isn’t false to do that because as my story about the hole in the rug shows, what was really a minor crisis felt in the moment like a major tragedy. I know what it feels like to be in the middle of a catastrophe even if I’ve never fought in a war or been chased by dinosaurs (not counting dreams).

As a reader or viewer, I also know I would be more engaged by cannibalism than a hole in a rug. Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I could write about something important to me without feeling I have to take it to epic, end-of-the-world proportions. When you break down well-known extremist drama and literature to their possible (in my mind anyway) seeds of inspiration, it can still be interesting. From the basest instincts, what ethereal masterpieces may have come.

Oedipus Rex—heir to throne unknowingly kills his father and marries and sleeps with his mother. In real life, Sophocles, a plebian with messianic tendencies, was a “sensitive” boy who didn’t click with his father, a successful Type-A businessman. His father wouldn’t let him attend the nude Olympics in which Sophocles’ BFF Demetrius would be throwing the shot put. To make matters worse, Sophocles’ birthday gift to his mother, a Greek vase engraved with an original fawning poem, was outdone by his father’s gift, a surprise trip for two to Crete. For revenge, Sophocles fantasized about posing as a towel boy and drowning his father in the deep end of the Parthenon baths. Then he would have his mother, the only woman he’d ever get close to and his biggest fan, all to himself.

Romeo and Juliet—star-crossed lovers from feuding families carry on a reckless, secret affair that due to poor communication ends tragically for the teens but brings the families together. Young Will Shakespeare had it bad for his first cousin Catherine. Three years his senior he hung on her every silly word, enraptured and fascinated by her bulging corseted bosom which had developed early for a 14-year-old. Try as he might to hide his affection, no cod piece was big enough to contain his secret, and his parents forbade him to play with her around the May pole. His uncle had hit the big time with the season’s crop, and he flaunted it by buying rounds at the local pub, while Will’s father struggled to make ends meet. Their sibling rivalry decreased the number of family functions in which Will saw Catherine. Despondent, Will skulked around the dirt roads and pastures of Avon, plotting to get out of the dead-end town, maybe to some place exciting like Italy where no one could tell him who he could and couldn’t love, mostly due to the language barrier.

Mary Poppins—a dictatorial banker and father gets a lesson in humility from a magical, too-good-to-believe English nanny for his two quiet but impetuous children. Author P.L. Travers, who at the time had to hide her female identity in order to get published, was constantly scolded by her parents for her flights of fancy. “Stop your daydreaming and do something useful, like count the eggs in the chicken coop. And while you’re at it, feed those damn birds or you won’t get tuppence from me!” But she couldn’t help it—no matter what menial task she put herself to, into her mind delightful—dare I say “merry”—thoughts would pop in. So she started a series of novels to basically catalog her imagination that just wouldn’t quit. Having moved from her native Australia to England and Ireland to make her mark as a writer, she struggled to adjust to the constant rainy weather and the omnipresent umbrella. She brilliantly turned the cursed accessory into a thing of whimsical flight, inspiring scores of children to injure themselves by jumping out of trees with an umbrella in failed attempts to fly like their heroine.

Gone with the Wind—Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara connives to maintain her way of life amidst the turmoil of the U.S. Civil War, torn between romantic notions for do-gooder Ashley Wilkes and carnal satisfaction with rogue Rhett Butler.  Poor Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell—an Atlanta newspaper columnist who no one took seriously. She’d show them! Okay, sure, she had never finished college. It wasn’t her fault! She had been forced to quit and return home to take over the family household after her mother’s untimely death. Such rotten luck. Eventually she had gotten out of the house before the jazz age passed her by and had some fun, flirting and cavorting with young beaus. She thought she had made a good match with her first husband “Red”—who knew he was a bootlegger and an abusive alcoholic?! The best revenge? Marry his best friend and best man, that’s what! Fiddle dee dee, Peggy was determined to crank out an epic potboiler that would shut them all up. An especially traumatic episode from her childhood, when their pug Miss Melanie had a difficult labor delivering four puppies, could be a useful plot device, as God was her witness. Thank goodness she had taken notes while her crazy-as-a-loon Uncle John O’Mara rattled on his tall tales of fighting in the Civil War. Wait! Her notes! They’re gone! Darn that lazy-good-for-nothing maid—she left the window open and the wind blew them all away!!! Oh dear, oh dear, when will it all end?

A Streetcar Named Desire—disgraced, aging Southern lady Blanche Dubois intrudes upon her poverty-stricken little sister in New Orleans where Stella’s dumb jock husband Stanley abuses them both, driving Blanche insane. Openly gay author Tennessee Williams actually knew a Stanley Kowalski, whom he met at a shoe factory. Williams’ father had forced him to withdraw from his highbrow studies at the University of Missouri to go to work on the assembly line. Disgraced and mortified—and “off track” from his true desires, Tennessee was reduced to repetitively threading shoelaces which drove young Tennessee nuts and stained his delicate hands. The saving grace was salivating over hunky Stanley, who strutted up and down the factory aisles in a sweaty white tank-top, heaving large crates of shoes onto his broad, muscular shoulders and deliberating flexing his biceps in front of the sissy boy oddly named after a state. Tennessee was further intrigued by Stanley’s size 12 boots and his startling habit of yelling at the top of his lungs, “Cruella!” whenever he set down a crate of shoes.

Star Wars—Young Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force from master Obi Wan Kenobi and fights Darth Vader and the dark side, with help from two robots, a princess, and renegade smartass Han Solo. Writer/director George Lucas, nicknamed “Luke” by his high school buddies, had dreamed of becoming a professional racecar driver, but just after graduating from high school, he was in a serious car accident. From his hospital bed, he introspectively realized that he hadn’t trusted his instincts, and had gone right, when he should have gone left, and was thereby Forced off the road. “Luke” rebound and went to film school, puttering around with animation and short films with robotic intensity. Taken under the wing of renegade, smartass auteur director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Finian’s Rainbow, Lucas formed his own film company and hired an oddball crew of studio rejects. A diabetic, he fought to control his energy—one moment he was lethargic and weighed down by gravitas, the next, fueled by massive cinnamon rolls, his blood sugar would spike to hyperspeed. A hard-nosed trooper with obvious balls, Lucas soldiered on against Hollywood skepticism and against all odds, hit the mark with a beloved film that blew up box office records. He continued with a Star Wars sequel, no wait, a trilogy, or maybe that should be a double trilogy, with prequels. Having run out of decent source material, it went on too long and just kind of petered out, with superfluous scenes, forced lame cleverness, this, that, you know. And after starting out so well. Oh, well. Now what?