Hello friends,
The first story I remember ever writing was as a third-grader in Mrs. Renninger’s class at Willamina Elementary School.
She liked crafts, and so she had us bring our stories to life on tactile, small screens. We wrote and illustrated our stories on scrolls of paper attached to two paper towel tubes we brought from home. The tubes were installed horizontally in cardboard boxes with TV-like cutouts. Mrs. Renninger probably brought the boxes from home, because who entrusts 8-year-olds with boxcutters? To view the story in your tabletop theater, you turned the top paper towel tube clockwise. For a repeat viewing, you had to first rewind it counterclockwise with the bottom tube.
All I recall of my story was that in it, I was an adult, and I lived in a daffodil. I was no doubt inspired by Thumbelina and I Am A Bunny and other classic children's literature about creatures with human features burrowing into safe spaces of their own. I have no recollection of what actually happened over the course of my scrolling story. Something must have happened, though, because the story scrolled. It had a natural beginning, middle and end.
I didn't make the connection until now, the height of daffodil season here in Portland, but Mrs. Renninger's project proved a lasting influence. Years later, when I envisioned the way the storylines of Windfall would intersect, it was on a scroll. I even put the scroll up on my office wall to visualize the narrative structure of my book. It ran left to right, not top to bottom, but even so, there's no doubt that my third-grade paper towel roll story helped me understand how to unspool Windfall.
Recently, I returned to work on a screenplay I started in late 2020. It's based on an idea that came to me that summer, while sitting in the audience of the Medora Musical in North Dakota. The fictional idea hit me like a bolt of lightning, which surprised me, because I'm most comfortable in the realm of nonfiction. Even so, I couldn't shake the story or the characters I envisioned. It kept playing out in my brain like a film.
I applied to and was accepted to an introductory Sundance class in screenwriting, where I learned the basics of the format and how to write a synopsis of an idea. After that first class, I took two others here in Portland with an experienced screenwriter, an instructor who provides detailed feedback on up to 10 pages a week.
One of the tenets of good screenwriting is that you have to write what you envision onscreen. It's hard! But another cool thing about writing for film or television is that there is a visual language for it. Not everything has to be explained or described the way it does in nonfiction or a novel. You can also use sound! It's an intriguing way to think about stories cinematically, one that definitely stretched me as a writer. Over the course of a few months, I wrote the first 30 pages of a screenplay.
Then, though, I sold Windfall and I had nine months to turn it in. I set the screenplay aside but I stashed a printout of my synopsis and background research in a file folder. Every so often, I'd see it in a pile of papers on my desk, and whenever I did, I smiled at the working title scrawled across the folder. I always hoped to return to the playful, creative way I felt whenever I fired up Final Draft on my laptop.
There are many wonderful things about publishing a book, especially the interactions you have with readers. But one of the not-so-great aspects is that a story you spent years crafting becomes attached to outcomes outside of your control. There is only so much you as an author can do about sales or whether your book gets reviewed by the New York Times or The Washington Post, or whether anyone shows up at your readings. Because of the archaic way publishing works, you don't even know how well your book is doing unless it's a raging bestseller. (And few books are.)
The lack of information or external validation can color how you, the author, feel about this thing that brought you such great joy to create. It's unfair to your book or to you as a creative person, but it happens, even to those in perfect mental health. (And believe me, no writer is in perfect mental health.) Nearly every author I've spoken to has shared with me about a post-publication emotional slump of some sort. To me, the sense of diminishment feels as though I'm letting down the eight-year-old version of myself—the girl who constructed a daffodil house in a scrolling cardboard theater as a gift to her future adult self. The child who knew she would always need a sacred space to protect her creativity.
My inevitable post-publication letdown came just as my screenwriting instructor here in Portland announced he was offering another of his courses. So I decided to revisit something I knew made me happy. Over the past few weeks, I've returned to the world I began building a few years ago. I came back to the screenplay with fresh eyes and new feedback, and I will likely finish a draft by the time the course is over in mid-May.
Even so, I want to make an important point here, which is that I am under no illusion that my screenplay is 1) good or 2) will be made. Sure, I'm a published author and a journalist with an advanced degree in multimedia narrative techniques. So I guess I have a leg up? But the odds of selling a screenplay and seeing it come to fruition are even lower than publishing a book—even if I had much in the way of Hollywood connections.
And selling this screenplay is not the point!
Working on it is, though. Spending time on the project is just for me. It’s time in my own private daffodil house, an imaginary world where I can immerse myself in bright, fun colors and music and characters who start doing all sorts of bonkers things on the page. The daffodil house is a magical place where I can recreate the childlike joy of making something with no attachment to outcomes over which I have little control.
So roll the paper towel scroll!
Yours in pollen-soaked spring pixie dust,
Erika
P.S. I really wanted you to imagine Mrs. Renninger’s tabletop theaters yourselves, but just in case you’re curious about how to make your own, here is a tutorial for a similar concept. It uses a vertical scroll.
THE NEWS
All the links…
For Stateline, I wrote about efforts around the country to speed up home construction.
“If we do not take emergency measures immediately, Great Salt Lake will disappear in five years.”
What one journalist learned at 3 mph.
And if you need additional motivation to take a walk.
The joy of roadside Americana. Always stop for the world’s largest bison and the mysterious baby-making rocks and the Salem Sues!