How I feel when I pitch.
My life has been kind of a conflicted, on-again off-again, will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with words. At the beginning, it was all love. I adored reading from an early age, and when it came to the spoken variety, my parents were, if anything, a little too encouraging. Unless I was complaining, they thought whatever I thought and said was wonderful, so those two things were often the same. They liked to show off how cute I was when I was an unabashed and unfiltered tiny person, and so that’s how I tended to be.
At least until I reached third grade, when my lisp got me put into speech therapy. The therapist, Ms. Flowers, and her assistant, worked hard to get me to pay attention to how I talked, which certainly made me more self-conscious (me listen to me?!). But the bigger thing was how, one day, when I was blabbing away as I usually did, thinking everything I said was clever, I caught Ms. Flowers gesturing at her assistant (just because I was talkative didn’t mean I wasn’t observant), making a little talking hand. I instantly knew she was saying that I talked too much (because also, talkative ≠ dumb) and immediately shut up. What kind of teacher of young children, especially children with speech impediments or other disabilities, does that? Excellent question, because I can tell you that not wanting to talk didn’t really help me much in terms of, oh, learning how to speak. I quit speech therapy not long after that, the way I’d already quit violin and would also soon do with piano, and continued to do throughout my life with stuff I thought I wasn’t good at (except for lacrosse, which I kept at, despite that I sucked, because I thought it would make me more popular. Newsflash: being bad at a sport does not make your suburban high school teammates like you).
But that was probably the beginning of my internalization of the idea that I should talk less, and I wasn’t alone. Being picked on for my lisp and for doing too well at algebra was part of the education you got as a girl in the 80s: just stand there, listen, and look pretty. It took me a while to figure out what the “look pretty” part of that equation meant (see this for more on that), but I quickly did become a very good listener, and, eventually, my mother taught me how to “make conversation.” That did not mean talking about yourself the way boys learned to do, it meant getting other people to talk about themselves by being curious, asking questions, and listening to the answers in order to keep the conversation going.
This ended up being a pretty useful skill, not just in making friends, but in terms of storytelling. I found out a ton of great information about people that I could later use as fodder in my fiction, and once I started making documentaries, actually hearing what people said instead of waiting through their answers as a way to get to talk about myself enabled me to find out and follow up on far more interesting stuff in interviews than you get to just by asking the questions you came in with. But the downside was that, eventually, I became really not good at talking about myself and my ideas at all. Quips and pithy commentary? Those were in my comfort zone. But whenever people would get to the point where they asked me what I was up to (if they got there, which plenty of people were happy never to do, evoking in me feelings of both gratitude and resentment), I’d stumble and sweat — often literally — trying to tell them what I thought they wanted to hear, rather than what I actually wanted to say. Talking about myself always felt like I was putting on a show to impress people but had no idea how to sing, tap-dance, or trapeze, and I’d be so relieved when the spotlight moved off of me and back on to them.
But being less talky didn’t stop me from being wordy. Because I had the words — the number of them in my head was only growing after all — so if I wasn’t going to say them, I had to get them out some other way. Up through high school, when page amounts were a thing you had to exceed, this was generally a good thing. I could regurgitate the stuff I’d learned and what I thought of it like nobody’s business, and even if teachers didn’t read everything I wrote (I don’t blame them because there was a lot), they got enough of the gist to know that I had learned, if anything, too much, and that got me good grades. The only person who occasionally got screwed in this equation was me, because I was the one who actually had to finish those endless essays on Ancient Greece and Great Expectations. Moreover, when I got to college, I had to actually figure out how to organize my thoughts, not just for papers, on which there were sometimes page limits (the horror), but for my nemesis, the essay test. Fit all of what I’d learned in Introduction to International Relations in that stupid, 5”x 5” bluebook, and do it in an hour after having answered all the other test questions?! Surely you jest! Finally, a TA suggested that I make a quick outline on the inside cover of the book before trying to write the essay, and that really helped. I still often didn’t make it to the end of my words on the subject, but I got closer.
This has continued to be the issue with my writing. I am always butting up against character and word limits whenever I have to submit something, the first drafts of these essays always ramble (often so do the final drafts), and my comedy scripts begin at two hours plus when everyone knows they should be 1.5 unless you’re Judd Apatow. I’ve learned how to be a pretty good rewriter and editor, but it’s always a grind. And it’s not like I think all of my words are gold at all, I just have trouble figuring out which ones are not, and especially which digressions are riding off on their own into the sunset and which ones are actually necessary, or at least funny enough that I can get away with them. Getting feedback helps, a lot, but it always still comes back to me at my computer, pruning away. So I just try to remind myself that, whatever I’m writing, as short as I can make it is probably still too long.
I wish that I could somehow merge my writing and my talking selves, putting more of the urge to clam up into my writing and more of my confident voluminosity into my conversation — because the talking-about-myself portion of my words experience is still a challenge. Teaching has helped with this somewhat, both because I have a captive audience (which does not, however, prevent them from falling asleep) and because I know that film students love to hear stories about being on set, which I always have in my back pocket for when I see those eyelids drooping. And when I had to do press or Q&As for Flat Daddy, I was usually okay since I was generally just answering questions, so I knew at least somebody had asked me for information that they wanted to hear — and I had a co-director who would always jump in if she saw me freezing up. But recently, when at the Stowe Story Labs I had to actually pitch a pilot, in person, to other persons, I had to keep reminding myself that there was air, and that it needed to be breathed in and out from time to time in order for my lungs to continue to work in a way that would allow my voice to actually come out of my mouth. My inner little girl is very much still there, telling me that I have to convince people that they want to listen to her, when she would be much more comfortable going home and writing 5000 fascinating words about she was thinking that they’d all be sorry they never got to read. But of course, we make the words so that other people can read and, some day maybe, hear them, and in this business, that only happens if we learn how to do more than just shut up and listen. Hopefully, with a little help, I’m getting there.
❤️ I’m super glad I had you too. And you’re definitely still a good writer, I love how you phrased that.
I think a lot of people feel the same way you do. 🤷🏼♀️