Letters From Alex

Second star to the right and straight on till morning.

Those are the directions from London to the Neverland, the path followed by Peter Pan as he flies through the night sky with Wendy, John, and Michael.

I recently read the original novel, Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie, for the first time with my daughter, which is surprising because the Peter Pan story has always been important to me. From the day I saw a stage version when I was six, I knew I’d never grow up beyond chasing a creative life.

Peter runs off to the Neverland when he’s a baby (never mind how) because he overhears his parents discussing his future, which quite turns him off. And Peter has a marvelous time in the Neverland, never growing up, living underground with the Lost Boys, watching the mermaids at sport, and fighting the pirates, led by the fearsome Captain Hook.

However, Peter does think about his parents. One night he flew home, expecting the window to be open for him, but it was closed and he saw another boy sleeping in his bed. Peter realized that his parents no longer wanted him, and he bears this pain as he adventures through the Neverland.

Peter is playing through the pain. It’s something most of us do. Carrying on the best we can despite an ended relationship or a personal disappointment or the death of a loved one. We’ve all got something. Often we’re playing through the pain in a positive way, and sometimes we’re running from a pain that will never stop chasing us, much like the crocodile is always following Captain Hook, hoping to chomp on his other hand.

Consider what pain your characters are playing through. Even if it’s never revealed, it’ll make them more dimensional and relatable. You can do this for major characters, but also for the minor parts.

The pain comes back to Peter in the final chapter. One night he flies into Wendy’s house, hoping she’ll come play with him, but she no longer can because she’s now a married woman with a daughter of her own. Enraged…

He took a step toward the sleeping child with his dagger upraised. Of course he did not strike. He sat down on the floor instead and sobbed; And Wendy did not know how to comfort him, though she could have done it so easily once.

But then Wendy allows Peter to take her daughter, Jane, to the Neverland for a while, and years, later Jane allows Peter to take her own daughter.

It’s not the worst fate for our characters—or ourselves—to parry the pain with something we love.

Alex Steele,

President

I’ve learned to suffer the slings and arrows of life with a fairly even temper.

With one exception.

Dealing with automated phone support.

Recently, I wanted to speak with my phone provider to make sure we were all set for calls on an international trip. So I’m trying to speak with a real person, but the automated voice needs some kind of code from me, which I don’t know, and so it assigns me a new code (I’m so discombobulated I’m not sure if I gave them a code or they just picked one.) Anyway, I get a new code, but have no earthly idea what it is.

Then, after much wasted time, I manage to get a real person on the line, but they say they can’t help me unless I give them the code, which I don’t know. At the end of my rope now, I scream, “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!”

(BTW, this will never happen at Gotham. If you call or write us, you’ll be talking to a real live person, with little or no delay.)

Push your characters to the limits. It makes for great storytelling, and we’ll get to see how they handle the heat of their personal crucible. Will they stay true to form or find something new inside themselves? Will they break (like I did) or rise to the occasion? Will they somehow turn the story in a new direction?

I’m a fan of old movies and Jimmy Stewart is a favorite. He got pushed to the limit a lot—with obsessive lust in Vertigo, with despair at unfulfilled dreams in It’s a Wonderful Life. But I’m thinking now about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Jimmy plays Jefferson Smith, the head of the Boy Rangers, who is appointed as a replacement in the U.S. Senate. He’s a wide-eyed optimist expected to vote in lockstep with his state’s senior senator, who is mired in all kinds of corruption.

When Smith refuses to go along with the corruption, the political machine besmirches Smith’s name with fabricated letters and news items, and the Senate is set to vote on his expulsion. Smith is almost broken—too good for cruel politics—but his aide, Clarissa, convinces him to stage a filibuster to delay his expulsion and prove his innocence.

For 24 hours, Smith holds the Senate floor, talking nonstop, barely able to stand near the end, when he proclaims hoarsely:

You all think I’m licked. Well, I’m not licked. And I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause.

Fantasy? Maybe. But I might look to Mr. Smith next time I’m pushed to the limit.

Alex Steel,

Gotham President

As you may have seen, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris has been revived after a devasting fire almost six years ago that sent its iconic spire tumbling to the ground.

Amazingly, it’s been rebuilt, mostly using the exact same materials and techniques that were used when construction began in 1163. Some of this is unseen, such as the oak support beams, and much of it radiates to the eye, like the erasure of time’s grime to the stone, stained glass, and pipe organ. 

About the restoration, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, wrote:

For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure—that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.

This past year, I read Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the first time, a breathtaking tale that takes you high and low through the cathedral, often following Quasimodo the bell-ringer who scales and descends the building both inside and out with muscular arms and deaf ears. At the end, I gasped when I discovered where Quasimodo ended up. If you’re in the mood for melodrama mixed with history, give it a go.

The cathedral comes alive in the book, a place of sin and sanctuary, as here:

Only the great rose window of the façade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling reflection to the other end of the nave.

Hugo partly intended the book, published in 1831, as a cri de coeur for preserving the cathedral, which had fallen into disrepair. The story so captured the public’s imagination that the King ordered a major restoration, which goes to show the power of a good tale.

I’m also reminded of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” which I often revisit, about a closed-off man who finds his life cracking open when he draws a cathedral on paper with a blind man’s hand atop his, to give the blind man a sense of what a cathedral looks like. The story is included and deeply analyzed in Gotham’s book Writing Fiction.

And why this matters to you and me…

Creating a work of art—be it a painting or poem or pyramid—is a miraculous event. People have been doing it for, well, who knows how long? You may be doing it now… or hoping to. It can be done. The results may be magnificent. Yet even if they fall short of that mark, there’s an overpowering beauty in the act of aspiring.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President