“People chase illusions and these illusions are created by movies. I want to make things concrete and real and to break down the illusion. There’s nothing more ironic or strange or contradictory than life itself. I don’t want people years from now to say: ‘Remember DeNiro, he had real style.’”
– Robert DeNiro
There are far more qualified people than me to give advice about writing, including two of my fellow Offenders—Alfredo, who won the prestigious Nicholls Fellowship, and Iris, who was nominated for an Academy Award for writing Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima (see an example of how good Iris’ advice is here). But when I moved to New York at age 17 to pursue the writer’s life, there was one thing I learned about dramatic writing that’s stayed with me to this day and that I think of every time I write. Actually, it’s a lesson that also applies to the other dramatic arts—acting and directing (more on these below)—as well.
It has nothing to do with anything I learned in class (although my writing profs at New York University were awesome), but rather an article I read during that time that made a light bulb in my head go off.
I think the piece was in the Village Voice or New York Times Magazine–it was an interview with a father who flew up to New York City every weekend from his Florida home to try to find his son who had run away as a teen. A family friend had allegedly seen the boy in New York so that was enough for this father to travel to the city every Friday night to walk around Manhattan from top to bottom, left to right, and then fly back to Florida on Sunday night. The father did this because he loved his son and as long as there was a shred of hope the boy was alive, he was going to use all his resources to find him. This is what he lived for. He did this every weekend for almost a decade. In his dreams, the father imagined finding his son, having an emotional reunion, bringing him back to Florida where the boy’s mother was waiting and they’d be a family again.
