Winning the Cookie

When I was 18, a freshman in college, I signed up, on a whim, for a playwriting class. Best decision I ever made. (Well, other than saying yes, a few years later, to brunch with the cute brilliant guy I'd had a crush on all through high school. . . and then yes again, when he asked me to marry him. . . )

But back to playwriting.

I had always been pretty good at writing. I wrote well enough to develop some impressively bad work habits, like leaving papers until the night before, or not doing the reading before writing the paper. Until playwriting class.

The professor, Doc Murphy, was one of the best teachers I've ever had. Every week we all had to write something, a scene, a character study—and then we'd vote; whoever's work was judged best would win the chocolate chip cookie Doc Murphy brought in. Man, did I want that cookie.

The problem was, you didn't get the cookie for cool adjectives, varied sentence structure, smooth transitions. Doc Murphy, bald, cross-eyed, an iridescent scarf knotted nattily around his neck, would demand, "Astonish me." He said that a first draft was just for puking up your first idea, and that of course it would be boring, trite, full of clichés; by your twentieth draft, if you were really lucky and working hard, you might reach mediocrity! That's where the fun would begin, he said, because that's when you hone your characters from flat, bland stereotypes into astonishingly particular individuals, with passionate needs, complex pasts, hidden flaws, implosive secrets.

Writing became exciting, athletic even. I wrote lists—lists of questions for my characters to answer, possible names, needs, enemies. . . I wrote and wrote, better scenes and sketches than I'd ever written before in my life.

I astonished myself with the turns my plots took, with the depths my characters began to reveal to me. I even got Doc Murphy to open his mouth in a pucker of astonishment, twice.

But I never won the damned cookie.

What I got was, of course, much more valuable—a method of writing that pulls me deep, deep into my stories. John Steinbeck wrote of one of his characters that he "got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands." That's how I write. That's what I love about writing.

Yeah, yeah, but it would've been so sweet to win the cookie.

I'm still trying, I guess. How about you?

Rachel Vail
Author of You, Maybe: The Profound Asymmetry of Love in High School