This was our final in-class writing exercise. We had 15 minutes to write our resume/portfolio cover letter to a creative director (Mr. X) in order to sell ourselves to an agency and get hired. Here is mine:
————————–
Dear Mr. X,
You want ideas that are going to grow legs, walk over, and slap you across the face. The kind of idea that feels like an explosion making love to a sunset. You want to cry, scream, smile, and maybe even wet yourself a little because, damn, that’s good.
Those kinds of ideas are out there. They live inside certain people, nuzzled up in their pre-frontal cortexes, sitting catty-corner to a couple of overactive neurons and a big fat pile of rejected ideas. I am one of those people. I can’t get coffee, I can’t dream, hell, I can’t take a freaking shower without being assaulted by a wide array of, mostly bad, sometimes inappropriate, and occasionally epic ideas.
When I was little, I used to play with a group of kids in my town. I couldn’t always get the nicest new toys, so instead I had to convince my friends that whatever it was I had was the thing they wanted to play with. I’ve been training for this for a long time, and I’m ready to do big things with you.
So here’s what you need to do. Look around for a phone and dial the numbers ————. No phone? My email is ———. Listen, if you have to, you can make a smoke signal. I’ll keep my phone close, my computer on, and my eyes to the sky. Let’s make some ideas and sell the shit out of something.
Sincerely,
Alex
Very interesting in-class assignment last week- we had 30 minutes to write a page long story that must begin with “Once upon a time…” and end with “they lived happily ever after.” Other than that, all is fair game. Here’s the story I came up with:
————————————–
Once upon a time, in a magical little town known as Cleveland, Ohio, there lived a young boy. Now, this boy, he wasn’t the tallest boy, or the shortest one. He wasn’t particularly thin or fat. He couldn’t sing well, and he hated peas. He was a good kid: he respected his Mother and did well enough in school, although not too well. This boy was just like every other little boy you might know: with nothing amazing or fantastical ever really happening to young Phillip from Cleveland.
Phillip wasn’t one of those boys with many friends. He tended to stick to himself, and if I had to guess, I’d say that was the reason he got so excited when he stumbled upon that nest with the little baby bird. We might not ever know exactly why Phillip decided to take the bird: maybe it was a chance to make a new friend, maybe he just needed something he could call his own, to make him special. But he did take it, and he decided, right then and there, that he was going to take care of the bird and teach it to be the best little bird in the world.
Young Phillip from Cleveland started spending all of his time up in his tree house with that bird. He spent hours scouring the yard for little sticks and plucking oak leaves from his tree in order to make a perfect little bird nest. He even dug holes in the grass looking for earthworms.
Phillip couldn’t think of a name at first, so he called the animal “Baby Bird”, and after saying it he liked the way the B’s sounded and decided to keep it that way. Baby Bird was keen on chirping and liked to dance around the gnarled floor of his tree house. It always made Phillip smile.
The bird was quite small. Small enough, even, to fit in the palm of Phillip’s boyish hands. But Phillip knew that one day the bird would grow up, and that his Baby Bird needed to know how to do all of the bird things that grown up birds did. He wanted to teach the bird everything it needed to know, and Phillip knew that every good bird needed to know how to fly. So the young boy from Cleveland thought about how to teach his little bird.
He remembered how, only a few months back, Phillip’s own father had taught him how to swim. His dad had looked him in the eyes and told him, “you’ll learn fast if you just jump in. I know you can do it,” and then given young Phillip a little push into the pool. Well, Phillip was able to do it! Maybe the same thing could work with Baby Bird!
Phillip held the bird out of the tree house window and looked it in the eye. “The easiest way to learn how to fly is to just try and do it! I know you’ll be great.” And with that young Phillip from Cleveland turned over his hand and let the bird go. It fluttered for a moment and then fell the 15 feet to the grass below. Baby Bird hit the ground with a dull thud. Little Phillip from Cleveland raced down the latter and picked up the bird. It wasn’t moving.
He brought it back up into his tree house and placed it into its nest. It didn’t dance or play anymore, but Phillip still loved Baby Bird. Though the bird no longer played with him and was starting to have a smell that reminded young Phillip of the locker room at school, he continued to build up its nest. He brought it earthworms, although it didn’t eat any more. Phillip loved little Baby Bird, and wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to it. He was going to take care of it and be the best big bird dad he could be. No matter what. Young Phillip from Cleveland would make sure that they lived happily ever after.
My usually dependent right foot missed its mark. Instead of falling soundly on the top step, it wafted dumbly two inches prior. My hands tried, in reflex, to shoot out horizontally for balance, but being as they were placed snugly into my pants pockets, gained no room for movement.
It was my head that started falling first. I found myself looking upwards at the rest of my body, the top step quickly retreating in front of me as I bounced down. Each crack on the trip down signaled another broken bone: a few ribs, an arm. My mind starting thinking in slow motion. I became acutely aware of how dirty the steps were. The building janitor should probably mop those.
My body laid in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
This is a true story.
I tried installing the Ad School’s fonts on my computer yesterday. Tried being the operative word. I put them all into my font organizer but clearly did something wrong because my computer immediately took a giant shit. Yep. Gone. Completely. I had to erase the entire hard drive and reinstall the operating system. I’ve only just now gotten my computer back in operational shape.
I can tell you this: I’m not going to try putting in 400 fonts at once any more. Nope. One at a time will work just fine.
A bell chimed when I opened the door and walked through. The receptionist in front of me smiled with recognition and motioned me to sit on the leather sofa to her right. “11:30 appointment, ya?” I nodded and sat. “Angel will be right with you.”
My hair doesn’t ever get too long anymore, but it does tend to grow uneven a few weeks after a trim, so I still have to keep it up. You’d think balding might at least save you that, but no.
Angel called for me and I quickly changed seats from the sofa to his chair. I never liked haircuts. Nope. I feel like they never quite look as good as the last one, which means, of course, that I’m always looking worse and worse. Every haircut. It’s a downward fucking spiral of bad haircuts.
The Rock© is currently sold out. Please wait 20 million years while new ones form. Thank you for your patience.
-The Rock© PR Department
There isn’t anything quite like getting an unexpected letter in the mail. The mail is slow. It’s cumbersome and it’s difficult, so there’s really no question why barely anyone uses it any more. I think maybe that’s why it’s so special when you do get one. Someone actually took the time to bother with an antiquated system, and they did it for me.
You can imagine, then, how I excited I was when I first saw the lone white envelope.
I slid the parcel out of my mailbox and studied it with interest. Though smaller than a standard envelope, the package had a little more weight to it than I expected. It was, to be sure, more than just a letter inside. My excitement grew.
I turned the envelope around in my hands. The address line was sloppy composed, and no return address given, but it clearly read my name. Maybe one of my little cousins showing me their progress in learning to write.
I stuck my finger into the small pocket of space to the right of the adhesive and pulled it across the top, opening the letter in a somewhat jagged pattern. A fine white powder wafted up from beneath the folded paper as I pulled it from the envelope. Immediately my eyes stung. On the paper only a single line was written, “Death to America.”
‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘I just got anthraxed.’
We had a fun class today. It started with Vicent reading off some famous movie taglines: ‘Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail.’, ‘Whoever wins, we lose.’, ‘Everyone has one special thing.’. He then looked at all of us and told us, “you have five minutes- I want everyone to come up with three taglines. You may not know what the story is about, just come up with three original taglines that will make us want to hear more.”
Here were my three:
1) Challah at ya boi!
2) If a tree kills in the forest, can anyone hear you scream?
3) In 1969 we went to the moon. In 2012, it came to us.
The class then voted on which tagline they wanted to hear more about most. They wanted more of #3. The next part of the class, we had fifteen minutes to write three log lines based off of our tagline. Each of the three should be for very different stories, but all should tie back in to the chosen tagline. So, here were my three log lines:
1) The moon shifts its orbit by a few feet every year. One man, astronomy professor Will Donahue, has realized something: in only a few months, the moon’s orbit will reach a critical point, and come crashing down into the Earth below. The most beautiful symbol of our night sky is now the most deadly. In this race against time thriller, the citizens of Earth must come to terms with their own destruction, while an elite team of scientists, led by Donahue, race to save us all.
2) This Halloween is shaping up to be an especially memorable one for High School senior Danny Magena. His new girlfriend, Becca, is throwing the big party, and all his friends are going to be there. Plus, it’s supposed to be a full moon. But, as the sun sets and the party starts heating up, things begin to go wrong. Kids are disappearing, people start seeing mysterious shadows, and the moon never rises. No, it turns out that the ancient Native American moon-god, Seta, has returned to Earth. Now, it’s up to Danny to save his girlfriend, his friends, and his life from a moon-god gone rouge.
3) Chad was just an average, unimportant, and utterly unpopular college kid, when one obscene drunken gesture of defiance, caught on camera and posted to YouTube, changed everything. After his “full moon” went viral, people started to take notice. Now he’ll have to learn that being popular isn’t always easy. In a laugh-filled quest to constantly out-do himself and stay relevant, Chad just might have learn some of life’s most important lessons.
After hearing all three log lines, the class voted on which one they wanted to hear more about, and the 2nd log line was chosen. We then had twenty minutes to write the first 500 words of our story. The story had to fit with both the original tagline, the chosen log line, and draw the reader in to want to hear more. Here is what I wrote:
Danny climbed the stairs to his attic one by one. Each step sent a loud crack reverberating through the narrow staircase, beckoning him to turn back. He had always hated it when his parents sent him up to see her, that old witch, but this time seemed especially terrible. Becca’s big party was starting in just a few hours and he had promised her he’d help with the setup. He was late already, and there was a lot to do.
He knew he shouldn’t mind spending time with her, his reclusive Grandmother, but nearly everything about her made him cringe. He didn’t care about his Cherokee heritage, which she so desperately clang too. So she was the elder of a tribe, a shaman, what was that supposed to mean to him? All he knew is that she spent her time in this attic, performing rituals instead of being with her family. Danny hated her. He hated how much she cared about Hocus Pokus bullshit, about how she always tried bringing him into it, telling him he was “special”, “destined”.
As he inched open the dilapidated door to the small attic room a familiar smell choked at his throat, he had to stop a minute before going in. He could picture the room. A wall of jars lined the far side, each filled with assorted plant and animal parts at different stages of rot. The middle of the room was dominated by a large wooden table, the enamel warn completely through from her constant grinding. She would be standing at the lone window, looking to the sky, her lips moving with some silent prayer. It could be minutes before she would even turn to recognize that Danny had come into the room. Whatever it was she was praying for, it was always more important than he was. “She’s just stuck in the old ways”, his mother always told him. “Fuck the old ways,” he always thought.
The door flung open without Danny having to push. His Grandmother was standing there, right in front of him, staring with a blank set of eyes. “Seta losho monaba” she hissed with a voice that barely sounded human. Danny took a step backwards and almost fell down the stairs. She had never been at the door like this, and she knew he couldn’t speak Cherokee. “SETA LOSHO MONABA” This time she was yelling. He looked into the room and saw a small fire burning on top of the table. He ran in to put it out. “What are you doing up here! You’re going to burn this place down.” He grabbed at a pile of sand beside the table and shoveled it onto the flame. It flashed green and went out. When he looked up again, his Grandmother was standing right beside him.
“He is coming. Tonight. You must stay here. You must learn how to pray. You are the…”
He didn’t even let the crazy bitch finish. She had nearly burned the house down, and now she was telling him what to do? He didn’t want anything else to do with her. In one movement, Danny turned, walked to the door, and flipped the middle finger as he ran down the stairs. Tonight was the night of Becca’s big party, and nothing, especially not his insane Grandma, was going to ruin that.
The night seemed especially dark, he thought to himself as he left his house, perfect for Halloween.
The four-seater single prop plane touched down at midday. The ride left a lot to be desired: the heat was stifling, making it nearly impossible to find a comfortable position before sweat soaked through any fabric making direct contact with the seat, and the small plane was easily thrown back and forth by any uneven air. Had I not still been overwhelmed by the events of the past week, I may not have made it through the ride. My mind, however, was completely focused on coming to grips with my new life. The plane, though admittedly rough, was only an afterthought.
The expanse of the Serengeti rolled on into the horizon. Low bush and empty plains dotted with small patches of denser high growth. The entire picture was greener than I expected, though my expectations were based only on speculation. Somehow the harsh and wild Masai Mara seemed like it should have been brown: dusted over by cracked Earth, baked underneath a powerful and unrelenting sun.
I was there for a reason, I reminded myself.
Only yesterday I discovered my gift. I survived a blast of radiation that destroyed nearly everything around me for miles. No, I had done more than survive, I had changed, evolved, into something better. Maybe it was the smell that had been on my clothes: minuscule breadstick particles excited by the radiation to fuse with my own. They had gotten into my cells, fused with my DNA. The truth is, I may never know for sure.
Out of my outstretched hands breadsticks emerged. This incredible power would not go to waste. I was here to feed those who needed endless breadsticks most.
