Movies with Great Screenplays You May Not Know

I’m devoting this blog to movies you may not have seen, movies with great screenplays. Some of the movies were suggested by friends or family members.

The Clouds of Sils Maria was chosen by the poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield. This is an amazing movie about a middle-aged actress, beautifully played by the great Juliette Binoche, who is returning to the stage to appear in a play that she acted in when she was an ingénue, only now she’s playing the part of the older woman. A beautiful and brilliant screenplay by Olivier Assayas, who also directed. Great ensemble acting. Highly recommended. If you like Assayas, who also writes and directs French films, Summer Hours is also quite good and also stars Juliette Binoche.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in The Clouds of Sils Maria

The Way Way Back is a surprising movie about a teenage boy caught in a world where grownups act like kids, and kids have to find their way without parental guidance. This film was recommended by the playwright Tamar Shai. Strong screenplay by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. The movie is lifted above the usual coming-of-age story by the character of Trent (played by Steve Carrell), the ne’er-do-well owner and denizen of a water park. Trent becomes the guru and unlikely father figure for the teenage boy. 

The poet Patricia Spears Jones suggested a couple of movies, including The Kids Are All Right, screenplay by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, a complex story about two lesbian mothers who have kids by the same sperm donor. When the man appears on the scene, the plot thickens. Great cast with Annette Beining, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo. Patricia also recommends Do the Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee, who also appears in the film as a character named Mookie—I love it! Probably Spike Lee’s best film, a nuanced treatment of race, set in Brooklyn.

Poet and fiction writer Robert Thomas picked an oldie but a goodie, the film noir Out of the Past, screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring. This movie has everything you want in a suspense drama: a decent tough guy pursued by scary villains, a femme fatale, and settings all over the West Coast, including vintage footage of San Francisco. Kirk Douglas plays against type as the bad guy—it’s one of his stronger roles.

Fiction and nonfiction author Richard Chiappone, who also writes screenplays, mentioned the movie Slap Shot. Great setting—minor league hockey in a rust belt town. One of Paul Newman’s best roles, scripted by Nancy Dowd. Great one-liners, engaging love story, political resonances.

Poet Lisa Houlihan Stice chose Paris, Texas, screenplay by Sam Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson. This is a haunting film about amnesia and broken family ties set in the Southwest. Memorable.

My friend Ava Torre-Bueno reminded me of the film The Best Years of Our Lives, a classic about the difficulties soldiers face returning from war. Still a current topic, with resonant messages about disabilities. Robert E. Sherwood wrote the screenplay.

My daughter Lena Rogow mentioned a movie with a great screenplay that she loves, Mostly Martha. It’s an exquisite German movie about a gourmet chef who winds up raising her orphaned niece, a girl in deep mourning who refuses to eat. Screenplay and diretion by Sandra Nettelbeck. 

I don’t think I could write a blog about screenplays without mentioning John Sayles, who is also a fine fiction writer (check out his books The Anarchists Convention and Union Dues). Sayles has the ability to dive into a region or topic and find the truth below the surface. My favorites are Baby It’s You (class differences in high school), Eight Men Out (one of the best baseball movies ever!), and Passion Fish (stellar performance by Alfre Woodard).

Alfre Woodard in Passion Fish

A few other films where I’ve enjoyed the screenplays, randomly selected:

A Voyage Round My Father, an autobiographical film written by John Mortimer of Rumpole of the Bailey fame. This could actually be Laurence Olivier’s best screen performance. He plays a cranky old lawyer who is a loving father to Alan Bates, almost in spite of every single thing the dad says and does.

I love the movie Va Savoir (Who Knows?), the masterpiece of director Jacques Rivette, who passed away in 2016. The screenplay was a collaboration of Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, and Christine Laurent, based partly on a play by Luigi Pirandello. It’s a play-within-a-move device, with a moving story and great ensemble acting.

I can’t finish a blog about great screenplays without mentioning the films of the French director Patrice Leconte. His movies are all incredibly provocative, intelligent, and haunting. My faves are The Hairdresser’s Husband (written by Leconte and Claude Klotz), and The Girl on the Bridge (about a knife-thrower performer who finds his assistants by rescuing would-be suicides from jumping off bridges—screenplay by Serge Frydman).

And one last one, a favorite flick: Norma Rae, Sally Fields’ best role, and the script is also beautifully written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Funny, emotional, politically powerful, about unionizing workers in a Southern factory town.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

The Importance of Persistence for a Writer

Sometimes a writer becomes so popular, so suddenly, that you wonder how it happened. In the late 1980s, the fiction writer Ann Beattie was on fire. All her stories were appearing in The New Yorker. A novel was in the works, there were rumors of a movie contract.

Ann Beattie

I was a fan of Ann Beattie’s—I still am. Her short story “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans” in Secrets and Surprises is among my favorites. But I have to admit that I was furiously jealous of Ann Beattie. She’s only five years older than I am, and she was the most popular young writer in the United States at the time she first came to prominence in the late 1970s.

In 1978 I went to hear Ann Beattie read at the Sheridan Square Bookstore in New York. The room was packed—I had to sit on the floor because there were no more chairs. Ann Beattie gave a terrific reading, but a part of me was holding back from really appreciating it, because I couldn’t stop envying her.

After the reading there was a Q&A, and someone blurted out the question we all had in mind: “How did you first get published in The New Yorker?” I probably wasn’t the only person in the audience who was thinking She probably slept with an editor or had a friend who edited stories there.

Ann Beattie took a deep breath. Maybe she had heard this question many times before and she was controlling her temper. If she was, she was doing a good job. “Well, the first nineteen stories I sent to The New Yorker, they rejected. I went back and worked on my writing. The twentieth story, they accepted.”

All right, I thought, if that’s how Ann Beattie got published in The New Yorker, more power to her. 

How many of us have that persistence? Not just to keep sending our work out when most of the responses are rejections, but to keep refining and correcting our drafts. Sometimes, it takes the kind of persistence involved in sending your work twenty times to the same magazine, improving it each time.
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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Are Correct Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Important for Creative Writing?

I have to confess that I have a visceral reaction when I see creative writers or literary magazines use incorrect grammar, spelling, or punctuation. For instance, I recently browsed the website of a new, online magazine that is calling for submissions for what they describe as “non-fiction.” For some reason, these editors, who aspire to be at the forefront of their genre, don’t know that “nonfiction” has not had a hyphen for at least ten years. Given how easy it is to look up spellings online, is there any excuse for that sort of error?

Did Shakespeare use “correct” grammar and spelling?

How important is it for writers to use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation? Some of us are more particular about these mistakes. Those slips and lapses bother me a great deal. They indicate to me a lack of seriousness and professionalism. For a writer not to use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation is like a would-be lover who dresses up for a date but puts his sweater on inside out.

Maybe I’m influenced by the fact that I make my living as an editor. I traffic in rules of language and usage on a daily basis.

I have to keep reminding myself that the rules for spelling, grammar, and punctuation in English are a relatively recent phenomenon. Grammar and spelling began to be codified in the late eighteenth century. Shakespeare, for example, spelled words differently all the time, and he often made what we would call grammatical mistakes, using phrases such as “more fitter,” or “more sweet.” See the fascinating essay on this topic by Professor Karl Tamburr, “Why Shakespeare Didn’t Know Grammar.”

Not everyone has the same tolerance or intolerance for errors of grammar, spelling, or punctuation, anymore than everyone wakes up on the weekend at the same hour. My biggest quarrel with incorrect usage is that it leads to confusion. That is where rules become more than just conventions. 

Some authors feel as if their work is just the creative side of writing. That’s why they became a poet or novelist or playwright and not a journalist. They sweat the details when it comes to characters, plot, dialogue, imagery, the music of language, etc. “Don’t bother me about grammar and spelling, that’s what they pay copyeditors for.” Yes, but isn’t that a bit like expecting someone to clean up after you? Do I detect a bit of elitism in that attitude?

There are other class and cultural issues here. Those with a more polished education often have a firmer command of the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I find that my students in the large public university where I’m now teaching creative writing are less likely to know these norms than students in elite private colleges, who had more expensive educations.

My mother, Mickey Rogow, was a product of the New York City public school system. She ingrained in me from an early age the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The child of immigrants, my mother learned English as new Americans often do, with an accent, since Yiddish was also spoken in her home. Attending elementary school in the slums of Harlem and the South Bronx, she had teachers from the previous groups of immigrants who made fun of her accent and her mistakes in English. To her, making errors was not simply a matter of academic rules. It was evidence that you might not sufficiently belong to U.S. society, that you were a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, someone with less of a claim to being and remaining American. That’s partly why the rules of English are not just arbitrary conventions to me. They are shibboleths that demonstrate that you are an accepted part of society.

Should we look beyond that somewhat colonial heritage to reject the rules of the dominant culture? I do believe that creative writers have the ability and the right to make their own rules. I love the creative way that Ntozake Shange has invented her own spellings and punctuation to render Black English on the page in a lively and accurate way:

she wuz sullen

& the rhinestones etchin the corners of her mouth

suggested tears

fresh kisses that had done no good

from “one,” for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf

But that’s a different story, when you set out to make your own rules. If your goal is to follow the rules of standard English grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and you fail to do that correctly, be aware that some editors, and some readers, may judge you.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers and Collaboration, Part 3: Writers Working Together—Breton’s Earthlight

In the first two blogs in this series, I’ve talked about collaborations where an artist, such as an illustrator or composer, interprets the work of a writer. I’ve also discussed projects where a writer repurposes text already written, for instance, turning a poem into a children’s picture book.

In this post I’m going to talk about two or more writers working together to create a new work. One area where I’ve done this quite a bit is literary translation.

The first book that I translated was a collaboration with writer/translator Bill Zavatsky. 

It’s a funny story how this collaboration began. In the late 1970s, I was a young poet just starting out, living in New York City. Bill Zavatsky was a relatively established writer—two books of Bill’s poems were in print and he was the publisher of two literary magazines, Sun, and Roy Rogers. The latter was a wild child of Sun for special projects such as the memorable 100-page issue devoted entirely to one-line poems.

I was a totally unknown writer (mostly I still am!), living in a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village with a bathtub in the kitchen. At the time, I was going out with another poet, a woman named Susan, who was taking a creative writing workshop with Bill Zavatsky at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. I was translating early poems by the French surrealist, André Breton, because I loved them, and because I wanted to hear what Breton’s unbridled stream of consciousness sounded like in American English.

Susan knew that Bill had an interest in Breton and she urged me to send a few of my translations to Bill for publication in his magazine, Sun. I did. Months went by. I heard nothing.

Then in the summer of 1977, Susan and I crashed a publication party at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47^th Street, ironically in the heart of the diamond district where Hassidic jewelers sold stones for engagement rings. I think the book being launched that day was John Ashbery’s poetry collection Houseboat Days. I knew almost no one at the party (certainly not John Ashbery!) There were a few familiar faces, as anonymous as mine, but Susan spotted Bill Zavatsky in the crowd. I was too shy to talk to him—after all, Bill actually was chatting with John Ashbery. Susan literally pushed me to approach Bill about my Breton translations.

I did talk with Bill, and to my amazement, the reason he hadn’t gotten back to me about my translations was not because he hated them, but because he had been extremely busy. Bill suggested that since he was also translating poems from the same period in Breton’s work, we should collaborate on translating a book of Breton’s poetry.

A lesson here for less established poets—you may have more to bring to a collaboration than you think. Although Bill was a widely published poet, editor, and translator, he had not studied French for as many years as I had or spent as much time in France. I did have something to bring to the mix. We also had a similar vision of creating a version of Breton informed by the language of the Beat Generation and the New York School writers who had been influenced by the surrealists. (Read Breton’s poem “Free Union” and then Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and you’ll see what I mean.)

Bill and I set about to translate roughly two hundred pages of Breton’s collection Earthlight (Clair de terre), including many of the surrealist’s best poems. For me, the collaboration was an apprenticeship. Bill was the older and more experienced poet and he brought a wealth of knowledge about the practice of translation that I learned a great deal from. He was also more widely read. 

Bill Zavatsky

But for Bill, I think it was useful to have someone on the team who had a firm grounding in French grammar, vocabulary, and culture, and could say, “Breton is probably referring to the town of Pont-à-Mousson because most of the manhole covers in Paris are made in that town and are stamped with that name.”

Collaborations between writers are not symmetrical. If every writer brought the same set of skills, we wouldn’t need to collaborate. Different writers bring different knowledge to the mix. On the other hand, there has to be some common ground for the writers to compromise and enjoy one another’s work.

Bill and I worked on the translation of Breton’s Earthlight off and on for seventeen years. Through many vicissitudes, we always kept our vision for the book in sight. When Earthlight finally appeared in print for the first time in 1994, it won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award, which at that time was the annual prize for the best translation into English.

I’m excited to announce that our translation of Earthlight by André Breton has just been re-released by Black Widow Press. The new edition not only includes the French text en face for the first time, it has an updated introduction and notes that Bill contributed, incorporating the latest scholarship from France on Breton and his sources.

I’m delighted to see the book finally published as Bill and I had first imagined it forty years ago. This edition is bilingual with extensive notes to provide background on Breton’s encyclopedic interest in the occult, politics, botany, zoology, art, and history, and the way they infused his wild and passionate poetry.

My collaboration with Bill Zavatsky not only led to the publication of Earthlight, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Homage to Marilyn Sachs, 1927–2016

Acclaimed children’s writer Marilyn Sachs passed away on December 28, 2016. Author of more than forty books, Marilyn played an important role in children’s literature as it moved from the idealized and sentimental stories of the 1950s to the more realistic situations and multidimensional characters that developed in the 1960s and beyond. Her books inspired deep loyalties in children who strongly identified with her heroines. Marilyn was also my literary mentor during the time she was my mother-in-law from 1986 to 1998.

Marilyn Sachs

When I think about Marilyn I always recall the apartment where she lived for more than four decades on 31^st Avenue in the San Francisco’s Richmond District. That flat was a temple to art, filled with the wonderful woodcarvings of female figures by her husband of seventy years (yes, seventy years!), the sculptor and political activist, Morris Sachs. All of Morris’s statues have Marilyn’s wide hips.

The Sachs apartment also held many works by artists whom Marilyn and Morris had befriended once they moved to the Bay Area in 1960: a print of farm workers in a field by Emmy Lou Packard; and furiously charcoaled figures by Ethel Weiner Guttman. There were Navajo blankets on the walls of the dining room, and Persian carpets on the parquet floors, as well as a table in the breakfast room that Morris himself crafted from a redwood tree burl.

In that apartment, Marilyn entertained a river of guests. A master of the art of conversation, Marilyn could draw out the shyest person. She was not afraid to toss in her two cents with even the most gregarious visitors. Marilyn once taught me that you could tell how interested a person was in what you were saying by their occasional unconscious replies. “Uh huh, uh huh,” means polite interest, but the person is mostly bored, and you should change the topic. “Yeah, yeah,” on the other hand, means “Tell me more!”

There were always travelers passing through San Francisco having tea or dinner at the Sachs’s apartment. Marilyn was the most entertaining of hosts, keeping everyone laughing with her sharp witticisms delivered with her unpretentious, New York accent.

Marilyn’s work as a writer was evident in her study, which had an entire wall decorated with photos and letters sent by devoted fans who had written personal appreciations of her books. Her novels particularly appealed to what is oddly called in the trade, “the middle-aged child”—kids from 10 to 14—pre-teens. Marilyn understood that age group extremely well, partly because she could recall so many great anecdotes from her own life during those years, anecdotes that often found their way into her novels.

At the time Marilyn started writing, children’s books in the 1950s were often artificially sweet and innocent, particularly those with female main characters. These novels often portrayed unrealistic, idealized situations. I’m thinking, for example, of Sidney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, published in 1951, with five sisters whose worst problem seemed to be finding a misplaced a library book.

Marilyn spent many years as a children’s librarian in the Brooklyn and San Francisco Public Library systems. In New York, she worked on a bookmobile that brought reading to far-flung neighborhoods, many not near a local library. She became convinced that real children needed more naturalistic fiction that reflected their real-life problems.

Marilyn wrote her first book, Amy Moves In, around 1954, but the novel was so unlike most of the children’s literature of the time that it took her ten years to get the manuscript published. In that book, the mother of the two sisters is hit by a car, and the girls have to become self-sufficient in a way that many children must do when there is an absent or ill parent. Amy Moves In is still in print five decades later.

Marilyn also depicted Jewish American characters in a way that no other children’s writer had done before. In All-of-a-Kind Family, for instance, the main characters seem to be incessantly lighting candles for Hanukah or Shabbat. Marilyn showed the lives of American Jews as she knew it from growing up on the tough streets of the South Bronx in New York City.

Marilyn almost never wrote a bad book, to my mind. She was an incredibly consistent writer. She’s best known for The Bears’ House and Veronica Ganz, two stories of compelling misfits, Marilyn’s preferred heroes.

Among my personal favorites of her books is Call Me Ruth, a historical novel about a girl whose single-parent father is a labor leader in the garment industry in the early 1900s in New York. 

Although Call Me Ruth is a deeply sympathetic and well-researched portrayal of the trade union movement, the character of the mother is complex and believable. She’s a true crusader for social justice, but a neglectful mom. This is just one of her books that shows the influence of the great novelists, such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Willa Cather, whose work she read over and over with enormous enjoyment and profound understanding of how those authors structured their fictions.

Another favorite of mine is one of Marilyn’s last books, The Four Ugly Cats in Apartment 3D. This novella is about a girl who finds several cats abandoned by a neighbor and has to get them all adopted quickly to prevent them from being put down. It’s interesting that the apartment number is 3D. Marilyn is a three-dimensional children’s writer if ever there was one. She expertly combines humor and pathos—for me, the signature of the best writers.

In addition to being an award-winning and enormously prolific writer, turning out more than a book a year during her prime, Marilyn was also a mentor to many authors and illustrators. Judy Blume credited Marilyn with being both an inspiration and a help to her when she was first attempting to get her own groundbreaking and realistic fiction published. Marilyn was also an influential member of a circle of talented children’s book authors and illustrators in the San Francisco Bay Area that included Beverly Gherman, Susan Meyers, Maxine Rose Schnur, Susan Terris (also a poet and editor), and Ashley Wolff.

Marilyn was also a mentor to me. I attempted, unsuccessfully, to write my own young adult novel, in emulation of her accomplishments. When I showed Marilyn the manuscript, she had one cryptic and wise comment I’ll never forget: “Don’t try to tie up all the loose ends.”

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

It Takes More Than One Book to Make a Writer

There’s a great line in the classic Hollywood movie Shanghai Express where a man says to Marlene Dietrich, who is playing the role of Shanghai Lily: “I see you’ve changed your name since we last met. Did you get married?” To which Dietrich replies in her breathy German accent, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Well, it takes more than one book to make a writer.

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express 

The first time we write a book, we’re often just fumbling around, trying to find our unique calling as an artist. Everything is new to us: themes, characters, style, approach, diction. Often the first book, even if it takes years to write, is just practice, a dress rehearsal for another project. And, sorry to say, that can be true of the second or third or fourth book as well.

It may take the better part of a lifetime to really figure out what your project is, and how to realize that project.

Then how do you know if you really can be a writer, if you spend years on different books and none of them works out quite the way you had hoped? Well, even a book that you consider has fallen short of your expectations might have passages that show your true abilities as a writer. That page, that stanza, that paragraph, that chapter, that character—if you can figure out what you did right there, and get yourself into the state of mind you were in when you wrote that, you can possibly sustain that higher level of work for a longer stretch, even an entire book.

In order to do that, though, you’ve got to be willing to listen to criticism, hear the truth about your work, and implement it in your writing. And not just the praise of your friends who love you and can't see your work objectively. You have to get that objective feedback, because on your own, it’s extremely difficult to identify the strongest elements in your work. The difference between talent and a writer who consistently turns out quality work is the ability to take criticism seriously, and to learn from it. It’s OK to make mistakes, as long as you don’t keep repeating them.

I know it’s tempting to give up after a book or two if the end product isn’t as good as what you’d imagined when you first got the inspiration. It’s so much easier to take up throwing pots, or hip-hop dancing, or playing the didgeridoo. When you first start a new art, you learn so much, so fast. It’s thrilling. You feel as if you’re making enormous progress. But then the hard work sets in—learning from your mistakes, revising, polishing. No art is easy.

It may be that you are better suited to pottery or hip-hop dance. Didgeridoo, or didgeridon’t, either way it’s cool. If that is the art that energizes you, more power to you. But if your dream is really to be a writer, don’t give up after one book, or after two or three. You don’t get to be Shanghai Lily overnight.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers and Collaboration, Part 2: Repurposing Existing Content

In the last blog I talked about collaborations where the writer doesn’t have to change much in an existing work. The example I gave is when a poet has his or her work illustrated by a visual artist.

In this blog, I’m going to discuss collaborations where a writer repurposes existing text to create a new work with another artist. Here are some examples:

• Adapt a work of narrative prose into a play (for more, please see this blog)

• Turn one of your poems into a song lyric and collaborate with a composer who writes the music

• Edit a literary anthology that includes work by a visual artist or artists

• Work with an artist to create an artist’s book that includes text that you rewrite for the project

One example in my own work of text repurposed for a collaboration is an adult poem I wrote that became a children’s picture book. The book started as a two-page poem called “Oranges” that appeared in my collection A Preview of the Dream, published by Gull Books, a literary publishing house run by Carolyn Bennett. A Preview of the Dream sold all of 200 copies, which is not unusual for a small press book of poems.

Cover art by Rachael Romero

My poem “Oranges” honors the diverse group of people whose labor goes into creating a single orange:

Somebody cleared the fields.

Somebody toppled the pines,

upturned the stumps.

Someone plowed the rows

straight as sunbeams in the heat

that made them swab their temples.

Probably they spoke Spanish.

The widely published and much lauded children’s writer Marilyn Sachs heard me read the poem and said, “With a little rewriting, that could be a picture book.” I’d never thought of writing a children’s book, so I asked her what she meant by rewriting the text. Marilyn pointed out that the ending was a little too adult for children:

A world of work

is in this ripe orange that I strip apart,

longitude by longitude.
I place a section

in my willing mouth

and its liquid fibers

dissolve on my tongue.

When I wrote that adult poem, I wanted to emphasize the sexiness of eating a section of orange. But in a children’s picture book?—not so much. I kept much of the poem as it was, but I rewrote the last lines:

A world of work

is in this ripe orange that I pry apart.

I place a section

in my mouth

and its liquid fibers

dissolve on my tongue.

Less sexy, but it still conveys some of the sensual experience of eating fruit, and in a way that children could appreciate.

A lesson I learned here: with collaboration, not every detail in a text has to be spelled out. The artwork ended up conveying much of the sensual experience of eating an orange. 

Oranges by Zack Rogow, illustration by Mary Szilagyi

Not only that, the illustrator communicated the entire concept of an orange containing a world of work  simply by drawing a frontispiece with an orange floating in space like a planet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book was still only an idea. How to get it in print? Carolyn Bennett, the publisher of the small press book that included the poem, agreed to act as the agent for the text. Sometimes, in a collaboration, people take on unaccustomed roles.

Carolyn did great job in this new role. She sent the text to Richard Jackson, an editor at Orchard Books who had successfully steered the careers of many writers, including Judy Blume. It happened, by coincidence, that Dick Jackson was interested in a book that dealt with diversity—he immediately bought the manuscript. It was an incredible stroke of luck, but it would never have happened without rewriting the text. That repurposing made all the difference.

I originally had in mind for the drawings an artist I liked who had never done book illustration. Dick Jackson quickly let me know that he had his own ideas on this subject. Dick selected the experienced illustrator Mary Szilagyi, and Mary created gorgeous paintings to illustrate the book, working much harder on her artwork than I had on my short text. The hours spent on a collaboration don’t always even out, I’m afraid.

Large publishers do tend to like to pick the illustrator they want for a children’s book that comes to them as a text. They have a stable of artists whose work they admire and they know they can rely on. The publishers like to give those artists a steady diet of work, partly because they genuinely like their artwork, partly to keep the artists’ loyalty, and partly to support and promote their careers.

Dick Jackson made a truly excellent suggestion to improve the text, but I was such a young, hothead radical at the time, that I refused to listen, thinking that Big Business was trying to co-opt my political message. This was a side of collaboration I hadn’t learned yet—it also involves taking advice, even if it means changing your beloved text.

But in the end, Oranges turned out to be a successful children’s book. It was selected as a Junior Library Guild Book of the Month, and it sold about 10,000 copies. Much more than all of my poetry books put together. That’s another side of writers’ collaborations worth mentioning—the work of other artists can sometimes make literature way more accessible.

Writers and Collaboration, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry