WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

  TISH COHEN

Because my office seems to have a microclimate separate from the rest of the house—it gets no heat in winter, no airflow in summer—it’s probably appropriate to think about the surface of my desk in terms of seasons. But my desktop seasons aren’t determined by the sun. They’re determined by where I am in the writing of a book.

Springtime would be the start of a new book. I sift through whatever’s left over from the previous novel, pitching, filing, or putting it in my ever growing don’t-know-what-to-do-with-this pile. I pull all the ratty Post-its off my monitor except for Steve Martin’s quote: Be so good they can’t ignore you. Spring is full of hope. The novel is not much more than a sprig of an idea, but I’m certain it will be the best novel EVER.

Summer is an awful lot like cleaning out the garage. You know that moment when you’ve dragged everything out onto the driveway, you’ve swept out the floor, and are now sitting on an overturned recycling bin surrounded by decades of junk, wondering why you thought cleaning out the garage was a good idea in the first place and wishing somebody would come along and put everything back in place while you go have a nap? That’s the summertime of writing a novel. My office is stifling hot, I’m overwhelmed by scraps of good ideas, scraps of bad ideas, leftovers from yesterday’s lunch, and am wondering how I can ever work all of it into a decent story. I wonder if the Gap is taking applications.

Autumn. Autumn brings hope. The book is taking shape, my office is cooler, and back-to-school fashions have inspired me to get out of my ratty sweatpants and write in actual clothing. I have a completed first draft and am making smaller changes now. Sure, my desk is littered with reference materials, Post-its and note cards inches deep in spots, but it’s my favorite season and am starting to look forward to raking up the debris.

Winter is tough but satisfying. The gloss of autumn wore off fast and my agent or editor gave me much more homework than I’d imagined. The paper on my desk may have drifted up and over the phone even. It’s time to shovel, I’ve been through the book so many times I can’t look at it any more and I’m obsessed with the tiny seedling that I hope will be the next book.

Certain things never change. There’s a mirror made from an old window frame above my computer, as well as a shelf holding CDs, a fat candle I never use, and an antique box from France I bought thinking it was a chic place to house my pens and highlighters but it’s so hard to open so it just sits there looking, well, old and French. My desk is surrounded by beadboard paneling, painted cream, and I’ve come to think of it as a giant bulletin board. Pinned into the wood are poster boards with character notes about my current work in progress, a list of great verbs I never think to look at, and a photo of Steve Carell (I’m hoping to lure him into the Town House movie through the power of my mind).

Trapped between a couple of boxes that hold bulldog clips, business cards and nail files are photos and bios from little girls hoping to play Zoe Monday Costello in the TV series for The Invisible Rules of the Zoe Lama. And I have a little shrine of hot-off-the-press copies of Inside Out Girl. It makes me happy to stare at the cover, so I’ve stacked a few to view from all angles. There’s a fat dictionary and a fatter thesaurus that, sadly, is falling apart because I take it up north every weekend and it’s just not built for that kind of mileage. I’m hoping to get a new one for my birthday this year, one I can leave up north so I can give my current thesaurus a bit of a rest in what are now its senior years.

Beside from all the stacks of books, reference magazines, pub house catalogues, notepads filled with, well, notes; I keep three wooden boxes from Japan. One is filled with ideas for future books, another contains little quotes about writing in general, and one has things like names for characters or just quirky things I wanted to remember. All three boxes are overflowing to the point where I have to stack books on top or risk losing the contents.

The only thing on my desk that remains clear of rubble is the Town House script with the original Post-it my agent stuck on the cover when he sent it to me:

Tish:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-Dan
P.S. !!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

Tish is the author of Town House (Harper Perennial), a 2008 finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – Best First Book Award (Canada and Caribbean region), and in development as a feature film with Fox 2000. Ridley Scott’s Scott Free is producing and John Carney, the award-winning, critically acclaimed director of Once is directing. Production is set to begin in New England in 2008. Town House was released to massive media interest in Canada and has been published in Italy and will soon be released in Germany.

Tish has also written the middle-grade novel, The Invisible Rules of Zoe Lama, a bestseller in Canada, which was published in 2007. The sequel, The One and Only Zoe Lama, will be published Summer 2008.

Inside Out Girl, Tish’s second novel for adults, will be released in August 2008.

The Diving Bell And
The Butterfly
(2007)

Written by:
Ronald Harwood

Starring:
Mathieu Amalric
Emmanuelle Seigner
Marie-Josée Croze
Max Von Sydow


The true story of Elle editor
Jean-Dominique Bauby who
suffers a massive stroke that
 leaves him paralyzed except
for his left eyelid. With
help from his speech therapist,
he blinks his memoirs.

 

SAY WHAT? Misused Words

All together - all at the same time; a group acted or acted upon collectively. 
     Without the slightest hesitation, or a single working flashlight, the lads all together entered the dark cave.

Altogether - entirely, on the whole; in all.
     But changeable am I only, and wild, and altogether a woman, and no virtuous one.

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

In 1995, a screenwriter found himself stuck in Los Angeles traffic. He turned on the radio to kill time, but was much more interested in getting off the freeway than listening to the talk show. The guest on this particular program was a teacher who complained of layoffs, funding cutbacks and how too few people valued a well-rounded education. And the Arts—often the first thing to go when the penny pinching started.

"Does anybody care?'' the teacher asked.

The question sent the screenwriter back to his school days in Michigan. He remembered several teachers who had a huge impact on his life. One that stood out was his junior high math teacher. She was the toughest, meanest teacher in the school. She threw chalk at the students. She called everybody who wasn't making the grade flat tires. The students had to stand up to give their answers, and if they gave the wrong answer, she'd shout, "Sit down, you're rocking the boat." Everybody hated her. But when she found out he was using another kid's books to do his homework because he couldn't afford his own, she bought his books for two years in junior high and on into high school.

The talk show segued to the news, but the screenwriter couldn't shake the teacher's lament. Does anybody care?

"I did," he said, "and I didn't know how to get a hold of the caller to tell him, so I wrote a script.''

He didn't want the character to be a copy of any one person but rather an amalgamation of all those great teachers in Holland, Michigan. Thus a warm, caring music teacher, by the name of Glenn Holland, was born.

Still, he wanted to pay tribute to the teachers individually, so he gave their actual names to the students in the film. 

The result was Patrick Sheane Duncan's thank-you to the entire teaching profession. "I was lucky to have a whole bunch who took the time and effort to reach out to a kid who didn't have the advantages of most of the other students,'' Duncan said. "That meant a lot to me."

The sentimental and inspirational Mr. Holland's Opus was a box-office hit. The topic hit a nerve with many groups, especially teacher organizations and the music community. 

"I hope the hell that radio caller sees it," Duncan later said. "Kind of a message in a bottle.''

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