The Funnel Cloud to Oz
First Lessons In Writing My Life Story
A year and a half ago, I started writing and illustrating an autobiographical graphic novel, and I’m only now realizing what I’ve gotten into.
Writing autofiction means turning one’s life—which is just one damn thing after another—into a coherent story. The first order of business was to realize that my life story transcends what actually happened to me.
“You’re not after the facts,” my writer friend told me, “you’re after the truth.”
My friend’s tip got me thinking about the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 musical fantasy starring Judy Garland—one of my personal bibles of the creative life. The opening scenes carry Dorothy from the sepia world of her Kansas farm, through the portal of the funnel cloud, and into the technicolor dream of Oz.
They sum up my first five lessons in writing a life story.
#1. Be Better Than A Huckster
Dorothy, the poor Kansas farm girl, dreams of traveling “somewhere over the rainbow.” In Professor Marvel, the itinerant fortune-teller, she sees someone who might help her make her escape.
Marvel is a huckster, but he’s a huckster with a heart.
He knows the fortune Dorothy wants: the romantic dream of world travel. But he gives her the story he thinks she needs: the tragic tale of a runaway girl who has broken the heart of her aunt and who had better get home right now.
Dorothy’s dream makes her vulnerable, as our dreams so often do, to men with an agenda. Thank heavens the good Professor has a moral code.
What he sees in his crystal ball, his whole Swami show, is a lie, but it is a noble lie that teaches Kansas peasantry like Dorothy their life lessons.
It’s certainly better than taking the kid for all she’s worth, but it is not what Dorothy needs. Dorothy needs a storm of true art—a “Whopper,” as the good Professor calls it.
Lesson #1: Be better than a huckster. In telling a life story, the job is to descend, not into some cheap crystal ball full of life lessons, but into ourselves, to find the truth of our experience that we all share.
#2. Let Go Into The Swoon of Creation
The twister blows out Dorothy’s window frame and knocks her unconscious. The spinning funnel cloud outside the window melds with the dark spin down into her interior life—the swoon of creation.
The question is: What’s going on down there?
Freud called it “the Dream Work.” Our thoughts, he said, appear in concrete images. We condense many objects into one, displace emotional energy from major to minor figures, and string together fragments into coherent sequences.
But no manual of psychic moves can explain the dream work. It’s a mystery. That’s why it’s always done in the half-light of the unconscious, the dark of a swoon.
Lesson #2: Let go into the swoon. Writing is dreaming while awake. Allow the story to emerge from the place of dreams. (Don’t ask me how that’s done. Right now, it’s hit or miss.)
#3. Embrace Creative Destruction
“Every act of creation,” Picasso said, “is first an act of destruction,” and that’s where Dorothy’s dream begins.
When she awakes inside the dream, she’s inside the funnel cloud that’s tearing her world to pieces. Spinning in the dark are the shreds of her life on the farm: a shed clucking with chickens, the farm hands rowing a boat, Auntie Em knitting in her rocking chair.
They are memories torn from the orderly sequence of her waking life, flying in the whirlwind turbulence of her dream.
Lesson #3: Embrace Creative Destruction. Each experience must be torn from the chronological sequence of memory and allowed to find new attractions in the magnetic field of the story. The imagination will fuse the pieces into the gemlike quality of art.
#4. Shoot For Power and Glory
When I was a child, the moment that terrified me most occurs when Dorothy sees Miss Gulch pedaling her bicycle through the storm—and the woman turns into the cackling Wicked Witch of the West.
Even as a child I knew what Miss Gulch was: a buttoned-up, frustrated, church-going bully throwing her weight around her Kansas county.
But the Witch was a whole different nightmare.
She froze my blood, but she was beautiful in her power, her long black hair and her cape rippling behind her in the cyclone wind.
The witch was Miss Gulch unchained, her bun unbound, her coat torn asunder, her bicycle gone. Freed from the gravity of petty, small-town decorum, the Witch flies with all the power and glory of a dream.
If I couldn’t fall asleep after the movie, it wasn’t because I was afraid; it was because I was amazed.
Lesson #4: Shoot for the power and glory. The goal is to move the reader, and for that, you need raw power, however you can find it. Your job is to become a real professor of marvels.
#5. Bring The Story Home
Dorothy was right to want to leave her Kansas farm—the flat landscape, the befuddled uncle, the weary old aunt, the pig-stinking farm hands.
A girl has dreams. But her journey through Oz must, alas, come to an end.
When she wakes from her swoon, Dorothy finds herself back in Kansas, surrounded by her aunt, her uncle, the farm hands, and even Professor Marvel, who has dropped by to make sure the little runaway made it home safely.
The dream sets Dorothy a new task: to bring Oz back to Kansas.
She has to learn to see the people she loves, as we do, through the figures they cut in her dream: to see a brilliant scarecrow in the lanky, clever Hunk, a romantic Tin Man in the stiff but dreamy Hickory, a Cowardly Lion in the brave but fearful Zeke, and a flam-flam Wizard with a heart in the old, Kansas fortune-teller.
Lesson #5: Bring the story home. Life is ordinary; magical moments are the exception. The ultimate goal of the story is to help others see the magic in our common lives—to show our readers the enchanted life we are all actually living.
To say I throughly enjoyed this ingeniously written read is a huge understatement on my part.
Can’t wait to read it!