If Words Could Dance
Fran Lebowitz once told Jerome Robbins, resident choreographer for New York City Ballet, that he had the worst job in the world.
“It would be as if I were sitting at my desk, and all the words of the dictionary were lolling around the desk, glaring at me and smoking.”
(What Basketball Taught Me About Writing Microfiction.)
She’s not far off base. In my decades-long career in ballet, I spent countless hours standing around the studio waiting for choreographers to string together steps for me to dance. There was some glaring and, of course, there was a lot of smoking, but there was also problem-solving and artistic collaboration. Sitting here, staring at my blinking cursor, I’d give anything for the words in my dictionary to say, “Or…we could do this!” and then arrange themselves in a beautiful line.
Professional ballet is a team effort, a stew of bodies, costumes, music, and movement. You are never alone in your creative quest and you always know what comes next. Tendus always follow pliés. Rehearsal always follows class. If you are a toy soldier in the Nutcracker this year, you know that next year, you will be a mouse. One day, if you are lucky, you might even be Tutu #5 in a snowstorm of 16 flakes.
It’s true: There are no guarantees. Dancers grow too tall or too wide or too old and then they are forgotten or fired. But for those who get to stay another season, there is a progression.
And there are mentors. When I was 10, my teacher held my hand and said, “This is how you sew a pointe shoe.” She showed me how to cook my shoes in the oven to make them harder and how to bang them on the sidewalk to make them softer. I learned everything by example: how to rehearse without exhausting myself, how to recover from a swollen ankle, even how to yell at a director who might have overstepped her bounds.
However, as a writer, I was alone.
During the years I danced the Nutcracker and Swan Lake and in weird ballets no one has ever heard of, I also wrote stories and screenplays and novels. Unlike in ballet, in which the entire company knows how many aspiring Sugar Plums were denied the role, there were no witnesses when I received a boilerplate rejection. This should have given me a safe haven to revise in private, but I discovered that I couldn’t fix my stories unless I had an audience, and I wouldn’t be granted an audience unless my stories were polished enough to publish.
I was stuck but I didn’t know what to do about it. My only example of the writer at work was the tired trope of Hemingway or Kerouac slumped over a typewriter. A fifth of whiskey at his elbow and wads of crumpled paper at his feet. Or Toni Morrison penciling drafts in 15-minute chunks before the sun rises and her children wake. Both images fed a stereotype of scarcity. Mothers had a scarcity of resources. White dudes had a scarcity of ideas. I knew from years in the theater watching set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, dancers, musicians, and stage hands that scarcity is never the problem. The problem is how to make the audience care.
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
When Fran Lebowitz tells Jerome Robbins that he has the worst job in the world, she is referring to the making of Glass Pieces. Set to music by Philip Glass, the ballet is notoriously difficult. The score is uncountable by dancers’ standards and the choreography is both technically demanding and hard on the body (Robbins had earned his dancers’ scorn). What starts as the chaotic apathy of pedestrians twists into virtuosic sequences. The ballet expands and contracts, culminating in what might be described as joy. It is quintessential Jerome-Robbins genius.
But early in rehearsals, the choreographer was stuck, and he thought Lebowitz could help. She was the most judgmental person he knew, he told her, (considering the source, this is really saying something) and he wanted her to attend rehearsals with him as he worked. He didn’t need feedback. “I just want to watch your face,” he said.
Only Robbins knows how her facial reactions spurred him on, but this idea of a front-row seat for a work-in-progress made intuitive sense to me. It felt analogous to the metaphorical leap that transforms dress-rehearsal disasters into opening-night magic.
I wondered if my writing could also make metaphorical leaps.
I began to imagine my words as dancers. Stiff sentences were like cold muscles that hadn’t warmed up yet. Bulky narratives would find their flow when I connected to their core. Submissions were like auditions and rejections weren’t personal. My words (and I) had to show up every day, whether we felt like it or not.
I sent my writing to friends and specified that I was not asking for feedback. In fact, they didn’t even need to read the work; they just had to hold the stories in their inboxes. When I returned to my manuscript a few days later, I could see what wasn’t working reflected in my friends’ silence.
It was as if all the words on the page were dancing around and not all of them had earned the right to be there. I cut clever and precocious phrases the way a director might replace a cocky soloist. I deleted passages that slowed the momentum of a chapter and I left spaces for words to stretch the tension the way a prima ballerina milks the timing of her bow.
Even though words singing through a sentence do not have the same agency as bodies hurtling through space, I treat them as though they do. Each revision is a run-through. Each version, a rehearsal. The pulse of my blinking cursor marches toward opening night. A joint collaboration, my words and I, as we try to make the audience care.
Check out Janine Kovac’s The Nutcracker Chronicles here:
(WD uses affiliate links)