EPISODE 06: “Superman Falling”
To save his marriage, a New York advertising exec reluctantly accompanies his wife to the Midwest.
Superman Falling lives near to my heart, first because it came from an emotional place, and second, because it I learned so much working on it.
The emotional origin was years ago. I was recovering from a major abdominal surgery – the removal of a cancerous tumor that had been discovered as during tests as I was trying to get pregnant – and I had a dream.
In the dream, I was standing near a window on a high floor of a building, holding a baby. The baby slipped from my hands and fell out a window. After he fell, I started running as fast as I could down a stairwell, desperately hoping… for what? That all wasn’t lost – or that I would make it to the ground first and somehow catch him? But as I ran and ran, the realization sank in that there was no saving this. The sorrow and guilt was overwhelming.
When I woke, I felt compelled to write the dream, which I did, making up some of the circumstances that weren’t clear in the dream, but leaving its core – the child falling and a parent running down flight after flight of stairs, hoping desperately for a miracle — while at the same time knowing what waits at the bottom.
A couple years later, I took a version of the pages I’d written to one of my first writing classes, where I learned something important:
Just because you feel certain emotions when you’re writing, doesn’t mean readers will feel those emotions when they read what you’ve written.
The folks in my writing workshop didn’t feel what I felt. Instead, they were confused. They floated different theories as to why the story “wasn’t working yet,” and offered advice on how to possibly fix it. But the killing blow was the instructor’s note. He said, “The moment you’ve written about isn’t the real story, the real story is what happens after this moment.”
Notes that are versions of “go write something completely different,” are tough to swallow. I’m sad to say that I have entire projects sitting on aging hard drives after getting similar notes. So kudos to my past self — determined and energetic and a little bit dumb — because she went off and actually wrote the “after this moment” story.
Which still didn’t work.
My instructor read it, and gave me a new note: You want to have two stories, not just one. There’s a present-tense story, then there’s a chronic tension born of the past that puts pressure on what’s happening in the present.
These weren’t words I was ready to I understand completely, but something about them resonated. And when I went back to the page and bludgeoned my way through another draft, I began to experience a slow-motion epiphany: The past shapes the present and adds meaning to it—and there are different ways of weaving the past into a narrative. Later, when I studied screenwriting, I recognized this more clearly. Even today, when I’m watching or reading, I find myself observing whether a narrative is a “two-story” story.
In the final version of Superman Falling, the plot is entirely fictional, the protagonist is not me—his guilt has different roots, the situation is different – my own experience mostly replaced. But somehow the act of replacing almost everything, and transplanting my sense of grief and guilt – made the story “work” more effectively—not perfectly at all, but the best I was capable of then!
And the process of crafting the story was part of a transformation in my life. Those flashes of understanding and fleeting moments of control I’d felt whetted my appetite for learning more about storytelling… and that hunger is something that has given my life purpose and meaning for more than a decade.
“Superman Falling” was first published in Colorado Review.
Cover art by Ted Giffin. Sound design by Greg Gordon Smith.
