Sometimes you have to know a lot more than what ends up on paper.
Whether it’s a screenplay, stage play or a high school essay, it always comes across who knows their stuff and who’s flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to writing well on any topic. And you can be sure, when you’re in the writing biz, that eventually someone’s going to come along and go over your work with a set of exam gloves and a fine-toothed comb.
My best example actually comes from a high school essay I did on Nicholas and Alexandra, the last Czar and Czarina of pre-Soviet Russia. All I had to turn in was a 15-page paper and I had an entire high school semester in which to write it. I probably could have flipped through one basic primer on the Russian Revolution and obtained all I needed. Instead, I got caught up in the subject and read about four books on the topic, including one on Rasputin and one on the love letters written between Nicholas and Alexandra.
While the Rasputin stuff was nice and spooky, it will always be the love letters book that made the biggest impression on me, because it humanized authority figures for me. Here was Nicholas, Czar of Russia, one of the most powerful nations on earth at the time, and then there was Alexandra, member of the royal line of Europe. Both very important people, powerful and impressive.
Yet their love letters were little more than the sweet and foolish things that passed between boys and girls in my own senior class, full of sweet nothings, insecurities, uncertainty about whether the other person liked them. Just normal beginning of a relationship and falling in love stuff. It was an amazing book that helped me see, even at 18, that folks in the halls of power in our world are all just people, no different than anyone else.
That’s good writing. And after all that research and reading, I think mentioning the love letters of Nicholas and Alexandra made up for less than a page of my essay. Yet because I did that research, I knew my subject so much better as a result, and my problem was not reaching 15 pages; my problem was trying to stop when I reach page 25.
