My students aren’t just learning how to write fiction, they’re also learning about all kinds of other stuff, like...
Hold on. I need to put that differently.
Let’s try this: Because writers are supposed to write what they know, they need to know, well, everything, so in order to learn how to write fiction my students are learning about all kinds of other stuff, for instance, the history of the great migration of African Americans out of the South, the menu at In-N-Out Burger, the biblical allusion that opens Moby-Dick, automats.
This week for their writing exercise I have them looking at some paintings by Edward Hopper, picking out a person in a painting of their choice, and turning that person into a character in a story. One of the paintings is Automat. Turns out many of them knew Hopper already and could even name at least one of his paintings. Guess which one.
So they’d heard of Hopper. But none of them knew what an automat is. Always a helpful instructor, I gave them the clip below as visual aid.
Apparently, automats were like saloons in the Old West. You couldn’t be in one long before a fight broke out.
The movie is Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, and Edward Arnold. Preston Struges wrote the screenplay. Sturges is someone else my students need to know about.
Something I want to teach myself, making a regular comeback out of the line “Hire a hall.”
I’d pick Conference at Night myself. What about you?