“My first date” is an easy topic to trivialize. However, simply by continually asking Josh every conceivable question, we were being rewarded with hundreds of increasingly enthusiastically rendered specific details, that begin to set his essay apart. To give you the idea, here are a few representative questions:
- Describe Alan.
- Define cool.
- Describe Alan’s world. What makes it cool according to your definition?
- Describe Alan’s house; compare it to your house.
- Describe in detail what you did together during those two weeks:
“We drove around. We listened to music:. . . ”
“Such as?”
“Oh you know. Songs my parents could never get me to listen to... The Beatles. Led Zeppelin... ”
“Any specific songs?”
“Alan played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ a lot late at night when we were playing Nintendo.”
“Any particular Nintendo game?”
“Basketball, because during the day Alan was teaching me how to do a lay-up.”
“Describe your first date. Was it the major milestone that you expected? Why? Why not?”
“Know what, though? That first date with Jessica, her sister and her brother, was so natural it wasn’t really all that big a deal. My last night there was by far the more important. I didn’t bring it up sooner because I was afraid it would make my essay way too long...”
(CLUNK!) Sound made by UU rapping Josh on the head with a pencil: “DON’T COUNT WORDS!!”
“That last night, everybody else went to play mini golf but I felt like staying home. So there I was, contentedly sitting on the couch, watching TV in my ratty shorts…when, around one a.m., everybody returned home and came downstairs into my room to hang out with me.…”
In that session, Josh talked for almost an hour while we took notes, about the basement room down that flight of stairs. He described in detail where everybody was sitting, the movie they watched, “Children of the Corn...” But what Josh talked about most was the moment when Jessica sat down on the couch beside of him in front of the TV and held his hand.
“For my whole life up I had always felt afraid of everything, mostly of saying and doing something lame. The very instant Jessica took my hand, I suddenly understood what it meant to feel complete.” By not counting words and saying every conceivable thing he had to say, though it had taken him three sessions, Josh had finally found his essay's theme.
From Day One of working with Uniquely U., Josh’s opening sentence had referred to Alan’s house in Pennsylvania as a kind of heaven. What then is Hell? Middle school awkwardness around girls. Even though Josh, in his second freewrite, had written a lot of very specific information about middle school, by now focusing solely on the Hell theme, we can easily cut an entire page. It now makes perfect sense to think of Alan, Jessica, AJ, and Christy as Josh’s guardian angels, with the horror movie as yet another aspect of hellishness. Even the “Stairway to Heaven” leading to the rec room where Jessica’s takes his hand comes into play. Once the unifying metaphor has been identified, every detail you include now serves to underscore it.
