One day I met a girl coming up the stairs with short-cut, fiery red hair. I think she was coming to have lunch with Marty Pasko’s girlfriend, Becky, but I might have that wrong. Her name was Linda Woolverton. Everybody said she was a great animation writer. Whatever she was, she was certainly interesting. I kept trying to figure out ways to actually meet her.
Our first “date” started at an Inhumanoids editing session. Linda, for her part, might have been an animation writer, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hang around with a bunch of geeks. It just wasn’t her thing. When I’d met Linda, she had a red buzz cut, but now her hair was growing out. She reminded me of Ripley from Aliens. When her hair grew out, she became more Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, with intense blue eyes. She was especially Emma Peel in her red convertible sports car. She had whippet energy and never seemed to get tired.
Linda would tell you she had a damaged childhood, and she’s even written a book about it called Running Before the Wind. And maybe she was damaged, but she never played damaged. There was nothing self-destructive about her. The other thing was, and this mattered, that she was mega-talented. Nobody disagreed on that point. We might not have known that she would end up the highest-grossing woman writer in the history of the WGA—we couldn’t have—but while all of us had our own set of magic skills, everybody sort of knew that she was probably the best writer. Or, at a minimum, none of us were better, let me put it that way.
And she had another hidden advantage: she walked into geek world with her own sophistication. She’d worked at CBS and knew exactly how the networks worked. She’d also been an actor in college and part of the theater group.
Linda always chided me about not writing from the heart. And she had a point. It’s never really been my intention to touch people’s emotions, and when I’ve actually found myself in a position where I had to, it’s always felt weird—like I then had to go somewhere way over the top just to even out. She claimed that her secret was heart, but she was about a lot more than that. She had a Stephen King quote from It printed on her wall, and she had a habit of blindsiding you with plot surprises. You should have seen them coming, but you didn’t. Go ahead and watch Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, or Maleficent and see for yourself.
Watching her write was an entertainment experience all its own. She’d be working away, laughing at stuff, sometimes tearing and sort of unable to explain what she was laughing about, which was okay. It hit the page. She’s one of those writers who hits the page. If it doesn’t hit the page, it doesn’t matter how good you are, just like it doesn’t really matter how good you look in practice.
And this is the lesson for writers and would-be writers. Where do you write from?
Not that I can answer the question. I’m still not sure where I write from. Sometimes from my brain, sometimes from my biceps, now and then from my gut, but rarely from my heart. It’s just not the organ that interests me.