Creative Writing Class
Peter
Steven Spielberg continues, ‘do you know how much people pay me for my services? This conversation is already a token of my goodwill. With what I get paid per film, I could probably charge you a thousand dollars for every word I say. I will tell you where the Library is. Even better, I have a room right next door of portals that will take you straight to all its most common locations! Well, vaguely near its most common locations. Well, vaguely near some of them.’ Wait, locations? Plural locations? As in, there are more than one?’ Spielberg continues, ‘nothing is more valuable to me than stories. Give me something I don’t know. Give me a story that’s a diamond amongst the dirt, a cola bottle amongst the haribos, a Harry Styles amongst the One Direction members. Give me a story that will crystalise into a mirror that reflects my fears back at me and unlocks a mineshaft down to the depths of soul. Give me a story like that, and I’ll do the favour you ask for.’ Peter gulps. He has a feeling that it wouldn’t go down very well if he gave Spielberg a tenner and asked him to call it even.
Indiana Jones strides through the door and slips a pen and piece of lined paper next to the plate of everyone but Fangirl. He whispers something in Leia’s ear, but she bats him out the way with genuine anger. Even she must be stressed about what Spielberg is asking.
‘Write me a story about the worst moment of your life,’ Spielberg commands, ‘and if one story is good enough for me to keep, then you’ll have one favour.’
Indiana Jones tips his fedora at them, as if to say, good luck with that!
Peter squeezes the pen. The white page fills him with anxiety, as if it were not just mushed-up tree bits but a bottomless void made of everything he’d failed to achieve in is life. Bottomless void made of everything he’d failed to achieve in his life. Is that the kind of overly-elaborate phrase writers use? Peter would have paid way more attention to his middle school English classes if he’d known it would actually be useful one day and he’d have to indirectly save the world by completing a creative writing assignment. Is it too late to ask Mr Spielberg if he accepts apple pay? Or if he’d fancy anything from Peter’s fossil collection?
He glances either side of him. Hermione is scribbling away with such ferocity that she’s probably scratching the table. Fangirl is peering over at Legolas’ elegantly looped letters, trying to snoop at what he’s writing.
Surely somebody else will come up with a story good enough for Mr Spielberg. Peter just needs to half-fill his paper with any old rubbish so the others will think he made some effort. The worst moment for like all humanity was the war with Thanos and the Infinity stones, right? He scrawls something down about that.
After a few minutes, Spielberg rises from his seat. ‘Righty-ho! Let’s see what you came up with.’ He whips Peter’s page off the table, and starts reading it out. ‘My worst moment was…’
‘Hey,’ Peter protests, ‘I didn’t know you were going to read it out to the rest of us. And Mr Fedora over there.’
Sympathy and privacy are clearly not Steven Spielberg’s strong points, because he carries on reading as he paces around the dining room. ‘My worst moment was during the battle with Thanos and all the Avengers. Then he’s added in brackets: the second one for me. The Avengers Facility which I had loved so much was burning with amber fire and crimson flames. That’s unnecessary polyptoton, Peter. The sky was a lavender haze. No, you can’t put that. Taylor Swift will sue me. It looked like all was lost. Even though everybody made a massive deal of the Wasp and her boyfriend doing something with a magic van, nothing ever came of it. I’d totally failed at holding onto the Infinity glove for more than about five minutes, and then was buried in a mound of Chitahuri that I couldn’t win against, only survive against. Scarlet Witch – no, you don’t need to add in brackets that she was the hot scary one. You really don’t need so many brackets. Doesn’t it get annoying for you? – had completely vanished after the ship shot at people nowhere near her. Dr Strange was still busy doing stuff with a lake which really sucked for us because he totally could have just decapitated Thanos with one of those sling ring things if he’d tried. Captain America was really not as superior as he thought he was. Captain Marvel had been blasted out the way by the purple rock. The gazillion other superheroes who had been there ten minutes ago were apparently all busy, because when Thanos put on the magic glove in a surge of rainbow light, only Iron Man was left to do anything about it. Everyone felt the surge – no, you can’t use surge twice in a row – of power when Mr Stark whispered, ‘and I am Iron Man,’ and snapped his fingers and destroyed Thanos and all his army. All the monsters flaked away into dust as we fought them. I swung towards Mr Stark as quickly as I could. I asked him if he could hear me, still clinging onto a spiderweb thread of hope that he could be fixed, but then Ms Potts pulled me out the way and I had to watch as the light went out the arc reactor and out his eyes. He saved the whole world but the whole world failed to save him.’ Spielberg tuts. ‘Bit overdone, isn’t it? I’ve seen it before. 2.8 billion dollars’ worth of people have seen it before. I want something a bit fresher. Juicier. Zingier.’
Peter tries to grab the paper back, but Spielberg lifts it out of reach. ‘Wait! I can do better than that. What about yesterday morning? When that recording of Mysterio played around the world and now everybody thinks I’m a villain not a hero and I might have to be a fugitive and never see my friends or Aunt May ever again?’
Spielberg sighs. ‘No, that’s cheating. I want a truly character-defining moment, that unhinges your soul from certainty and requires painful reattachment. That will live at the forefront of your mind guiding every choice you make until your mind rots away into dust. Twenty-seven hours isn’t enough time for that.’ He holds out his palm. Hermione passes her paper, which is curling from so much biro. ‘Well, a whole page, front and back. My worst memory is in truth an absence of memories. When I took my parents’ memories away from them. I knew that Harry Potter and Ron Weasley needed me to hunt down Voldemort’s horcruxes with them.
Without me, who would apparate everyone to new places, pack the tent, cast the protective enchantments, cook the dinner, research the Deathly Hallows, wear the locket, plan the next… honestly, was there anything you didn’t do in this book? Maybe Voldemort would’ve been defeated in half the time if you’d drawn up a chores rota instead. I knew that once I was branded as travelling with the Chosen One, my head and the cash reward for handing it to the Death Eaters would be plastered over every lamppost in the Wizarding World. The only way to protect my parents was for them to no longer be my parents. Honestly, Miss Granger, this is almost as long-winded as JKR’s descriptions of Quidditch.’ He flips over the page. ‘My whole life, I had felt torn between two homes. Now, I’d finally had to choose between them. I’d destroyed one to save the other.’
Hermione bends her head down so that her mane of hair half-hides her face. Peter tries to drag his eyes away from her, but it’s difficult to not look at the person you’re thinking about. He’d had no idea that Hermione’s world-saving adventurers had cost her family, just like Peter’s had yesterday.
Spielberg crumbles up her story into a ball and chucks it back at her. ‘That’s no good, Hermione. We’re making stories for the masses. Stories that sell out cinemas and buy me another plane. And your silly teenage angst about boarding school really isn’t that relatable for all the plebeians. They want the fantasy of it, not the reality.’ He sweeps past her and snatches Arya’s page. ‘Let’s see… oh, you’ve only given me three sentences. After I watched my brother-in-law kill my father, I fled to the Twins with the hope of finding my mother and brother and uncle. I saw my brother ride out on a horse, but realised it was his propped-up corpse with his Dire Wolf’s head sewn on in the place of his. It was a terrible time to be twelve. As much as I admire your succinctness, we rather need something that every viewer now doesn’t already know before they even start watching Game of Thrones, don’t we now? Any more ideas? That we might not know already?’
Arya doesn’t answer Spielberg’s question, but instead points at him and drags a finger across her throat, as if to ask if he wanted his pet’s head duct-taped onto his severed neck.
He swallows and moves onto Leia. She passes him her paper. Spielberg scans it and tuts. ‘Leia, Leia, Leia. Where is your emotive I-language? Nobody with friends or their sanity intact cares about the type of solar ionisation in the hypermatter annihilation reactor on the Death Star.’ As someone who totally does care about the type of solar ionisation in the hypermatter annihilation reactor on the Death Star, Peter tries not to be personally offended. ‘We want the emotional impact of Darth Vader blowing up your whole planet. All the deets about how haunted with guilt you are that he definitely wouldn’t have done it if you’d just been a bit politer to the Space Nazis or named Mandalore or something instead.’
Leia’s bottom lip quivers. She blinks like a windscreen wiper turned up to the max, then replies, ‘no.’
‘Never mind. Alderaan doesn’t matter anyway, since we didn’t meet a character who died on it for twenty-five years. No emotional pull for the audience, see?’ He drops Leia’s writing into the maple syrup fountain. Leia watches the paper be engulfed by gold, then vanish into nothingness. Spielberg picks up Snow White’s page. ‘Ah, now you have plenty of emotive I-language.’ He flips it over. ‘Too much, really. There’s a whole page about how lost and terrified you felt when you were alone in the woods and no prince came to rescue you and the animals were all too scared of the huntsman to come help you.’ He passes it back to her. ‘Well, it’s certainly got more depth than the Kristen Stewart version, but I’m not sure if my Rachel needs any more opinions from strangers.’
Finally, Spielberg makes his way round the table to Legolas. Surely out of all of them, Legolas will be the one to come up with some twenty-thousand-line Man Booker prize winning epic poem about something deep and meaningful and tragic enough to make cinemas full of macho middle aged men cry. Spielberg holds out his palm. The elf’s fingers stretch towards his tea, then retreat. ‘I wrote nothing’ Legolas announces, ‘because I do not have a worse moment. I never lose battles, never lose loved ones, never even lose my balance and stub my toe. Literally, elves’ feet technically hover a fraction above the earth instead of coming into contact with it. If you would like to hear about my greatest success instead, I have plenty of those.’
Peter releases his irritation on his fork, squeezing the prongs together. Legolas totally did write something, because Fangirl peered over the avocado toast at it. Peter notices a folded-up piece of paper is tucked underneath his mug. Legolas knows exactly what his worst moment is, he just changed his mind about revealing it to everyone else.
Indiana Jones gathers up the pens. Spielberg sighs again (grown-ups tend to do that a lot when interacting with Peter). ‘Well, that was disappointing. For all of you, presumably, who hope to save the universe from tyranny and things. But far more so for me. I was going to get all my children a fourth pony. Each.’
Panic speeds Peter’s thoughts up to double-time. One of them has to come up with something traumatic enough for Spielberg to exploit. How many storyworlds must be sustained by people’s imaginations? Thousands? Millions? And unlike the Villain in the Dark and their constantly-expanding army of minions, they have no shot at finding the Library without help. He locks eyes with Fangirl, whose irises are wide with anxiety (just like Peter’s probably are beneath the Spider-Man mask). Fangirl is so like he used to be, like who he would be if that radioactive spider had bitten the next person along instead of him.
‘Hold on, Mr Spielberg,’ Peter calls, ‘I have a better worse moment. Well, you might think it’s the worst worst moment but it’s the truest worst moment I can think of and I bet you haven’t already heard it.’
Spielberg eases back into his chair. ‘I’m all ears.’
Peter resists the urge to make a joke about Spielberg’s facial proportions. ‘My worst moment wasn’t during the battle with Thanos, or any other battle. I didn’t have the superpowers yet, or anyone who wanted me on their side in a war. There weren’t any clashing armies or blazing fires or even any other people. I was all alone because I’d barricaded myself in a toilet cubicle next to the changing rooms of my middle school because some other kids poured milk into my backpack. And I truly believed that I was nothing. That I was less than a speck of dust drifting through the vacuum of space, not even big enough for gravity to suck it into any planets or stars. Because I know I shouldn’t enjoy saving the world, what with all the war and all the responsibility. But there is a part of me – most of me, actually – that secretly kind of loves it. Like, not the death and destruction and doom and stuff. But loves having a purpose and being special and knowing that there is a reason I exist and am important and am a someone. Even in that final fight with Thanos, when I was tearing across the battlefield with the Infinity Gauntlet (and that’s, like, the greatest power in the universe) tucked under my arm as I dodged a whole army of angry aliens I remember getting such a rush of excitement and thinking, damn Luke Skywalker got nothing on me! because the fact that it was me doing this proved to me that I am someone. And that’s why I panic so much that I’m not good enough at all this adventuring stuff, and that I’m a loser among heroes. Because if after the universe gave me this one-in-eight-billion golden ticket to being a superhero and I still can’t succeed at it, then I really am nothing.’