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'Disco maniac' fuels passion for writing
I focus my training heavily on technique. Whatever reputation I have in the training business grew mostly from the detailed tip sheets you find on this Web site and from workshops that concentrate on teaching the techniques outlined in those tip sheets.
When I watch Michael Quintanilla, I am reminded of the importance of passion in training. Michael doesn't break his techniques down in great detail. But he writes and reads his stories with such passion, and tells stories about his stories with such passion that you leave his presentation with refueled passion for writing. And that's as important as any technique you can teach.
Michael, formerly a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, does offer valuable advice for writers:
- "Go overboard."
Your editor will rein you in if you go too far, he says, but only the
writer can take the story as far as it should go.
- "Writing
is a form of seduction."
- Turn your interview
into an "inner view."
- "You get surprises by hanging out."
But the impact of his presentation goes far beyond his advice. You see how much he loves storytelling and how his passion comes through in the stories. You see the passion in his presentation as well.
I've seen Michael's "Confessions of a Disco Maniac" twice, at the National Writers' Workshop in Fort Lauderdale last year and this November at the America Press Institute's "Compelling Storytelling" workshop. Each time I presented a workshop earlier in the program. "Confessions" evolved as Michael participated in panel discussions at journalism conventions, then developed his own one-man show. He's been presenting it in the current form for about two years, 10 times this year alone.
Both times I heard Michael he was the last speaker on the schedule. It's not an enviable slot. Some people are always leaving early to catch a flight or get started on the long drive home. Well, Michael has to go last on the schedule because no one would want to follow him. If you're going to a program where Michael will be speaking, allow time to stay to the end. You don't want to miss him.
You know this isn't your average writing workshop when you walk into the room and a disco ball is splashing light about the darkened room. No one I've seen in journalism training uses more stuff than Michael does. He uses music, costume, candles, slides and that disco ball. Michael coined the word journaltainment to describe not only his presentation but the industry's current emphasis on presenting journalism in an entertaining package.
The things Michael uses in his show are more than props and special effects, though. They are part of the story and part of Michael's message about throwing yourself into the story. By the time he finishes with his presentation, you want to meet his mother, and in a way you have.
His story about his mother's scarf is so moving that people ask afterward ask to touch the scarf. Michael told me about an an editor who asked if she could touch the scarf and soon others were "passing it around and talking about similar garments or jewelry that belonged to a parent or a grandparent and the value that had to them. It made me feel so great. ... I get choked up thinking about it."
His mother has seen his show three times and each time Michael introduced her to the crowd. "My mom stood and people clapped and later wanted to meet her and touch her and hug her," Michael said. "But the times I've done the show with my mom in the audience I have to remind her to 'Ma, just stand and wave when I introduce you,' because if I don't she'll take the microphone away from me and do her own show!"
Whether she's there or not, Michael passes along powerful writing advice from Mom: "When you feel, that's when you reveal."
Michael draws laughs with how he reveals that he was a disco maniac: "I was a swiveling pelvic discoid, in good, bad and ugly petroleum-based body-hugging threads that defined my suave and slick style as I rocked my boat, shook my groove thing and rang my bell."
He draws more laughs when he reads this passage from a story about a the Hair Ball in Houston: "Her hair, you see, is so McSupersized, so Titanic, so Viagraously altitudinous that it's Godzillian."
Yes, he says, an editor balked at "Viagraously altitudionous," but he appealed and it ran. Michael encourages writers to have fun with the language. "You have to bend it. You have to twist the words." Writers have to be creative with words, he says, the way chefs are with good and designers with fabric.
He challenges writers to challenge their editors with their creativity. "So many reporters are afraid to risk it all," Michael told me. "They tell me how they do the kind of journalism that their editors expect and half the time they don't know what their editors expect."
Michael moistens eyes as he tells the powerful story of Raphael Cordero's final six months as he died of AIDS. Journalistic convention and ethics teach us to keep distance between the writer and the subject. Michael became a caregiver for Raphael after writing an initial story about him. Michael teaches us that we can get close to our readers by getting close to our subjects.
"Touch the untouchable
inside yourself," he says, "and you can touch it in others."
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