University 2.0: Air Miles 2.0

When I started my first degree back in the mists of time, Sainsbury's had just launched their first reward card. I became a little obsessed with it.

I realise I may be alone in thinking this, but that first card was  better than its successor, the Nectar Card, and here's how: you could use it for air miles. And air miles were straight forward, tax-free, and generously allocated.

After a term's worth of (basically) cheddar, bread, tea bags and milk, I was able to treat myself to a flight back to Guernsey to see much-loved, much-missed friends from my gap year. I'd eaten at least one meal in college per day during that time, but I'd been savvy and always chosen the make of bread or cheddar or tea bags that carried extra reward points (and there were many of those back then), and so basically one term's worth of lunchtime cheese toasties had been sufficient to carry me home. I know Guernsey isn't far, but still, that's some achievement. And my brilliance at collecting reward points was, now that I think about it, something of a legend among my group of friends. (Maybe not a legend; I exaggerate for the sake of poetry. But it was nonetheless mentioned from time to time.)

Now that I'm about to start the whole university thing again (though it will be called "school") I have picked up this obsession where it left off. America loves reward points. It loves them! And most beloved of all, as far as I can tell, are the frequent flyer miles. Unlike the Air Miles of old (wistful sigh), each airline has its own scheme, which makes it more complex, and a lot harder work to figure out.  I'm flying to DC with British Airways, who are an American Airlines partner, so I've opened an account with them, though I've opened several others too. I plan at some point to spend a substantial amount of time looking through the web site of each scheme and collating information on exactly which restaurant, which credit card, which hotel, earns me how many points with which airline. Maybe even doing a nifty thing involving a giant map and colour coding. Because it's not just flights - you can earn them on everything. I mean, everything. You can spend them on everything too, but I won't be doing that - mine are for seeing the world. Well, Colorado and California, anyway.

My air miles collecting will be legendary once more.

All because of Aaron Sorkin: how the West Wing changed me

The internet is aflutter with excitement about Aaron Sorkin’s new television show, The Newsroom. All kinds of questions are being asked: how will Sorkin write a Republican protagonist? Where’s Bradley Whitford? Will The Newsroom air anywhere besides the US?

Here’s what I’m asking: will it change lives?

Because The West Wing changed mine.

For a long time, my friends in London had been telling me I should watch it. “It’s all about politics,” they’d say. “You like politics.” They were right. Once I gave in, the show took over my life. And something surprising happened in me as I watched: I fell in love with the English language.

As a child and teenager, I wrote prolifically -- in French, which is my mother tongue. When we moved back to the UK, and English became my dominant language, I did not feel so inspired. French, I was convinced, was superior. It was beautiful. English was not.

But that was before Aaron Sorkin convinced me otherwise. His mastery of the language awoke something in me that had been dormant for years. “Oratory should raise your heart rate,” says one of his characters, and that is exactly what his words did for me.  I began to devour novels. I began to itch to write again.

Sorkin assumes an intelligent viewer, and yet still teaches them a multitude of things. He doesn’t shy away from difficult or controversial issues. And in the language itself there is poetry, too, and rhythm:

“Nice job on the speech,” says one character to another, Sam Seaborn, in the third season.

“How did you know I wrote it?” he asks her.

She quotes some of its phrases. “We did not seek, nor did we provoke… We did not expect, nor did we invite…”

“A little thing called cadence,” Sam replies, and you get the sense that Aaron Sorkin is winking at his viewers through those lines.

Sorkin is also skilled at developing complex and memorable characters, avoiding, for example, the liberal temptation to paint all Republicans as evil.  Life is not black and white, and nor should fiction be if it is to be believable.

Josh Lyman – deftly played by Bradley Whitford - is one such character: arrogant, brilliant, and deeply wounded. He is also at the center of a will-they-won’t-they storyline which kept many viewers hooked; I wanted my writing to do that, too. The restraint which Aaron Sorkin showed in not getting Josh and his assistant Donna together too soon – and the resulting tension - is one of the defining features of the show. I wanted to create characters as compelling as Josh and Donna; I wanted my stories, like Sorkin’s, to reflect the complexities of life in general and romance in particular.

So it was that walking home one summer Saturday after a morning of French teaching, an unexpected thought occurred to me: wouldn’t it be fun to tutor Bradley Whitford?  And that was the start of my first novel, in which someone very much like me teaches French to someone a little like him, who inspires her to move to Washington DC and (many years later) become a Senator.

Given the source of my inspiration, it was perhaps inevitable that politics would provide the backdrop to the story. My friends in London had been right: this wasn’t a new interest. I chose Sociology in my last two years of high school and almost studied Social and Political Science at University. I was once passionate about that stuff. And The West Wing prodded at that, too. Prodded and poked and awoke the beast.

And of course, I had to visit Washington, and the city stole my heart. Maybe it was the majesty of the monuments or the colors of autumn: we don’t have the deep, deep red of the maple tree in Europe. Maybe it was the surreal sense of stepping into a fictional world that had seemed only to exist on screens and in my imagination. Maybe it was eavesdropping on high-level conversations in classy restaurants. Maybe it was the abundance of literary events and of bookshops with names like Politics and Prose. Maybe – most likely of all – it was the fact that my writing feels intricately bound up with DC and the corridors of political power. Hard to tell. But I knew I wanted to live there.

Writing, by then, had become a serious passion; I began to dream about studying it full-time. And when I dream, I reach for Google. I typed in “MFA” and “DC”, omitting “two birds”, “one stone”. And it came up with American University, a place which not only offered exactly what I needed in terms of the course but which also –  oh, happy day! -- was rated number one nationally for its political involvement.

I applied but wasn’t accepted. Would Donna Moss have let that deter her? No, she would not. I worked on my admissions essay and sent in a better writing sample the following year, and this time it was a yes.

I’ll be moving to DC in August. Perhaps to embark on a whole new chapter of my life complete with best-selling novels, a part-time voluntary job at the Democratic Party, and my very own Josh Lyman. Or perhaps just for a two-year adventure. But either way, it’s because of Aaron Sorkin. It’s because of The West Wing.

Brave is starting again

I guest posted on a friend's blog a while back about the scary yet exciting adventure that awaits me in America. You can read my post here.

Applying for a US student visa at the Brussels Embassy: things they don't tell you

1. You should try to get there as early as possible: the earlier you get there, the less you'll have to wait. 

My appointment was at 8.30, and I was there around 8.10. (A minor miracle in itself.) But there were already nine people ahead of me in the queue. You stand outside, and after ticking your name off on the list they let you in one by one to have your passport checked and your bags scanned.

2. If you ask, you can take a wallet in with you, or a book, or a magazine, and there is somewhere you can leave the rest of your things safely.

The call-centre guy had refused to tell me anything about whether there would be anywhere I could leave my bag, and the website had insisted that I could only take the relevant documents in with me - absolutely nothing else. Hence much panic about what I would do with my stuff and how I would pass the hours that I had been warned I would spend in there. 

3. If you don't take in your book or magazine, never fear: CNN is on. 

However, in the mornings, it's all the international stuff, which is terribly disappointing if you're me and you just want to hear about Mitt Romney's latest gaffe on the campaign trail. (But of course it's in the middle of the night in America, so even he is relatively safe from gaffing.)

You can also admire the photos of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and President Obama hanging on the wall. I liked them - their smiles seemed to say "welcome to America". That's what I liked to think, anyway.

4. Like everywhere else in Belgium, you take a number as you walk in, then wait for it to come up on the screen. 

At this point, they'll ask you to hand over most of your documentation, then take your fingerprints. Then you sit back down and wait for your number to flash up again, at which point you go round the corner to a different booth. I was expecting interview rooms, for some reason. But no - just a booth. 

5. They probably won't ask you anything you've prepared yourself to answer. 

For example, I had a whole list of reasons why I have enough ties to Belgium to come back when my course is over, and a whole speech prepared about why the MFA at American University is perfect for me. I wasn't asked any of that. But when I said I taught French, the guy switched into French - just to check, I think - and he also asked me what my father's job is. (He's contributing financially, so it's not as random as it seems.) The first question was "what's your background"? A little vague, perhaps. The second was "what makes you want to write"? and I blanked and totally forgot to mention Aaron Sorkin, thus squandering a nice little anecdote about how it's thanks to him that I got my visa. Instead, I'll have to tell the story of feeling a little treacherous, as I walked away, for not having given credit where credit is, in fact, due. 

6. They tell you there and then whether you've been approved.

I was expecting a nail-biting wait. I was very glad not to have one!

7. You walk out realising you still have various pieces of documentation that you took great pains to find or print, and checked multiple times. 

I'm not sure what that's about. I mean, if they wanted a photo of me, why didn't they ask me for it? But whatever. I'm approved. I don't care anymore! It's over.

8. It's nowhere near as scary as all the stuff you've read might suggest. 

When I said "oh, I wasn't expecting that question", I didn't get a black mark against me or my head bitten off, but rather a friendly joke. The people are nice and not at all intimidating. Don't be scared!

"Going up" to AU

The first time I went to University, I learned a foreign language: Spanish. I also learned a quaint version of English in which, at the start of "Michaelmas term", you "went up" to college, where you "read" a subject with a strange-sounding name like MML, SPS, compsci or natsci. The weeks started on Thursdays and sometime in November everyone took to their beds (or, more likely, the bar) with Fifth Week Blues. (Term started in October and lasted hardly any time at all, but the academic year did go on until June.)

The second time, I'll be learning it all, all over again.

For a start, I'll have to get used to calling it "school", after spending three years telling my language students that, in English, you leave school at 18 and after that it's called university. 

I won't be choosing papers for my course or writing essays for them; instead I'll be choosing "courses" for my "program", for which I will write "papers", some (but not all) of which may be "essays", since I will be, after all, studying creative writing.

The whole thing starts not with Freshers' Week but with "Welcome Week", which includes an "Involvement Fair", which is what I used to call a Freshers' Fair. The main event of the week is not matriculation but "Opening Convocation", during which undergrads (who may or may not be called undergrads) wear matching tshirts rather than gowns. 

And that's just the beginning! Confused? I will be. 

Living the dream: in the beginning...

One day there will be a new blog, and it will be called something like claireindc.wordpress.com, and it will document the beginning of the journey, and the beginning might turn out to be yesterday.

Or it might turn out to be the day I borrowed Emily's laptop to watch a Friends episode but instead ended up watching the DVD that was already in there, Season Two, Episode Five of a little TV programme called the West Wing and thinking "you know what, this is actually really good".

Or maybe the beginning was moving back to Belgium: maybe there's something in the air here, writing stardust or something  Here was where I wrote my first poems, my first "novels". Here was where people began to talk about me as a writer and believe in me when I was far too young to warrant that kind of title or that kind of confidence.

Or maybe it's not the dust, or the water, or anything about my childhood. Maybe it's the chance I got to write articles that reminded me there was far more to my love of language than a passion for correct grammar in three languages.

Or maybe it's the fact that I moved here with no big agenda, had no television, and one July had no social life either, and the only two things that kept me busy were work and the West Wing, and one day, walking down the street after a lesson with a Russian diplomat I thought, "wouldn't it be fun to teach Bradley Whitford French?" and suddenly, there was my novel.

Who knows, really, where it began? But yesterday I got an email, the email I've been waiting for, except I thought I was waiting for a letter, and I thought I was waiting till March. It said, "It's the Director of the MFA program at American University. I wanted to touch base with you personally and let you know that you've been accepted into the program starting fall 2012."

At this point, I don't know much. I don't know if I will get the scholarship I need to make this feasible. I don't know if it's God opening a door, or just me shoving at it really hard.

But I reserved some blog domain names just in case. Just in case I get to write about living in DC, studying creative writing, and campaigning for the Democrats. Just in case, in other words, I get to live my dream and tell you about it.