Three Who Took Writing Classes Write Their Own Ticket
Carmen Wong Ulrich: How a How-To Writer Learned How
It’s not that she couldn’t write. She was already a young editor at Money magazine.
But Carmen Wong had a story to tell—a deeply personal one—and signed up for Nonfiction Writing I to sharpen her narrative technique before attempting it.
Her mother had come from the Dominican Republic at 15 or 16. Peter Wong—the man she thought was her father—came from China. And following her mother’s divorce and remarriage, her stepfather was an Italian American.
“We had culture clash upon culture clash,” she sighs. “And not just of nationalities. We moved from an urban setting, New York City, to a town in rural New Hampshire where nobody understood my mother’s accent. Our house was so far out, there was no street address, just an RFD—Rural Free Delivery.”
With the help of NYU-SCPS instructor Adam Sexton and the warm encouragement of her classmates, Carmen shaped her reminiscences into a compelling narrative. It was to appear later in the collection, Borderline Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass, and Cultural Shifting.
Her writing skills polished, Carmen next produced a guide to personal finance for people under 40, Generation Debt: Take Control of Your Money (Warner Books). Immediately successful, this led to radio and TV bookings on Today, Good Morning America, CNN, Wall Street Journal Radio, Oprah’s XM radio network, you name it.
And finally, Carmen became the host of her own TV show, On the Money, on CNBC weeknights at 9 p.m.
She has a two-year-old daughter now, Bianca, and lives in Cobble Hill with her husband, Lawrence Ulrich, an auto critic for the New York Times. And, she adds, “He’s German-American.”
Brian Harris: From Bottom Lines to Punch Lines
It may have been his first produced play, but when Brian Harris’s Tall Grass opened on Broadway last year it wasn’t his first try at comedy.
Ten years ago he co-authored a tongue-in-cheek business manual, Lay Low and Don’t Make the Big Mistake: The Lazy Man’s Guide to Success. Brian says the last time he looked, it was number 99 on Amazon’s list of business humor books.
Long before he took a course at NYU-SCPS, writing appealed to Harris. So after earning his B.A. at Princeton, he returned to Los Angeles to try his hand at movie and TV scripts.
None of them sold, however. So, his next stop was the business school at the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.B.A., and from there to a job with American Airlines in Dallas.
Several stints as a stock analyst followed—S. G. Warburg first, Lehman Brothers later. But Brian was restless. He tried writing short stories; he tried science fiction. And “just for fun,” he tried doing stand-up comedy.
“I wanted to see if I could be funny for 10 minutes.” Pause. “The answer was no.”
Maybe he wasn’t funny as a stand-up comic. But when Tall Grass opened on Broadway last year the New York Times said, “Farce is Mr. Harris’s métier.”
The three short plays that comprise it, the Times critic wrote, are “black comedies about the kind of love in which misery, peril, and contempt are the only dependable aphrodisiacs.”
Brian credits instructor Jeffrey Stanley’s playwriting course with giving him the confidence to try a full-length play, which he’s working on now. He says that Stanley’s attention to the structure of a play was especially useful.
“There’s not enough attention to that in the theater today. You see some plays and they just don’t feel complete.”
Stanley N. Alpert: Kidnapped and Making the Best of It
It wasn’t what you’d call a birthday gift, exactly.
But being kidnapped the night before his 38th birthday gave Stan Alpert the incident he turned into a gripping, critically acclaimed true-crime story.
The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival, published by Putnam in 2007, began as a project for Carol Bergman’s NYU-SCPS class, Nonfiction Writing I. In weekly class sessions, with Bergman and the class scrutinizing it sentence by sentence, Alpert burnished the details of his narrative.
A federal prosecutor, he was walking home to his Greenwich Village apartment when thugs kidnapped him at gunpoint, intent on stealing from his bank accounts.
“A bitter night wind…filled the open trunk of the car where my body was headed…I sat in the back seat…a gangster’s right leg pressed to my left, another gangster’s leg to my right, each jabbing a pistol at my chest.”
A 25-hour ordeal ensued that Stan depicted in what a New York Times reviewer called a “harrowing, often hilarious reconstruction of what should have been a garden-variety New York street crime.”
Though he had taken a couple of writing courses before Bergman’s—always with the intention of writing about the kidnapping—Alpert credits her with giving him “a more critical eye.”
“She showed us examples of good nonfiction writing, and we took them apart in detail to see what made them good,” he remembers.
Now a movie of The Birthday Party is in the works. United Artists has optioned the movie rights and hired an experienced screenwriter to do the screenplay.
But Alpert, in private law practice these days, expects to continue writing after hours, though he’s not sure what his next nonfiction work will be.
“Maybe something about environmental law, maybe a police story, maybe something else…”