Cyndi Lauper's Advice for Writers

October 31, 2024*

On Sunday, I saw Cyndi Lauper live for the first time—on her farewell tour.

I’m wistful that I never got to see my childhood hero live in the 1980s, but my 50-year-old self was thrilled to discover that her sense of humor is as irreverent and random as I always imagined it would be. Her free-associative stage banter leapt from topic to topic and included seemingly unfiltered remarks about her bodily experience of being on stage. For example, at one point she announced that she was getting over a cold and had to blow her nose—which she did ON STAGE (luckily off mic). Cyndi’s remarks may have seemed disjointed and bizarre to some in the audience. But to me—with my lifelong reputation for nested tangents (and parenthetical remarks!)—her acrobatic conversational maneuvers were deeply familiar.

I don’t want to try to figure out or label Cyndi’s stage presence. To do so would pathologize interactions with the audience that seemed so comfortable—comfortable in her own skin and in her ability to relate to us. Some of her “digressions” were obviously rehearsed, such as bringing a camera backstage to witness her wardrobe touchup. That particular blurring of the boundaries between public and private might have been prerecorded, but never mind that possibility: it was the idea of the thing rather than the reality of it that mattered. But in addition to her planned informality, she seemed to ad-lib a lot of her stage banter, which included asides about doing yoga, attempting to rescue a fish from a hotel aquarium, and of course, the nose-blowing moment.

But here’s the thing: however far her commentary ranged, Cyndi never lost sight of what I think she wanted her audience to go home with. In addition to inspiring all the feelings we wanted to feel in hearing “True Colors,” “The Goonies,” and other favorite hits, she was damn well sure she wanted us to walk out of that arena thinking about the importance of reproductive rights and democracy. And unlike a certain politician who also wears wigs on stage—and whose monomaniacal perseverations come across as reactive (to put it mildly)—Cyndi’s refrains sounded intentional and carefully considered. Not random, not scattered, not accidental.

Neither were her thoughts about art and artistry, however off-the-cuff they may have seemed. She fangirled about collaborating with Yayoi Kusama on the wardrobe and video backdrops for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and was intent on naming the other artists and fashion designers she worked with, including David Wurtzel, whose “Air Fountain” provided a poignancy that video panels could never match.

But like her refrain about reproductive rights and voting, her writing advice was focused and her message unmistakable: pay attention to the world around you! She talked about getting rained on through a skylight left open in Cape Cod—“who let in the rain?” she remembers exclaiming—and then reaching for paper to write it down. “Write that down!” she emphasized. And repeated it later when she told part of the story behind “Time after Time”: the line “the second hand unwinds” came up in conversation, and again—“Write that down!” Listen for the lines, listen for the art in the everyday, listen for the unrehearsed combinations of words that deserve to be kept rather than thrown away. It’s not new advice—it reminds me of Annie Dillard exhorting readers to pay attention to the world around us—but it’s always worth repeating.

Journalists in the 1980s used terms like “junk rock,” “nouveau trash,” and “garish thrift-store” glamor to describe Cyndi Lauper’s style—a vibe that feels at odds with her grounded approach to songwriting.** If chance-heard utterances seem haphazard, paying attention as an artistic strategy most certainly is not. And Cyndi seemed intent on making sure we noticed this difference in the moment she removed a fluffy canary-yellow wig to reveal a plain black wig cap underneath:

“It ain’t all glamor. Because a lot of it is just—[takes off wig]—art.”

If you are eligible to vote in the United States and haven’t done so already, please just do it. Cyndi said so!

—Tes

* Obligatory Halloween content: I dressed up as Cyndi Lauper for Halloween when I was in sixth grade. The spray-on orange hair dye was extremely noxious and messy, but it was SO worth it.

** See especially Kurt Loder’s January 19, 1984 review in Rolling Stone.

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New Schedule!

Thank you to everyone who responded to our survey. You asked for sprints on nights other than Wednesdays and more asynchronous sprints, and we listened!

After November 10, we’ll try a regular rotation of Monday daytime (noon ET) sprints and Thursday evening (9pm ET) synchronous sprints in addition to our popular 4:30 ET Sunday synchronous sprints. Starting in December, we are also adding a second Sunday asynchronous sprint to the calendar. See below for the next few weeks’ schedule.

October Podcast

In which we discuss what it’s like when writing is difficult—and why that means you’re doing it right. Our next podcast episode will be out on November 14.

No Time to Write Club Schedule: November 6–November 25, 2024

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Zoom links are below for paid subscribers.

• Wednesday, November 6, 9:00pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Thursday, November 7, noon ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Sunday, November 10, 4:30pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Thursday, November 14, 9pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Sunday, November 17: asynchronous sprint on the Substack chat

• Monday, November 18, noon ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Thursday, November 21, 8pm ET: social hour on the Substack chat

• Thursday, November 21, 9pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Sunday, November 24, 4:30pm ET: Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Monday, November 25, noon ET: special pre-holiday Zoom writing sprint (75 minutes)

• Happy U.S. Thanksgiving! We will resume with an asynchronous sprint on Sunday, December 1.

What We’re Up To

Sara’s new novel is with her agent. While she waits for feedback, she's starting the very first steps of a new one!

Tes is catching up on sleep and work—nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see.