There are moments in which something, usually some exclamatory statement in some scene, is remarkable and special, and we don’t know why. Someone says some cute line that grabs the attention of the class. The phrase is more interesting and somehow funnier than anything else in the story. I call that a catch phrase.
Catch phrases are associated with certain characters and can vastly improve the quality of the story experience. Some catch phrases last all year and become sort of verbal memes.
Once a character in a Joe Neilson story needed to write something but couldn’t. “I can’t write – I don’t have any fingers!” became a catch phrase in that story. Joe alertly recognized the line “I don’t have any fingers!” as a catch phrase line and made it work.
Recognizing it, we then milk such phrases for full dramatic effect. We slow it down; we shine a spotlight on it. We ask the character to say it romantically, angrily, with surprise, to the left, up into the air, as a secret, to a certain student in class, whispered, while laughing, referring to the Director’s Cues above our whiteboards to do that. We might even move it up to the level of a chant!
I remember one character in a story who said “I don’t want to leave my room!” I then went on to say “I don’t want to leave my room” in subsequent classes multiple times in various contexts, changing out [leave my room with whatever we were talking about that day. I would just make eye contact with a student, the student would roll their eyes in expectation, and I would try to keep from laughing when I said it in various ways. It was just silly fun, but the language went deep.