Sometimes Deadlines Are Helpful

playwriting,

 

I’ve always taken pride in being a disciplined writer who doesn’t need deadlines to get the work done. I usually have several plays in various stages on my desktop. If I end up hating one, that’s okay. There’s one or two others coming up behind it.

This year, the deadline for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference was October 26th. On October 1st, as I was going over the submission requirements, I decided to not send the play I had finished. I still had problems with it.

Okay, so I could send a different play. However, there was one small catch. The play wasn’t done. I didn’t have a full draft.

Just a minor detail. No need to panic.

What did I have in my undone play? I had the characters. I had the visual world. I knew the tone of it. I didn’t have the ending, but I knew where I was going. I had been working on it for two years, so I had spent some time on it. I realized that I knew more than I thought I knew about it. I just had to get it to draft.

I sat down and finished the play. Every day, I worked on it and worked on it. The first ten pages took two years to write. The last ten pages took two days. I got it to the O’Neill five days early.

Having that deadline turned out to be beneficial. If there had been no deadline, the play would still be incomplete. Sometimes deadlines are helpful.

But. . .But. . .But

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Last month, Tiffany Antone put her writing heart on her sleeve on this blog. She kept coming back to the phrase but I’m not writing full length plays as she talked about everything she was doing—and she does some great stuff.

I totally understood her pain. She was going through the Buts. Yes, I have the buts too. I might be writing away and kicking ass on a new play,  but. . .but. . .but. I might have sat through a really successful production of a short play I wrote, but. . .but. . .but.

The Buts have caused me to start smoking (which creates real butts, hahahaha), drink too much, and curl up into a little ball with my eyes tightly closed and my fists clenched.

How do you fight the Buts? I do not recommend smoking, drinking too much, or curling up into a little ball. I fight the Buts by doing yoga (skipping the little ball part), sailing, and just plain getting on with it.

Sometimes, you just gotta get on with it and say, okay, what next? Actually, that might be a good phrase to counter punch the Buts. What next? Also what can I do now?

And Tiffany, don’t worry about them full length plays. According to Wikipedia, Chekhov wrote less than ten full length plays. Less than ten. Okay, so he was a prolific short story writer. Okay, so five of those plays are considered classics. Okay, so he was also a doctor. Okay, so he died young. Still, he did the work. Remember it’s quality not quantity. Insert inspirational quote here.

It’s your time now. What are you going to do with it?

Fuzzy Duck Fridays

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I’ve spent the last few Friday nights writing until after midnight – tying to cram in one night all the pent up writing from the week.  There are times when I think I’m going to burst in the car driving home from work (“I hope I can remember that idea/feeling/concept sentence”) so I can smash into the few hours left in the week.  I feel like a pile of fuzzy ducks flopping around together.

This makes for tangled, incoherent, nervous writing.  But at least it makes for re-writing.

I always find it interesting that when you have an image in  your mind that belongs somewhere in you writing, somehow that image seems to pop up everywhere. (An hourglass?  A skull with painted teeth?  A bad looking carnival?) They all seem to find their way to me in the hours before I write, beeping at me as I try to remember – where did I see that?

Now for the rest of my re-writing weekend!

Bumping Into the Characters

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I saved this to share with you:

By MARK HELPRIN in THE NEW YORK TIME
Published: October 3, 2012

“The  great essayist Roger Rosenblatt once generously reminded me that “good writers have good accidents.” Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that along with will conspires to put words on the page. The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable. Fortunately, the world is rich in the interweaving of the two, which can be found almost everywhere, and not least where one lives.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/garden/bumping-into-the-characters.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

 Recently I’ve been looking for signs for a new script I’m writing:  as in mystical/ magical/ unrealistic signs. 

Then in the  news there were several articles about solar flares.  I’m not sure what the ingredients of this happy acccident were, but the idea of solar flares triggered all kinds of brain synapses about electrical accidents.

 The article is a great read, and the last lines will stay with me for a long time:

 “Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish. Because they cannot last, their value is in the present, in memories that die with us, in things that come unbidden to the eye and in the electric, immaterial, miraculous spark that occurs when by accident and design they jump the gap and, like life itself, are propagated into something else, becoming for a moment pure spirit, thus to become everlasting.”

  

Gearing up for a new play, part 5: Finding the time and the space to write

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So I’ve vacated our 800 square foot coop, an agreement I have with my writer husband. There’s something about having two writers in the house at the same time: as if the other person is sucking all the creative energy out of the place. We both feel it. And so we agree to give the other person some solo time at home.

Today’s my day to clear out.

One advantage to living in DC, you can jump on the bus and in five minutes find yourself surrounded by Smithsonians and other museums.

I began the day at the Hirshhorn. There’s a terrific room on the third floor, wall to wall windows, electrical plugs, comfy chairs. Except they’re hosting some sort of event tonight (museums are forever hosting events here!) and closed off what I call “the writing room.”

Plan B involved snagging one of the small metal tables and chairs in the lobby. Noisy, but somehow reassuring to be surrounded by strangers and cacophony. I happily spent a couple of hours pounding out a script for work.

And then I was starved.

So I hiked a block and a half to the Smithsonian Castle Cafe for Mexican hot chocolate and a banana and am going to try to work on my script.

Yesterday was a good day. Why not today?

It’s so hard to find a regular schedule. And good places to write. I’m always appreciative of great tips. Do you write before or after the day job? Where?

One DC writer, DW Gregory, says she’s a binge writer, scribbling great amounts at a time blocked out for nothing else. I know that won’t work for me. I’m too easily distracted.

Suggestions, please?

Progress!

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One of the cleverest pieces of advice I ever saw for writers was aimed at those brave souls who crank out the first draft of a novel in one month.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
The advice was to have a “bible” nearby. Not THE bible. YOUR bible. In other words, the writer who inspires you, the book you wish you’d written, the book you read over and over again.

The idea was that when you got stuck – had a question about style or pace or dialogue – you could turn to your “bible” for answers.

I’ve decided to do this for my new play.

I’m actually keeping two “bibles” nearby. One is a book I love and find full of wonderfully funny dialogue. In fact, I’m going to write a modern version of it.

The other is a basic book on playwriting.

Admit it, you have a few on your shelf. I randomly flip through a few, hoping one will strike a note with me at this time in my writing career. It’s a reminder of all the things we already know about building characters and dramatic structure and how hard it is to write. But it’s a nice reminder that I’m not reinventing the wheel.

So this morning before starting work, I set out for a short walk down to the waterfront, read a little from each of my “bibles” and wrote three pages of morning pages. Mostly lists of the hundred and one things I could be doing instead of writing. A wasted morning.

I then put in a days’ work.

And just as I was about to kick myself for wasting my life, imagining I’m a playwright, as the sun was setting, I sat down one more time. And managed to write five first draft pages! It’s not brilliant, but it’s more than I’ve been able to pound out in weeks.

So, success!

At least for today. Check in again with me tomorrow.

Gearing up for that new play: take the process on the road

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I was invited to teach a playwriting class this morning at a DC charter school. More than a dozen kids had signed up – or had signing up thrust upon them – for playwriting! They’d slogged through Hamlet and play analysis. I wanted them to WRITE.

We did my favorite “build a play” exercise. It works with writers of all ages (hint to myself: try it this week…) Here it is:

-What’s your character’s name?
-Age?
-Who’s his/her family? (often when I do this with kids, they say their character has no family. So I tell them to describe the people they’d spend Thanksgiving with, the person they’d call if they needed a ride home from school, etc.)
-Habitat – be specific
-What’s your character’s greatest wish?
-What’s their secret fear? (I would run into kids who insisted their character wasn’t afraid of anything. So we ask the secret fear question)
-Extras – anything else that doesn’t fit in these categories.

Then I ask the class to pick the person who gets in the way of the greatest wish or pushes them toward their secret fear. Then write a character sketch of them.

And then write a scene.

And I watched firsthand exactly my own struggles with writing a new play.

One girl kept changing her mind. Her play would take place in a car – no, in a hospital room – no, the girl’s bedroom. All that second guessing stopped her from writing anything. Note to self: pick one. You can always change it if it doesn’t work.

One young man couldn’t begin at all. He sat there paralyzed for half an hour. But he finally put pencil to paper. He didn’t want to read his few lines of dialogue in front of the class. He kept apologizing for the work. But when he finally did, it was really good. He didn’t believe it. But it was. He was the only one in the room who’d set up a mystery that every one of us wanted to find out what happened next. Note to self: stop kvetching. The work might be better than you think. But you’ll never know if you don’t write it.

Several kids decided to write about ghosts. One decided to write about an alien whose planet was polluted and had to live on earth and lived in fear of being found out by the other kid who was a paranormal hunter. These were fearless writers, willing to take a step outside the ordinary and create something fun and scary and interesting. Note to self: think unconventional.

One other observation: it took FOREVER to get started. They plowed through the character sketches in a heartbeat. But the entire room moaned and groaned when it came time to write a scene. Sounded a lot like me. Note to self: you’re not alone. We all hate to write. Except when we’re doing it.

Tomorrow, I try to take my own advice.

Gearing up for a new play: why reinvent the wheel?

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All this week, I’m priming myself for the plunge into a new play. I’ve tried bribes and writers toys, given myself a soundtrack and some writing space. Now what?

Perhaps the best road map to success (which to me means typing “lights fade to black…”) is to see what my peers are writing. What can I learn from them?  What can I steal?

Having read and seen a LOT of new work lately, it seems I can divide the new play world into some very broad categories:

– Familiar stories in a world we’ve never seen before

Steven Drukman’s The Prince of Atlantis is a pretty straightforward story about finding your father and brothers growing up. But it’s set in an Italian American suburb of Boston in the cut throat world of the fish market. Yussef El Guindi’s Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World
is a simple boy meets girl, boy loses girl story.  But the world is that of recent Muslim immigrants in America.

I could take a familiar story, a familiar plot, but the play would become new and interesting when I take my audience to a world they’ve never visited before.

– reach for the classics

Everybody’s getting in on the updated translation act. Michael Hollinger tackled Cyrano. David Ives took on The Liar. For heavens’ sake, even Moises Kaufman is taking on The Heiress!

Why don’t I find my favorite classic and reinvent it for a modern audience?

– you gotta have a gimic

Or not. But there’s sure a lot of them out there. Christopher Shinn’s Dying City has the lead actor playing his twin brother. Natsu Onoda Power’s Astro Boy and the God of Comics had actors drawing cartoons right before your eyes. James Still’s I Love to Eat had food writer James Beard making canapes for selected members of the audience.

Is there something unusually theatrical that I can incorporate into my play?

That’s a start. But now I’d welcome your list of “must have” items for the modern dramatist. What’s getting produced? Why? What do you want to see?

Gearing up for a new play

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I always thought it was actors who were children, needing to be coddled and mollified. Now, I think writers are the the most infantile of all.

At least I am.

It’s been a lousy writing year for me. Two public readings of a pair of new plays, a crash and burn failure of a rewrite of a full length that’s been haunting me for a decade, and just no guts to tackle anything new. Perhaps, I told myself, I could write a second act to a lovely play that’s been begging for a companion piece this summer. Didn’t happen. I was tempted to just write off the year entirely.

But it’s fall. And the horrible summers of Washington, DC are finally gone. Leaves are glorious, humidity is a thing of the past, the sunshine is heartbreakingly gorgeous. Feels like southern California.

Fall has always been my favorite time of year anyway. It’s the promise of a new beginning – new friends, a new teacher, new notebooks. So why not a new play?

The theory sounds great, but I admit it: I’m scared.

So I’m going to trick myself.

First, I’m buying myself new writing presents: a new notebook, note cards in various colors, new pens, a designated tote bag.

And If I’m not brave enough to write more than a few lines, I can make lists – character traits, themes, bits of dialogue, words of encouragement from other writers. I can fill pages with words. It’s something, right?

I need theme music. So a search of Pandora is appropriate, yes?

What about visual stimulation? I’ve searched my stash of magazines for pictures of the locales I’m writing about. And pictures of people I’d cast as my characters. Just looking at them is a kick in the seat of the pants. It’s as if they’re saying: “so what do you want me to say? And will you hurry up and write it?”

What about the perfect writing place? I’ve written in our highrise stairwell, in my car, even in the Library of Congress. I’ve taken hikes near a lake, camped out in a library, taken over a table at Starbucks. Anywhere to shake up my brain. Anywhere that I won’t be disturbed for at least 90 minutes a day. 90 minutes where email can’t find me, Twitter doesn’t need me, the phone won’t ring, the cat doesn’t need feeding, the husband doesn’t need to talk about logistics. A place where I can feel brave enough to write something.

I am trying as many tricks as I can to tempt me into being brave enough to once again put my heart and soul into a play that may once again be shredded or dismissed or worse, ignored.

It’s a bit like starting to date again – new clothes, new hairstyle, little aphorisms, and asking yourself: what’s the worst that can happen?

I’ll report my progress as the week progresses.

Happiness – A Conscious Choice

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I found refuge in the handicap stall in the ladies’ restroom.  I chuckled  to myself as I crouched with my journal and pen to write about something.  “Something”  is trying to find my feelings that I had lost touch with, because I’ve been so busy keeping up with maintaining a life.

In the last few blogs during my round of blogging I hinted at being in “survival mode”.  Well I got deeper into it.  I’ve been slogging through hell.  (“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill.)

Then an awakening happened, and it was that I had become this mentality of being a victim of circumstance.  The awareness of this made me immediately stop on my tracks.  I stopped to consider what’s really important, then ask ‘Where am I going?’

Around this time, a friend from Vancouver, texted me.  He said he wanted to summit Golden Ears, and I was the only one he knew who was willing to do it.  That is true.  I’m crazy enough to do a ten to twelve hour hike into the woods without much training.  I had been living a semi-sedentary life of a desk job and imbibing on French cheese, baguette and wine, and minimal exercise.  I was ready.  I went for it and proceeded to book my flight, request for the time off, and asked a good man to take care of my dog.

I land in Richmond, home to Vancouver’s International Airport.  It was renovated prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics and its look and feel is about nature.  Passengers deplane and walk through a simulated rain forest (recording of streaming waters, bird calls, mild humidity from fake and real plants, wooden seagulls and stuffed animals) en route to the Immigration queue.  All this is familiar to me as I’ve gone home to Vancouver many times to renew my US visa since I decided to move to LA.  I miss home and yet I choose to live in LA.  It’s confusing.

It’s probably for this reason why I’ve allowed myself to seep into the mentality of being a victim.  I’m uncertain of what I want and allowed life to happen rather than making life happen.  It makes sense to me as I let the words spill onto this page without masking my feelings.

At the Budget rental office I’m rewarded with the luck of upgrading my rental car from an economy car to a convertible Mini Cooper for a reasonable cost.  I go for it.  I cruise into the jewel of the Pacific Northwest with the top down.  The cool wind and bright fall colors suffuse my senses…. Ahhhhh… I’m home.  My first stop is the Bikram Yoga studio on
Commercial Drive (the neighborhood I use to remember as artsy and bohemian that’s woven with modern urban amenities:  there’s a Starbucks and Waves tucked between the multitude of family owned stores and Italian and Portuguese cafes.  The yoga studio is across from the old standby “Joe’s Café” (the owner was a former bullfighter in Portugal, and he still serves the cappuccinos with a warm greeting and smile.)

After a good sweat, I’m ready to be a tourist in my hometown.  So much has changed, and yet there are still the familiar standbys like the Purdy’s Chocolate Factory.  That was my next stop.  Already, I’m shopping for goodies to take back to LA and also to give away to friends and family in Vancouver.  It’s the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend after all, and I was
feeling generous.  I spend the next two days between visiting friends and family and another yoga session.  The yoga was the only prep I had done for the hike.  At least, in my mind, I can sweat out the toxins and stretch my body.

The hike to Golden Ears was on Thanksgiving Day (the 1st Monday of October). It took almost 12 hours, and my friend and I got to his truck at 7:30 pm when the sky was already lit with stars.  We traversed through various terrains including wooded forests, alpine meadows and dry creek beds.  12 hours in the womb of nature is what I needed to recharge my battery and ground me to what’s important to me – to simply be happy.  A walk in the woods makes me very happy.  Spending time with an old friend makes me happy.  Watching 2 kids play street hockey in an empty recess ground makes me happy.  Chocolate makes me happy.  Multi-hued leaves on the trees and on the ground makes me happy.  Geese crossing the street makes me happy.

When the resistance is strongest; when I’m feeling up against the wall day in and day out, I really have to make the effort to consciously choose to be happy.  I think of the simplest joys I can make for myself and realize that that it does not take much to make me happy.

I land back in LAX the next evening.  I am waiting at the curbside for my boyfriend.  The whizzing and weaving airport traffic with the LA dry and cool evening weather makes the serenity of the last three days appear as an illusion.  A woman who was on the same flight waits for her ride too.  She turns to me and says, ‘Welcome to LA.’  I nod knowingly and we have a brief conversation about the contrasts of living in LA and Vancouver.  We agreed that we are here for a reason, though it’s not “home”.  Our rides arrive at the same time.  My boyfriend greets me so warmly my heart melts.  I’m home too.  It’s not a cliché.  Home is where the heart is.

Joyful Summit on Golden Ears