I still had Writer’s Block just prior to Thanksgiving. I read several articles about Writer’s Block and learned that nobody knows why it happens, that there is no known cure and that it happens to most writers during their writing lifetime.

I read the responses from the ICWP list and what disturbed me were the number of people who talked about how many ideas they had and how swiftly they arrived. Pam said “Do any of you just wish that your mind would STOP? I have so many ideas rumbling through my head at times.” Shirley said, “I have ideas coming at me all the time.” Robin said, “When don’t ideas insert themselves? They come too often and from too many places and at too many times to list.” Sandra de said, “One time I was walking across the street and I was hit by an idea in the middle of the crosswalk and stopped dead in the middle of the street.”

Without an idea, I spent my time trying not to worry and not to obsess about not writing and that took up a lot of time, of course: the trying not to worry.

I tried taking a break and doing something entirely different. I looked forward to Thanksgiving which would let me to just that. I spent Thanksgiving dinner with my family and about a dozen people whom I’d never met before. I listened to conversations about how to grow macadamia trees and how to teach yourself to play piano. I learned about chicken tractors, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, the Jacobson gland, and the mating habits of elephants.

During dessert, while I was listening to talk about folk art in Oregon, I had a glimpse of an idea. Then in the car, during the long trip home, I had another, and then another. I was shocked and not quite sure they were real. I don’t know if any are or if they will stay with me but at least I have something to noodle around with for a while.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there,
written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov

Looking for help, I went to the International Center for Women Playwrights, which is always supportive, and asked the list:  Where do your ideas come from?  I got many different responses.

Many people are most receptive to creative thinking when in motion.  Ideas come to them while they are driving.  Susan said, “Mine is in the car on the highway when I am alone.”  For some ideas come when they are doing the dishes, picking up the mail.  Deb said, “Mine is on my feet:  I do some of my most creative work on my daily walk.”  Angelina likes a “reasonably quiet public place, or at home.  I like seeing trees and a wide sky.”

I understand that. When my husband and I wrote screenplays together, we took long walks, got lots of exciting ideas and shed pounds.  I continue to walk, love the rhythm of walking, and find the quiet surroundings soothing, but for a long time,  I’ve thought only about my daily to do list when out for a stroll.

Water is a powerful muse.  Hindi wrote, “My muse is water…especially the ocean.  I look at it and it is so much bigger and powerful that my little writer worries disappear and I’m able to write.”  Others like to think in the bath and shower.  Lori combines motion and water.  She says she gets ideas  “during my daily walk on the river.  Occasionally, when I swim.  But as I live in Seattle, these often feel like the same thing.”

I understand that, too.  Ideas used to come to me when I was in the bath but in the bath now I can’t hear anything but Edie Brickell singing “In the Bath.”

People find sleeping and dreaming productive.  Ideas sneak into the brain when one is half-asleep or lucidly dreaming.  Letitia said, “I get my most creative ideas in that half-sleep as I’m waking up in bed but not quite awake.”  Sandra keeps post-its by her bed to capture those ideas that come in the middle of the night.

Some people are alone when musing.  Some get their best ideas in company, people watching and listening.  Martha gets ideas “from watching actors I know that I’d like to write parts for.”  Meg’s ideas come when she is working on something else – “Right now I’m working on a travel blog from our journey 2009-2010 to India, France, and Morocco.  Each picture helps to bring out thoughts not only on the moment, but also deeper or analytical questions that I’ve studied or thought about for years.”

I thought that knowing how and where people write could help.  Most said they sit at a computer, some daily, some not.  Some need only a computer, quiet, and coffee.  Pam wants a one room cabin up in the mountains, Sandra has a 1940’s oak teacher’s desk.  Letitia “may be on a velvet sofa or on the leather sofa depending on my picky mind-body moods.”

I’ve been writing in longhand.  I work at the office rather than at home.   I’ve been writing in my car, in the laundry room, desultorily, or with what Alan Bennett calls, “grim application”.

Maybe, trying to write short pieces could help, I thought.  Ann said, “The “sprints” somehow help me with longer pieces, even though they have nothing to do with one another. For example, a memory piece on my grandmother’s kitchen preceded an academic piece on deconstruction and Pinter!”

I took several stabs at ten minutes plays but nothing.  Nada.  Zip.

However, I did get some excellent advice and was pleased to connect with the creative women on the ICWP list, which I recommend to all.

The International Center for Women Playwrights – http://www.womenplaywrights.org/

I had Writer’s Block for a long time and it drove me crazy.  Over a year ago, I had an idea for a terrific play about a meeting between Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson.  I spent months and months researching and thinking.  I made hundreds of notes, copied dozens of quotations, read several books, even outlined the play, but I couldn’t hear their voices and couldn’t shape the piece. A friend suggested that I rework it as a vaudeville sketch but I couldn’t get my mind around that one either.

All that work is lying in the Mac land of the lost.

I worked on a project involving music and history which I loved doing.  When that fell apart, I hit the wall.

I tried the writing exercises.  I wrote about a painting, an object, a conversation I’d overheard.  I wrote for ten minutes without stopping.  I did it again.  Nothing.  Again.  I stared at the computer waiting for something, anything.

One day, I found myself clicking on dozens of youtube versions of Casta Diva.  I listened to Rosa Ponselle, Marian Anderson, Maria Callas, Renee Fleming, and more, and was beginning to memorize the words, when I thought, “You’ve already written a play about opera singers!”

What I did do is improve as a cook.  My basil chicken with parmesan and tomatoes is tasty, the carrot muffins are nutritious and moist, and one day, when doing my staring at the computer, I remembered an old recipe for a really good meatloaf.   I watched more episodes of Top Chef than one can safely do without permanently impairing her worldview and I can now chop onions with the best.

The rugs were vacuumed, the closets organized, and the bookshelves dusted.

And the mind was swept clean.

MARIAN ANDERSON SINGS CASTA DIVA

Thanks for your kind comment, Nancy.

I’m signing off with a very short blog just to that say that when Eve Ensler’s Swimming Upstream hits L.A., I hope that we bloggers can do a meetup and go see it together.

Thank you Nancy, Tiffany, and Robin for your replies about the influence of people with MFA’s on the theatre scene.   It really is difficult to know what the situation is and guess all we can do is to keep on trucking.  Ideally, we could all get a big barn and put up our plays in rep!

I still don’t know what to write next and have to remove a few obstacles that I’ve put in my path; like how to produce something startling, innovative, never seen before, with a new structure, new insights, perhaps a revelation or two.  And some laughs, of course.

Maybe, I’ll take Shakespeare’s approach, just for fun.

It was normal procedure among all the playwrights of his time to start with an old plot.  Shakespeare went further and never used a plot from contemporary life.  Marchette Chute says, “He was no innovator, and to the end of his career, he was willing to take decrepit, old-fashioned stories as the basis for his plays while his colleagues dealt in glossy new inventions of their own.”

One of the accounts of his process that I like the best is that of Romeo and Juliet.  It was already a legend in Verona and an Italian, Luigi da Porto, wrote down the story in the 1520’s.  It was also in a book of stories that an Englishman named William Painter had collected and translated from the Italian.  Then, a poet named Arthur Brooke, who had seen a stage version in London, turned it into a poem in 1562.

Thirty years later, Shakespeare worked from Brooke’s version, sometimes following the characters’ thoughts, thought by thought.

But, Shakespeare’s version is significantly different because he invented and/or drew complex, bold characters, such as the Nurse and Mercutio, he refused to moralize, he gave his characters motivation, and he elevated and transformed the language.

Here is a passage from Brooke’s balcony scene:

JULIET

“What if your deadly foes, my kinsman, saw you here?

Like lions wild, your tender parts asunder would they tear.

In ruth, and in disdain, I, weary of my life

With cruel hand my mourning heart

Would pierce with bloody knife.”

And from Shakespeare’s:

JULIET

How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?

The orchard walls are high and hard to climb

And the place death, considering who thou art

If any of my kinsmen find thee here.

ROMEO

With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls,

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.”

There it is.  Piece of cake.  I’m on it.

I’ve been thinking lately that the business, if not the art of playwriting, has changed and that many playwrights are in a club to which I don’t belong.  The number of people with MFAs, many from prestigious universities like Harvard and Yale, who are produced and talked about and who are literary managers or artistic directors in charge of who gets produced and talked about seems to be proliferating and those without graduate degrees are on the outside looking in.

I have a friend who is going back to graduate school so that she can make it in the theatre.

It seems to me that this situation in turn affects the kind of theatre that’s produced.  People who come from a similar background will naturally choose to produce the kind of plays that reflect their lives and their political views and others will be left out, which makes the theatre world less vigorous and adventurous.

This is a huge generality, I know, and many literary managers will recognize a good play if it’s a good play but I still wonder if the cards are stacked against those not in the circuit.  I’d love to have people weigh in and discuss it.  Do others see the situation differently?

Marchette Chute says that something like that was happening in Shakespeare’s day.  “…university men were turning out popular plays, and although their choice of actual subject matter was not very different from that of their predecessors in the public theater, they brought with them a sensitive ear for words and a well-trained mind and some of them were real poets.”

Furthermore “….they valued their university training as something that set them above the common herd.”

One of the most successful writers from the university crowd, Richard Greene, was appalled that actors made so much more money than playwrights and he disliked one in particular who was intruding on his territory.

“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

The upstart crow was William Shakespeare who continued to do quite well in spite of the criticism.

When we ended The Wind in the Willows, the producer told the Moms that their kids would be depressed, restless, and tired after coming off such a high.

I’ve been depressed, restless, and tired!  A Beatles song kept going through my head, “There’s nothing you can say that’s not been said.  There’s nothing you can sing that’s not been sung.”

Today I googled All You Need Is Love and realized that the Beatles were singing “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.”

Duh.

So, although I still think that I have nothing more to say and won’t ever be able to start anything new, I feel a little more optimistic.  I picked up Shakespeare in London – A Unique account of Shakespeare’s life and times, by Marchette Chute, to reread for the third time because it makes you fall in love with theater all over again.

It’s such a rich, vivid book.  Marchette Chute, who was a nationally recognized scholar of English literary history, wrote it in 1950, when you could have bought it for $1.95.  It’s out of print now but can be purchased from Amazon for not much more.

The book doesn’t discuss Shakespeare plays as literature but only as they relate to the working problems of the London stage.  Reading the book, you begin to understand how Shakespeare could have written almost forty plays in twenty years.  He was an actor in a repertory company, who worked full time and got paid for it.  And he wrote for that company.

Here’s just a little bit that could have been written about us all:

“The fact that Shakespeare was an actor gave him one great advantage over the average playwright of the day.  Usually a playwright made a play to order and met the actors in some convenient place where it could be given a reading.  Normally an alehouse served as an impromptu office, since, as one foreigner remarked, there were “partitions between the tables so that one table cannot overlook the next.”  Once the play had been read and approved, the dramatist was paid and his contribution was over.

But Shakespeare was an actor.  He was present during every detail of the production of his own plays and when they were acted he almost touched hands with his audience.  He was in a position to know exactly what could be achieved from the production point of view, and the quality that has kept him a living force on the stage for more than three hundred years was born in part of his close professional knowledge of his audience.”

Where is that repertory company today?  Is there one in Los Angeles?  I’d love to know.

Back to the book.

DIGRESSON

Playwriting has changed so much because of the Web.

As writers, we are far less isolated than we were before we went online. As a result of these blogs alone, we have a support system.

It was encouraging for me to read about Erica Bennett’s production difficulties because I had a similar devastating time with a play of mine. It felt good to know that I was not alone and might not have failed as completely as I thought I had.

We’re part of a community. We might not meet each other in person but can connect with other playwrights in a flash. Through different lists, we can meet playwrights all over the world. We may not be able to see their productions, but we can probably see clips on youtube and stills on their webpages.

Researching is different, too. We can go online and worlds open up in a morning. Today, I was looking up 1908 bathing suits and came across an article about Annette Kellerman, a swimmer who was arrested in 1909 for wearing a one piece form fitting bathing suit that exposed her arms and legs. Her story held me and I thought….”Well, I wonder if there’s a play in that?”

The Web changed how I felt about my writing. I remember working on a play years ago about women’s suffrage, researching in a reference library, reading big volumes of history and peering cross-eyed at miles of microfilm. I felt rather special, not of the common run, a feeling that sitting at the computer doesn’t encourage. That’s probably a damned good thing. (The library is still a great draw, and nothing beats sitting at a big tables with the light coming in through big windows.)

It’s not just research. Making music and working with a composer has completely changed. The piano is an accessory and the composer sets up his keyboard on a table, puts on his earphones and taps away. He or she sends out the finished song or piece to the playwright by email, ready for downloading to a CD. The actors and singers can learn the piece at home and come in to rehearsal off book and off song.

The high tech is terrific, but means nothing if we don’t sit down and say what we have to say, of course. And while I’m procrastinating, I’m going to read Sara Israel’s recommendation, No Tricks In My Pocket: Paul Newman Directs, and look at Krapp’s Last Tape, just to find out about that banana business.

I have heard and have been involved in so many discussions about the place of the playwright in the rehearsal process. The question always asked is, “Should the playwright should be “allowed” at rehearsals?” I’ve been shocked at how many directors and producers say, “No!”

The playwright will be hostile, will try to usurp power, will refuse to change a word, will slow down the creative work.

I disagree. The creative work started in the playwright’s head but the final creation is the result of a collaboration of all the players – producers, directors, set designers, actors, etc. And the playwright. Each contributes to the growth and evolution of the material. There will always be rigid and argumentative writers who indeed won’t change a word but every playwright I’ve ever known is eager to be able to cut, to clarify, to deepen, to flesh out her work with the help of the director and actors. All are thrilled to see their words come to life.

I remember being part of a company that developed a new play by an author who didn’t attend rehearsals. The morning after opening night, he came into the theatre office and grabbed a thick telephone book. He said to the director, “This is what I think of your play and this is what I would like to do to you.” Then, he tore the telephone book in half and walked away. (He was a burly man who worked out.)

The director of The Wind in the Willows, Dorothy Dillingham Blue, shares my philosophy. At the first rehearsal, she told all present that a new play is a work in progress and quoted, “A play is never finished. It just opens.” She continued, saying, a play is a living thing, cited Memphis, which was developed over a period of six years, and encouraged everyone to think, “Would it be better if….?”

We’ve just started rehearsing but I’ve there from the beginning of auditions. I’ve been in on talks with the set designer and as a result have rewritten the first Toad scene. The horse is gone, alas. I’ve added words for the mean Weasel girls, removed a Guard, changed exits and entrances, commented on lyrics and tempos for the songs. (What a joy to hear your lyrics sung by beautiful, youthful voices.)

I’m also useful on occasion. One of the actors mimed putting something into Mole’s hand. “What are you giving her?” the director asked. “A raspberry,” she answered. I was then able to demonstrate the Bronx cheer or giving someone the raspberry.

The second blocking rehearsal starts tomorrow at nine and I can’t wait.