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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

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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

Laid Up

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Anyone else out there suffering from “I’m-not-doing-enough-itus?”

I hurt my knee.  I don’t know how I did it, but it was the third such lay-me-up-for-a-while injury sustained in September.  I’m not a clumsy person either, so three Wham-Bam-Mother-F**ing-OUCH’s in one month must mean something…   or so everyone has been telling me.

The standard response to my “I hurt my knee” hobble show has been “This is because you do too much.  You need to slow your roll, lady!”   Only, don’t they understand that I have plays to write, shows to get on Broadway, and professorial employment to procure?

… or, that none of that is happening right now anyway?  In spite of my constant busy-ness?

So I’m trying to take it easy on the couch while I wait for this Thursday’s apt with the orthopedist (hopefully the thing wrong with my knee isn’t that dire!) but it’s hard!  It’s hard because I’m so wrapped up in my part-time-panic that I don’t want to slow down… lest the life I’m trying find get too far ahead for me to ever catch up with.

Except that I did hurt my knee and I’ve been forced to spend way too many days on the couch like a total bum, no matter my anxiety.

And since I’m confessing – I’m not-writing again, which sucks.  The frustration and aggravation are paralyzing me lately – the thought that I’ll get stuck here in the not-really-where-I-want-to-be pit is paralyzing me even more – and yet, I’m so tired that I find myself spending my bum-knee-couch-time reading or playing video games instead of the “Gee, if only I had more time I’d be SOOOOO writing my greatest hits right now!” mantra I’ve been humming the past few months.

So – what’s the point of this whine-fest?  It’s that I need more wine… and pages.  I need to get my butt in gear, but I don’t know how.  It’s not writer’s block, it’s honest to goodness depression and anxiety.

And I didn’t need a busted knee in order to admit that.

Breakdown

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What do you do when your Mac breaks down? CRASHES, COLLAPSES? Have you seen the blue screen of death? Have you stared at the small rectangle in the middle of a blue field with the smiling??? face in the center, alternating with a question mark? Have you followed the troubleshooting instructions in the manual? Held down the Option key, held down the start button? Have you turned the power on and off, pulled out the plug? Waited a few seconds and started everything up all over again?

I have. And I hate it.

I mean, how do you write when that happens? That happy hovering of the fingertips over the keyboard, the thought that the fingers might hit the keys and without ever engaging the brain might tap out something unexpected and undoubtedly brilliant is gone. No back space, no delete, no spell check. No dips into Google for a quick check on who, when, and where. No rest breaks in email, no welcome distracting photos of friends and family, no hilarious Youtubes gone viral.

I imagine that most of the modern playwrights we respect and admire had a typewriter. Lillian Hellman probably tapped things out. Arthur Miller. Carson McCullers. On a manual  typewriter, do we think? Or an electric Corona? But how did writers without machines manage to write such wonderful things and do it so fast?  Charles Dickens wrote fifteen novels with a quill pen before he died at fifty-eight. And he had ten children!

I recently read the oldest poem found, a Sumerian love poem, circa 2030 BCE. Here is the first stanza:

“Bridegroom, dear to my heart
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet
You have captivated me
Let me stand tremblingly before you.”

The poet or poetess wrote that gorgeous poem by pressing the letters into wet clay using a reed stylus and then baking the clay into a tablet.

So, I’m not going to complain.  I can put words to paper. I have some pens I love – the Precise Pilot rolling ball in blue and black. I’m crazy about lined legal pads in white and yellow. I could jot down a few notes. Record some observations.

And stick the Mac hard drive into the freezer for ten minutes. That might work, too.

Catching Up

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I have been under the weather and out of the loop and thought that before I blogged, I would catch up with my fellow bloggers. I’ve been reading and marveling at how much we have in common, how much support we need and give to each other, how informed and curious we are about the world, how engaged in life, and how madly, wildly, truly, persistently, we pursue The Play and The Production.

Almost all of us have suffered from writer’s block and have looked for ways to jumpstart ourselves, to beat self-pity and self-destruction and self-criticism and despair. I’ve read all of the blogs on the subject and have taken a lot of the advice but am still struggling with all four. The tip I liked most and consistently implement was #101 from 101 Tips to Fight and Overcome Writer’s Block. “Grab the chocolate.”

The links are always worth reading. It was good to catch up with Eve Ensler again and her passionate (everything she says is passionate) reply to Todd Akins and his theory of legitimate rape. I liked the article about the Pasadena Playhouse’s problems with Tales Of A Fourth Grade Lesbo, particularly the caution about email that I know and forget, which is that “you can’t tell tone in an email” and that “if you haven’t offended someone, unintentionally, recently, you will — trust me.” It’s the same with Facebook, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t really know how to use it and rarely visit my page and I find out I’ve been unfriended three times. What’s up with that?

It was lovely to find out that I share Ravenchild’s love of The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. It’s one of my favorite books. (I was tickled to hear someone in the audience at the Odyssey say that the last line of the book was one of best she’d ever read. I agree.)

Jen Huszcza’s idea of going for silly in plays, too, resonated. I think that Singing in the Rain is the best movie ever made, and when Donald O’Connor sings Make ‘Em Laugh, I laugh. (After shooting that scene, Donald O’Connor was taken off to the hospital. He smoked four packs a day!).

The blogs about self-producing and looking for funding never grow old.

What we all seem to feel is the loneliness of the long distance playwright. Jessica Abram’s feeling about “how freaking lonely it is” hit home.

I always want to bridge that gap between the writer and the rest of the world and have to restrain myself on opening nights. If the production is good and the play works, I am so high with joy, I want to embrace the world. If I add a couple of glasses of wine to that, I hug, kiss, and press the flesh, wanting to share that crazy high, terrifying dogs, children, delivery people and passing strangers. I have to stop at two glasses. If I had three, I’d make everybody stand in a circle, hold hands and sing, “We Are The World.”

Of course, if the play isn’t a success and I can see only fixed smiles and glassy eyes in the opening night crowd, I just grab some sausage rolls and cheese bits from the lobby trays, retreat to my car, and sob.

It was a pleasure to read all the blogs and I was delighted to hear about Robin Byrd’s grandmother who could “sing a whole church happy.”   I think that’s what we are all trying to do.