“I’ll try.” from the last chapter in Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
For years, I have been carrying around a story not knowing how it should meet the page but knowing that it had to get there somehow. A few months ago, I decided it would be in poetry – carried the pages around with me trying to shake the order and the theme out. No luck.
Then… a play I needed to submit somewhere refused to speak to me and I thought what if I take these notes and make it into a play. Decided on the characters and began to write for three days till “The End”, proofed it, let a few close friends read it and sent it off.
The end result was as intense as the writing of it. It struck me as odd that this story lay dormant for so years then exploded on the page like it did. Out of order on my list of things to write and not in the genre I picked. Dormant for 32 years then the alarm goes off waking me up from the exhausted sleep deprived state working too many hours on my day job has caused. It spilled out in 3 days like nothing I have ever written before. But then that’s the thing about writing each piece should be better than the last. Funny to have a story shut down on you because another one wants the roadway. I almost missed the signal but when I told friends I was not going to be able to finish the play I was working on but had this idea that I might be able to pull off in time, they each said, “go for it, what do you have to lose.”
I said, “I’ll try…”
I guess all you can ever do when you hit a wall is to try something else. Timing is everything. Who knew story notes had alarm systems attached?
