Thinking All the Things That You Think

Writing is a lonely calling. Much of what we slave over never sees another human's eyes. But sometimes, if a writer is lucky, they have a whole community watching them make words. For example, when they write a play and decide to produce it.

That's when the manuscript can't stay uncompleted in the drawer, or the half-finished poem tucked away in a desktop folder. There must be a show and therefore there must be a finished script. And there must be rehearsals: months of hearing your lines repeated out loud by others, seeing the house of your story tested. Will its beams hold? Can you stand to see your work splayed open in the unforgiving light of day? There is great risk and great reward involved, even for a supposedly low-stakes game like a Fringe festival.

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a story about telling stories. This post will capture most of the background, but if all goes well, by the end of September 2012, this whole blog will be a story about telling a story.

I am a frustrated writer. I have written avant-garde, unfinished stage plays that have gone nowhere, a full-length movie script that I tried to film when I was 25 that went nowhere. In 2009 I wrote teleplays for my friend's production company in Philadelphia. I spent weekends with unpaid actors reading my lines that whole summer. The process was thrilling and eye-opening, though the production ultimately went...guess where?

Writing is one thing, even getting actors together is just one more thing. But putting on a polished and successful production, that is another. I learned that the hard way. So I returned to solitary mode, writing my short stories and novellas, publishing a little e-magazine, and developing my manuscript editing and ghostwriting business.

And in April 2011 I wrote halfway through the third version of a novel that has been haunting me for three years. 120 pages of fiery, other-worldly channeling. The best writing I'd probably ever done and my only mind half-there, only half-watching. The experience gripped me with exquisite claws every day for a month. Wake up, read the paper, drink coffee, go upstairs, enter Other World. 

After writing the story too pulpy and messy in 2008, then too self-conscious and dense in 2009, I was determined to finally get it right and be done with it and it was actually, unbelievably happening. Every day I entered the far-seeing place, the world of this dark, mystic version of the post-revolutionary war Upstate New York, complete with a mother/witch, a Seneca shaman, the Celtic god of death, dead natives, a Dancing Man, the Wild Hunt, and three children with the second sight. I was tackling a huge question: what if all the mystical truths that had ever been projected on a place came to life at once? What sort of battle would ensue? Gods versus men? Dead versus living? The mundane versus the mystical? Who would survive such a clash of the titans? And why?

I had been accepted into a month-long residency at Vermont Studio Center for the month of May 2011 to work on that novel. I even launched a crowdfunding campaign to cover the $2,000 tuition. While the donations were pouring in, my writing was pouring out. I suppose it was a sort of miracle of love. Made more profound by the sheer surprise of it. The support that writers so rarely feel. The recognition that we crave.   

In May 2011 I took the train to Vermont and that was when those exquisite claws released me. The ink well dried up. I couldn't write a single word. I spent the whole month taping the pages of my novel to my office wall like a schizophrenic looking for messages in the newsprint.

No messages received, I spent the next five months completely creatively blocked.

By October I decided that I would try to conjure up the feeling of love and ease that had visited me in April, allowing for that miracle of writing. I had to do something. I tried to remember how it felt in my body. How it erased fear not just in my mind but in my entire being. That feeling of love opens the connection between me and the source that pours through me with the good stuff. The Real writing, as I call it. When it's present, it's as wide and fierce and wonderful a feeling as I have ever experienced. When it is absent...well, as photographer Peter Beard wrote: "On bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse heavy that I cannot write with them. Not one letter." 

But this one week in October, I did it. I had gone to see my friend Jack Simel in a play at MuCCC the previous weekend and was emotionally arrested by one scene: a man in his later years sitting at what looked like a writing desk. On Monday, I sat down on my front porch with Bertolt Brecht's play "Galileo" and Ann Bogart's book A Director Prepares and began to write a play. 

I was able to slide into that other dimension, re-creating the internal dimension of safety and love. I wrote a one-act play from beginning to middle to end in eight hours, not moving once from that porch. And the next day came a short story. And the day after, another short story. And the third day, yet another. Then I had to take yet another train, this time to Pennsylvania for a friend's wedding, and the ecstatic clutch was broken.

But I had stories. Complete stories that weren't yet publishable, but had bones, especially the complete one-act play called "The Life of Leo Wool" that I liked. As a fiction editor, this is what I look for in manuscripts in draft format. Is there a skeleton, or a "fossil?" as Stephen King says. If there is a fossil, I can work with that. I can feel my way around its structure, sensing where the further connecting bones will have to be unearthed and removing the stuff that isn't fossil, but is just stubborn rock gently, without cracking the rest. 

Maybe it is a gift one picks up from years of reading and writing. You want it for yourself bad enough, to figure out the secret to good writing, and eventually you do learn some tricks to make it leaner, stronger, clearer. You learn how to See and then to Say what you see. That is my job. It is a good job and it puts food on the table and (slowly) pays my grad school loans.

So, why has it been so hard for me to find and fix my own fossils? I like to say, because it sounds true, that the reason I've been blocked is for the very same reason I'm a good fiction editor. A lovely poetic irony. I can see what's wrong, but writing it better: that requires being a writer again. And I just can't flip that switch.

But it's more complicated than that. I've always had trouble finishing stories, long before I was an editor. Before I blamed it on editing, I blamed it on my years studying English criticism and theory. A lot of us English majors read the greatest books, the classics, even the non-classics that are nonetheless somehow politically important. And they look at their own meager thoughts and think, someday I'll be like them, if I keep trying. I'll be one of the Greats.

I was young enough and confident enough to think it was just a matter of time. Some college accolades and my own love of the act of writing helped. And writers like Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera, and Jeanette Winterson kept that desire stoked. But if I really was so confident, why couldn't I finish a novel? And why did I so rarely complete short stories or send pieces out for publication? 

The truth is that my internal critic, my need to be GREAT, created a constricting wall of fear around me. I could only get so far in a novel, no matter how inspired the language and subject matter, before I stalled. And that was death. I needed to be shut of that voice that cripples and derides and scoffs. I could do it for others, but I couldn't quite do it for myself. I could silence it for a week, but it came back after, ever-present and watchful.

So I returned from my Philadelphia trip once again blocked. But at least I had my fossil, and no one could take that away from me. 

Then Geva, the largest theater in Rochester, NY, put out a call for plays. The winners would have their plays read on their stage in the spring. I transcribed the play from notebook to computer, Googled the correct formatting (stage directions in parenthesis, names in all caps), and submitted the play. 

It wasn't accepted. I told myself I couldn't expect the second draft of my first play to win against veteran regional playwrights. I was being arrogant. But still, I was mildly surprised. I truly believed it had a chance, and I don't always feel that way about the things I create. And that was the important moment for me, because I realized I believed in my play. It had potential. Just needed more work. After all, writing is revising.

I put the play aside, thinking I would show it to Jack when I'd written another draft. After all, he was my muse and the main part had been written for him. I wanted him to play the part if I ever put it on and so I wanted to show him a play that would be worth his time. And not embarrassing to either of us.

Near the beginning of May my boyfriend, Dan, told me Rochester was hosting its first-ever Fringe Festival and Writers and Books, where he is on staff, was offering its performance space as a venue. My stomach twanged a little. "If only I'd known ahead of time," I lamented to Dan and our friends Chris and Tate that night. "I could have submitted my play." After all, I was a regular workshop instructor at Writers and Books, friendly with the staff and many of the students. What better place to make a debut? But the submission deadline had passed. Well, that was probably for the best. I didn't know how to put on a play. I'd probably need a whole year to figure something like this out.

A week later, I got a call. Writers and Books still had some empty slots to fill were taking in-house submissions. Taking a chance on people they knew were competent writers, I guess. Dan asked me if I would like to put on my play.

In The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, which I am currently reading, the gunslinger Roland Deschain sometimes says, "Ka like a wind."

Ka is the movement of fate, the turning of events outside of our control. That is what I felt. Circumstances had shifted, without any effort, giving me an opportunity to put on this play. It made me believe this wasn't just about me, but about the winds that move our lives to something bigger, some better expression than we can consciously create.

Today is May 29, 2012. I wrote a third draft of the play last week and sent it to Jack. Then I sat down on Saturday and read it aloud with Dan. Hearing it, seeing it from scene to scene helped me approach it like a manuscript. Dan and I made notes for three hours and I now have a two-day writing retreat in which to try to implement these notes. 

In other words, I played writer, I played editor, and now I have to play both, which is what revision is. And it sucks. It's the hardest part of writing. But it is necessary.

And that is just one issue I will be tackling. I am not just the writer, I am now a producer. My production company is called Phantom City: a name that I will explain in future posts. I will need a cast of at least 6, a director, a stage manager, and hopefully, some people to help get the word out.

"The Life of Leo Wool" will have two performances: September 22 and 23. That means I have June, July, August, and most of September to make this one-hour play go from words on a page to performances on a stage. Three and a half months to make sure I've written the right words, gathered the right people, and lead them in the right direction.

And all the while grappling with those perennial fears and worries. Am I being smart or safe? Am I saying what I really mean or what I think others expect? Can I go through with this? Do I have the talent, skill, nerve?

When I was younger, I wanted to be great. Now I'd just settle for being good. Hell, I'd just settle for not embarrassing myself or my cast and crew.

Anne Bogart says that embarrassment is one of the most powerful forces in the creation of art. But how to use that feeling to create a more exceptional, vulnerable piece instead of a flop?

There can be no guarantees. All I can do is take one step at a time, do what is in front of me, and hope for some of that magic, some of that love, to guide us.

And that is what I will be documenting here at this blog. The ins and outs, questions and answers, trial and error of putting on my first play. The people and places and ideas that come up along the way. And I am new to this, so I welcome your responses. 

So here we go. Let's raise a toast to theater! And to terror!