Week Fourteen: Dreams - mixed with everyday life? Premonitions?

Little smudgy, this prompt. Maybe smudgy enough that you didn't notice how Freshman-me mispelled "premonitions"? 

Sounds like I was reaching for something pretty "deep" with this one. Do I remember what, exactly? I do not.

However! Given my recent successes with playwrighting I've been hungry to try my hand at another ten-minute play.

This seems like a decent place to start.

Reflections on Week Thirteen

[Read the completed story here!]

This one was a tricky dance.

How to be earnest and self-effacing without inadvertently straying into territory that was too specific and/or a turn-off?

It turns out that I had already written most of this story days ago while trying to brainstorm, but didn't recognize that until yesterday. I rearranged the beats, cut for wordiness, and changed the pronouns so that it could be about anyone, male or female, who has dated anyone else, male or female. 

So now I had something that was, I felt, earnest, self-effacting, and universal... but kind of too self-pitying? And then I had the title.

I love the title, and it also, I hope, frames the piece in such a way that you can hate the voice of this story without also hating the story. 

What's your take on it? Has this particular song ever been sung to you, or have you been the singer? Don't be shy.

Next up: Week Fourteen!

Week Thirteen: Beautified!

Week Thirteen's completed challenge can be found here!

Is it a prose poem? Microfiction? Creative nonfiction? Good? Bad? Odious? Cathartic? Awkward? Empathetic? Self-centered? Big-hearted?

It is for you to decide. 

Reflections tomorrow, followed by Week Fourteen!

Colson Whitehead's "rules" for writing

From Colson Whitehead, writing advice that is one part earnest and two parts just funny:

Rule No. 7: Writer’s block is a tool — use it. When asked why you haven’t produced anything lately, just say, “I’m blocked.” Since most people think that writing is some mystical process where characters “talk to you” and you can hear their voices in your head, being blocked is the perfect cover for when you just don’t feel like working. The gods of creativity bless you, they forsake you, it’s out of your hands and whatnot. Writer’s block is like “We couldn’t get a baby sitter” or “I ate some bad shrimp,” an excuse that always gets you a pass. The electric company nagging you for money, your cell provider harassing you, whatever — just say, “I’m blocked,” and you’re off the hook. But don’t overdo it. In the same way the baby-sitter bit loses credibility when your kids are in grad school, there’s an expiration date. After 20 years, you might want to mix it up. Throw in an Ellisonian “My house caught fire and burned up my opus.” The specifics don’t matter — the important thing is to figure out what works for you.

Read the rest here!

Week Seven will not quit

So, I mentioned before that I was going to submit revised versions of Weeks One and Seven to this year's Boston Theater Marathon. 

Then, unbeknownst to you, I submitted those same plays to the Hovey Summer Shorts Festival and to one other festival I haven't heard from yet. 

Well, Week Seven's play made it into Hovey aaaaand...

That same play, The Interview, will also be appearing in the fifteenth annual Boston Theater Marathon! 

I really cannot overstate what an accomplishment this is for me. Since I first learned about the BTM in an intro to playwrighting class at Emerson College (...eleven years ago...), it has been a major goal of mine to get something I had written included in the lineup. And to that end, I wrote a decently okay play and slavishly tweaked, submitted, retweaked, and resubmitted that same play several times, each time receiving the flattering rejection note. (I assume there is a version of that letter that is less effusive. Maybe they're all flattering...)

The truth is, I don't really know what that play was about. It was called Dating Athena—smarmy business guy has several bad dates with the Greek goddess. It had an ambiguous ending I thought to be "theatrical" but did not mean anything to me. I just wanted to see my work on stage. Any work. 

The Interview does mean something to me... and in fact, I was worried that it was in some ways too literal, too earnest. But that's my style, and if the work feels disingenuous to me it'll show to others. Thanks in large part to this blog, I'm trying to be less precious and more direct with my writing these days, and I think that's why this particular play is responding with people: I've stopped trying to be clever and started trying to be me.

I can't wait to see what the director and actors bring to it.

Writing and day jobs

From Joanna Penn on her blog The Creative Penn, the pros and... other pros of being a writer who has a day job:

I can write what I love to write. I’m not driven by the need for money so I don’t have to write freelance. I don’t have to worry about the outcome of what I’m writing because it’s for pleasure, fun and the future. I loved writing Pentecost, I had so much fun. I don’t know if I could have done that without the freedom to write what I love. If I’d been fixated on writing for income, I would have focused on different goals. Writing a novel took a great deal of energy I could have used to write and launch other products for more income, but would not have advanced my fiction writing aspirations.

The bills are paid so there is less stress around the time-lines for writing/blogging success.I’m trying to build a brand and a reputation and as a writer and blogger, that takes years. I can’t speed the process up so I’m happy to earn elsewhere and spend time doing this for fun and building for the future.

[...]

Working elsewhere creates a desire and drive to write as I have to fit it into spare moments. I compare this to when I took three months off work in order to write a novel and didn’t write anything worthwhile. It was depressing and demoralizing and stopped me writing for nearly five years. I couldn’t create anything when I had unlimited time. There are many studies on how creativity is boosted when there are boundaries. It somehow helps the mind create rather than hinders it.

Read the rest here!

"I couldn't create anything when I had unlimited time" pretty aptly summarizes my year in grad school (we're still several boxes away from those particular notes, and I'm guessing they're about as morose as the ones in my Freshman year box...).

And, too, now that I've quit my night/weekend job I find myself less stressed but also less driven. Maybe I'm just recovering from my year-and-a-half work/writing/life marathon. Yes... This is what we will choose to believe.

Interesting read, anyway. SPOILER ALERT: If you check out her more recent entries you'll see that she did eventually make writing/teaching her full-time job. If and when I ever do that, I hope I can do it with as much discipline and success as she's managed thus far.

In which your thoughts are PROVOKED

From jeffjlin.com, a different reading of director Ang Lee's career than you might usually see:

From age 30 to 36, he’s living in an apartment in White Plains, NY trying to get something — anything — going, while his wife Jane supports the family of four (they also had two young children) on her modest salary as a microbiologist. He spends every day at home, working on scripts, raising the kids, doing the cooking. That’s a six-year span — six years! — filled with dashed hopes and disappointments. “There was nothing,” he told The New York Times. “I sent in script after script. Most were turned down. Then there would be interest, I’d rewrite, hurry up, turn it in and wait weeks and weeks, just waiting. That was the toughest time for Jane and me. She didn’t know what a film career was like and neither did I.”

[...]

Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine starting something now, this year, that you felt you were pretty good at, having won some student awards, devoting yourself to it full time…and then getting rejected over and over until 2019. That’s the middle of the term of the next President of the United States. Can you imagine working that long, not knowing if anything would come of it? Facing the inevitable “So how’s that film thing going?” question for the fifth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner; explaining for the umpteeth time this time it’s different to parents that had hoped that film study meant you wanted to be a professor of film at a university.

[...]

Of course, looking at the Ang Lee story now, who wouldn’t want to trade places: what’s six, seven, ten, even more years if you knew it would result in massive worldwide commercial and critical success? It’s common to hear “follow your bliss” or “do what you love and success follows.” Sounds great, right? Except here’s one small detail: You never get to know if it’s ever going to happen. You don’t get to choose if and in what form the success manifests; you don’t get to choose when it arrives.

Read the whole thing here!

I think about stuff like this a lot. How, once there's great success, the narrative of a person's life seems to gain this sense of inevitability. You know intellectually that Ang Lee, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, et al. worked and suffered and doubted and then worked some more, but it's difficult to imagine that they would or even could have given up.

But they could have! Of course they could have. But those aren't really the stories you hear. Those who have a dream but also debt and commitments and god forbid a family... when exactly does mortgaging your happiness today for maybe possibly a better tomorrow stop being admirable and start being selfish... if not outright destructive? One year? Two? Six? Ten? Twenty?

I think it's interesting because it's a question I sometimes struggle with. Every day is a juncture that could go either way. I could decide tomorrow that I'm not going to get up at 6:30am anymore to write. And I could invest all this time and energy into things I know will pay me and help me to build a better life. And ultimately whatever I decide to do will be my story. No one would feel the loss of whatever stories I might have published but didn't. 

Ang Lee could have been your friendly neighbor who worked in IT and made kickass home movies of his kids. That's a thousand times more likely than what did happen.

Anyway, great article.

Week Thirteen: Her beauty was in her love for me

 

Okay, please forgive, if you can, the melodramatic phrasing here. It makes me think of a wispy poet in some Renaissance court with a delicate hand laid across his eyes. Her beauty, 'twas in her love for me. O!

Maybe it's too awful to forgive. That's okay. But what I find interesting here is the simple idea of finding someone attractive because they find you attractive. There's something to that.

...I am not at all sure what, but there is something.

Reflections on Week Twelve

[Read the completed story here!]

I tried something very different with this one—instead of brainstorming internally and then summarizing the results of said brainstorm(s) here, I thought it might be more in the spirit of Unwritten Word transparency if I actually transcribed my internal process and posted it here (there was this one and that one and finally the other).

As you can see, I tend to ask myself questions and then either answer them or ask more questions around my questions. I don't know how interesting it is for you to read, but for me anyway it's a lot more productive than worrying over the one question in silence. Moving pen on paper or committing pixelated words to Giant Glowbox God (i.e., computer screen) somehow keeps my thought process chugging forward.

As for the story itself, I really don't know what it is. Do you? It's kind of funny, kind of meaningful in a larger sense. Look, folks: They can't all be pearls. The goal here is momentum. Perfect is the enemy of the good, right?

Next up: Week Thirteen!

Week Twelve: Burned!

Week Twelve's completed challenge can be found here!

Is it a poem? Microfiction? It's short, that's for sure. But I think it says everything I wanted to.

Reflections tomorrow, followed by Week Thirteen on Friday!