Category Archives: writing

writing

died on the fourth of july

The death of the American writer Thomas M. Disch, by his own hand, on the Fourth of July, was the last act of a drama that had been unfolding in public for several years.

As the author of a large number of death-haunted science-fiction novels and stories, and of several Gothic tales which treat modern America as a land of the dead, and of a huge body of poetry much of which danced with death in formal measure, Disch could from the first have been described as a writer well versed in terminus.

I’m late in linking to this Independent article about Thomas Disch’s death, via Neil Gaiman, but the article is so interesting it’s worth reading late.

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writing

Roald Dahl describing his first meeting with C.S. Forester

I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim.

But no. And it was then that I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trace, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.

“Come along,” C.S. Forester said to me. “Let’s go to lunch. You don’t seem to have anything else to do.”

– Roald Dahl, “Lucky Break”
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND SIX MORE

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theater, writing

Edge of Los Angeles

Readings for Edge Fest LA’s Los Angeles History Project begin today and extend to next Sunday, including new plays from Aaron Henne, Tom Jacobson, Philip W. Chung, Judy Soo Hoo, Teresa Chavez and Rose Portillo, and Larissa FastHorse & Brian Joseph. All readings are free and at the Autry. The website calls these readings “six new plays about our city and its rich history.”

Aaron’s play, RECORD STORM SPREADS RUIN!, is today at 11:

A corrupt administration. A leader clinging desperately to his power. A devastating flood. In 1938, Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw, on the verge of being ousted from power, broadcasts over the radio airwaves to a drowning city. His citizens, some living and some dead, converge on City Hall to offer him one last chance at salvation from his past deeds, before he is overtaken by a record storm.

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directing, theater, writing

playriding

I catch up with an old friend and fellow playwright, to recruit her to the staff of the National Theater of the United States. She’s going to be, among other things, our ambassador to Poland.

I talk about the reading of 13 WAYS, and how completely the bottom dropped out of my brain after it. The post-birth doldrums was a thousand times worse than it’s ever been for anything I’ve directed. I ask her, already knowing the answer, if it’s always that way with writing.

Yes, she says. But she says it with a smile – and it reminds me of my old comparison between the loggers and the theater people – the more pain, the more pride.

She also brings up something I hadn’t considered, that the further you go in the playwriting field, you quickly lose control of casting. This startles me. I realize how specific and important it was to me to be able to cast the particular actors that I cast in the reading.

I walk across the mental aisle, I put on my rapidly fading “director hat” and imagine directing a play that someone else had cast for me. Not so much.

I know, however, as tough as it’ll be, that I would be willing to give up casting in order to give up the responsibility and stress of directing. Just another thing to practice letting go of. (Definition: a writer: someone who has let go of everything except the words?)

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the chorus, theater, travel, writing

destination: chicago

After tonight’s reading, I officially have no plays in the grapevine from a directing point of view, and no projects, either, except writing projects.

It seems like as good a time as any to announce that I expect this next year to be more about playwriting and poetry than about directing. It’s time to explore choruses through language, not only through staging. I think when I do direct it’ll be events like tonight’s reading – one-time events with new formal innovation within them, concepts I want to beta-test. I also wouldn’t mind continuing to explore choral voice workshops. But even that is a move towards text.

I think what tonight’s reading proves to me is that my instincts for manipulating text chorally have been refined through all these years of directing and assistant directing – and it’s time to trust myself, and write the plays I’ve wanted to write all along.

So, the future. I’m in LA for most of the rest of this month. Then I and the architect for the National Theatre of the United States will be driving from LA to SF at the end of July, using the trip to scout locations in the desert outside of Vegas for our twin ampitheatres (one Greek, one Roman) and the rest of the ten-theater complex.

And then I’m moving to Chicago, where I expect to be based from for at least the next year. I’m going to have an apartment and a home base, maybe even a regular job. This move is predicated on many things, but largely the presence of the Convergers and the excitement of the theater and poetry scenes in that city. Also, the cheap housing prices, and the large number of theaters hiring for next season. And my need to move somewhere – and have that somewhere be somewhere I can work. And my best friend in the world, Eileen, is moving there too. We’re going to be roommates.

I’m excited to think about going to a new city (I’ve never been to Chicago at all – I’m taking Robert and Caitlin’s word for it) and starting a new life there – in terms of writing, location, avocation, and lifestyle. But yield who will to their separation, and all that.

I am aware that it’s going to be first very humid, then very cold. But I would live on a planet without light or oxygen and have my lungs fed air through a tube and take Vitamin D tablets for sun if that was what it took to survive in theater. (It’s often what it feels like during tech!) This is the next step I have to take, so it’ll work out. And there is a lake. And Bree tells me that getting really, truly “snowed in” is more rare than my nightmares suggest.

Putting it up on the blog makes it real. Chicago. I’m excited, and scared, and so ready to live somewhere for longer than six weeks. I think this is the best place for me right now, despite my passing interest in Belfast after doing all that Van Morrison research for Jess.

As Carl Sandburg says, in his poem on my new city,
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

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quotes, the chorus, writing

location, location

There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.

– Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs”

One of the functions the chorus has is the same as the narrator – telling you the way things are, the way things should be, the way things ought to be. And the chorus has always been unreliable, because they are real characters and have information hidden from them. They continue to be optimistic even when the audience knows it’s curtains for Antigone. But this line, and others like it that I keep stumbling into in fiction, make me think of choruses. Like this:

CHORUS
There is no happiness
like that of a young couple
in a little house they have built themselves
in a place of beauty and solitude.

It is so specific – it makes an aphorism, a general statement about life, out of something so very particular. There is no happiness like – but they has to be young, the house little, the place must be beautiful and isolated. Then, and only then, is there no happiness like it.

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writing

the problem with paper

I also finally relaxed about the fact that I like to work on legal paper, or trash paper, phone books, falling apart dictionaries, any kind of paper that isn’t actual art paper. I can make comics on legal paper with no hesitation. Art paper still causes me to freeze up. All I can think about is how much it costs. I have paper I’ve been dragging around for 20 years because I’m not good enough to work on it yet. I know this is insane but it’s true for me. I can’t work on expensive paper just like I can’t really stand to wear expensive clothes or shoes. I just know I’m going to mess them up.

Lynda Barry, from an interview in the Comics Reporter.

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film, theater, writing

topsyturvydom

I spend the evening with my oldest friend and his parents, all of whom are artists or educators. They are enthusiastic about podcasting, and they want me to tell them what I’m doing next. I don’t know. Only writing.

My oldest friend, who is a Victorianist, defines the Gothic for me, and I define the chorus for him. We know our fields of specialty because we define them broadly – to him, everything is Gothic, and to me, everything is a chorus.

I go back to Pasadena and watch Mike Leigh’s film TOPSY-TURVY again (about Gilbert and Sullivan) thinking it will give me some insight into collaborating on a play with music. I notice, this time, that Gilbert is directing the whole thing, too – rewriting his lines on the fly, and staging with absolute brutality and simplicity, allowing no one’s ideas into the shape but his own. It reminds me very much of the directors I have worked with who have also been the writers of the piece in question. Their ideas are good, but their processes are less open to innovation from the actors than the processes of directors who are only directors.

I think of the rehearsal I just had last week for the short Ron Allen play, and how little he said compared to how much I said. To write and only write, you need to be prepared to give your words into someone else’s hands.

Watching TT again also makes me wonder about making sure both CF and I continue working at the highest artistic level of which we’re both capable – not compromising ideas for each other as Sullivan felt he was for Gilbert – I wince at the memory of a few times during the reading where I asked him to provide music that was essentially musical sound effects, humorous and uncomplicated. On the one hand, I think he is more open to that kind of thing than other people I’ve worked with. On the other, we’ve never really talked about it.

It’s funny – I also realize, in this watching of the film (and after reading some writing online about it), how Mike Leigh’s filming of the scenes from the G&S operettas really plays up the fakeness of theater as a medium. It’s all about seeing the humans behind the illusions.

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quotes, writing

“For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt.”

When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d’Or, when someone’s misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down.

One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more you were ashamed of it.

– Jeffrey Eugenides, from this brilliant short story about democracy, money, and white-collar crime, “Great Experiment,” in the 3/31/08 New Yorker.

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