Category Archives: writing

theater, writing

footnotally,

didn’t manage to write the though-of-Hamlet-our-brother’s-death scene for playwriting class, by the way. I thought I knew what it was, so I wasn’t able to do it. I can only write things with uncertainty. This is like the time I spent two years thinking I was going to write a poem that was “like PRUFROCK, except better” and didn’t write a thing.

Instead, I flaked and brought in a scene from a play I’m not even “working on,” something old and messy. Course, everyone liked it better than anything I’ve brought in all quarter – and the reason I’m not “working on” it is because it’s too painful – and that’s why it’s better, even though it’s as raw as (insert appropriate comparison) – it’s realer. Hrmph. I would rather be stabbed in the eyeballs with pencils than write any more of it. At least today.

Is “I would rather be (X) than (Y)” a comparison too? I have to watch it.

I don’t have a “playwriting” category. I just have “writing” and “theater.” Somehow I think this post, which is more about cowardice than courage, is not going to be the post that creates that category.

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writing

word processor

In my playwriting class on Saturday, my third revision of the first scene of the play met with the greatest approval. I am revising it again for next week, but I suspect that I have finally gone far enough back in time to start before the story does. Almost. I want to have a production meeting with the producer addressing the assembled staff in something in the manner of “Though of Hamlet our brother’s death / The memory be yet green…” I feel a sort of momentum around this idea that I haven’t felt around the other beginnings.

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workstyle, writing

let’s get it started

I am revising a scene for my playwriting class this morning. I’ve woken up so early every day this week to help C move that I’m used to not sleeping, and have become more productive. She is staying here tonight, waiting to finally move in. I’ve had or been a houseguest every night this week. It’s been fun.

C was telling me about her brother, the short story writer, who rises super-early each day to write before his 9-5. I like the hour of the day for writing myself. I just never know, when I go to bed, if I will manage to get up. I think having her in the house helps. It’s more exciting to get up and start another day if there’s someone else to start it with.

Speaking of starting, this is my third attempt to write the first scene of the play. I do think each one gets better, but for my sake as well as the play’s, it would be nice to have a second scene some day.

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chicago, writing

imaginary horses

Yesterday, I met an actress friend on the Green Line. We both traveled from our jobs toward the Loop – her to an acting class, me to the library. My pants were tucked into my (Green) rain boots. She told me I looked like a British horsewoman. I told her that my horse would be waiting for us at the Ashland station, and I meant it.

The thought of this horse was more real and more pleasant to me than the presence of my friend, the clouds outside the train’s windows, or the sense of my own breath moving in the gallon accordions of my lungs. I am still thinking about that damn horse.

I told my friend this. Imagination, she told me, is an escape. I wonder – I know there is – if there is a danger in practicing escaping – just like when I was a kid, how I used to practice unfocusing my eyes.

(I seem to bring a better quality of observation to these posts when I am forced to do them less often. You know what they say about absence. )

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poetry, writing

past compare

Poems are comparisons and if you write too many poems everything starts to seem like something else. The trees, ringed with puddles, have pissed themselves after a night of drinking. The Hershey’s wrapper floating in the gutter, touching one corner to the concrete, is a fish nibbling at the reef of the sidewalk. It is starting to infuriate me. I do not want things to seem like something else. I want things to only be what they are. I want to release the visual world from the curtailment of my comparisons! Nothing is like anything!

To see a tree with a puddle under it and know it only for a tree with a puddle under it: that will be a new level of poetry.

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metablog, writing

something about nothing

Once upon a time, I cared more about the sounds of spoken words than about plot, which is central to drama, and comparison, which is central to poetry. I only cared about sound. But this is no longer true. This is who I was, the writer I was. I am no longer that person. As I get older, I seem to get better at action, metaphor, and simile. My writing today is not something my former self would recognize as mine. I would not want to possess it. I would not know it.

We name things and they change under the names. You can just be grateful – I know I am – that this blog isn’t titled TIME TO RHYME.

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a propos of nothing, F&F, writing

and if I say to you tomorrow

Take my hand, child, come with me.
It’s to a castle I will take you,
Where what’s to be, they say will be.

– WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE

My parents recently saw THE SEAFARER @ the Geffen, a play-variation of playing a game with the Devil for your life and soul. I have been thinking of how we know when it is we are going to die, for this and other reasons.

I went out for dinner with a friend two weeks ago, in a Michigan Avenue eighth-floor eyrie hastened from the halls of Harry Potter – a private club overlooking the lake, the lights, and the park. We spent most of the dinner discussing the nature of happiness, which he feels is there for the taking.

I wanted to say, “Friend, some days, my head is a garden for the cultivation of the flower, Despair,” but I didn’t. I think that being a writer, or thinking of yourself as Being a Writer, gives some license to mope around like a Fraggle, license which I have overused. I needed to hear this.

He further told me, Zenlite, that we only know two things:

– you will die
– the hour of your death is uncertain.

I am so in love with the way that last statement is written. This is a formulation similar to but wildly distinct from the Greeks’ “The best thing for mortal man is to never have been born. The next best is to die, and quickly.” It doesn’t hope for death, it only forecasts it. Forecast: Life, with a chance of Death. What does that chance make you chance? What chances would you take if you knew – or what will you not take, knowing you can’t?

If I don’t blog again for awhile, or if I only blog intermitttently from the catch-as-can computers of friends’ couches, I want to at least have left the site standing with some philosophy.

I find, too, that difficult as it may be to remember at moments when, I don’t know, your laptop has perished, that repeating “Happiness is there for the taking” has the inane effect of making you happier. For whatever it’s worth.

The NYT says our friends make us live longer. I don’t know that, but I know mine make me live better.

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metablog, writing

isn’t hard to master

I haven’t blogged in a long time. Shortly after the Passover Seder of which I spoke in the last post, my MacBook, which has seen me through a year and a half of personal assisting, a year and a half of assistant directing, and a year of Chicago writing, died the death of all good technology. I am writing this from my friend B’s computer, up in Lakeview, where I spent the night last night – watching SINGING IN THE RAIN and talking of old and new friends.

Being without a laptop has made trying to write regularly interesting at best, difficult at worst. I am laboring under a backlog of both ideas and emails. I find myself taking a weekly two-hour-long trip to the 24-hour Kinkos to get scenes typed up for playwriting class.

I lost work as a result – not much finished work, which was backed up, but first drafts in all genres.

A good thing about this is that I am learning to write first drafts longhand and save computer composition for revision, which has the merit, if nothing else, of shaking up my work habits.

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chicago, F&F, writing

april snowers

Yes, it’s snowing again. This time, the white dots are rushing downwards, like arpeggios.

I’ve spent the day cleaning up from last night’s party, which is one of my favorite things to do – to very slowly remove stains from your apartment that you can’t identify or remember. How did the food get all the way over here?

R&C took over the kitchen at 4 pm and created a TopChefworthy multi-course meal, including clams, grapefruit, salmon, focaccia, and scallops. E surprised me with a cake that was mousse layered on top of a brownie. I haven’t had a proper birthday cake in ages. And they really put 27 candles on it. I have the best friends in my universe or in Douglas Adams’s. No one went home hungry, or sober.

The best part was E singing along with Air Supply, and the other best part was when we found ourselves straining the last bottle of red wine through coffee filters to remove glass from a broken neck. So far, no one seems to have died. C lost one of the solar-system earrings R made her outside somewhere, and now that it’s started snowing, I’m not sure I will be able to find it.

Yesterday was also the first meeting of the new playwriting class I’m taking. I got to workshop the scene which I thought was going to serve as the play-within-the-play. It reads fine, but the instructor pointed out that it both had no dramatic action and also, as plays-within-plays go, was one of the least eventful PWPs ever. He was right.

I’m very excited about working on both the frame-play and the PWP itself, but I get the feeling that this class, rather than leaving me with a finished draft, is going to leave me with unfinished questions.

I am going to brave the snow and go buy an eggplant. If you had asked, I would advise you to do the same. Snow in April demands eggplants.

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a propos of nothing, chicago, writing

why is a raven like a writing-desk?

Last night, Beth and I ate at Mana on Division and planned out the Seder we’re having next week, and then I rode the Ashland bus to Pilsen for another meeting of the Jacques Lacan book club – which isn’t only about Jacques Lacan – but in my mind, he will always be the person who dragged me back into critical theory.

This morning is the first meeting of another playwriting class. It’s six sessions, and each one includes one hour of a writing exercise and two of hearing actors read the scenes you bring in.

So I’m beginning with what I think are the two crucial scenes from the 80 pages of the two-character play that I want to put within a larger framing structure, and seeing what happens. This week, one of my Chicago friends is one of the two guest actors, so that’ll be fun. She’s seen some of this material before.

I’m so happy to be back in a Saturday morning theater environment, like the acting class I used to audit in Los Angeles. This class is a long-running thing that I expect to have some regulars and some new folks. It’s a community that I’m very excited to meet. It won’t be the same as being in rehearsals, but it is a step closer to returning to rehearsals on the terms I want.

Tonight, a whole acronym full of friends are coming over for dinner. Outside, you can see sky between the clouds.

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