A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Twenty-Five

I attended another of the playwright's masterclasses at FAU's Theatre Lab.  This one was led by Christopher Demos-Brown, author of the play American Son, which was on Broadway recently and has been adapted into a film for Netflix as well.  It was a very interesting class, and he offered an exercise, which I believe I may try again, as it did not go quite well for me in my thinking at that time.  I was too easily distracted and could not really focus into a single idea.  I do have some better thoughts now on how to tackle it, and I think it is worthwhile.  It may well lead me to create the work that I turn in as a submission for the festival this year.  My short play last year actually was an expansion from work that I had done in the masterclass, so it seems a likely way to start.

In many ways, for me at least, that really is the biggest trick with most projects, as far as writing.  I am now writing poetry at a great clip, but it is because I have turned it into an ongoing project, not a single act.  Once I got myself started, I was off and running, and that has changed my work and pushed me to new places in my writing.  In a similar way, when I finally got myself truly started writing a novel, it became a project that I was able to finish largely by making it something I kept going with until it was actually done.  That is true for both my novels, as well as for the third novel that I wrote which is really not good and was largely just an experiment that failed.  Even in that last case, though I am not interested in the work as a product, the act of reaching the end of the book was possible because I made the decision to do the work each day, to make an ongoing process out of this, without any breaks.

Faced with the need and desire to write a play for my submission this year, I recognize that the most important thing for me to do is to begin and to maintain that momentum.  If it does not result in the right play at first, I will have to keep going, but the method that works for me is to allow my work to develop a momentum.  It may well be that this is far more universal, but I am speaking largely about my own experience here, as I have not really explored this question with other writers.  It is certainly true that many other writers do have difficulty with starting, and I know many who find that if they don't keep progress, an idea will die, but this is not the only thing I am speaking of here.  In many ways, it is a matter, for me, of this being something that is constant in my life.  I am not away from my work, really, because each day is a work day.  Writing poems has shown me that quite clearly, and in so doing has also helped me to become aware of aspects of my writing process that facilitate that daily work.

Writing a play, or a novel, or even a story, is not as much of a constant process, at least not right at this moment.  I could add, and a part of me would like to, work on these other genres to my daily work, but at the moment, I am not yet there.  I do think that writing a play this month will be a good test to begin that process, and I may get to the point where I am writing plays and prose works at a regular pace as well.  I need to discover how to connect with that work in the same way as I am currently connecting with my process as a poet, in the sense that I am able to feel how my daily life and my poetry are not disconnected.  Writing prose is different, especially in terms of fiction, as it is removed from me.  A poem has a certain connection to the poet, in terms of their own life in a sense, even if that is still largely an artifice.  In prose, a distance is added, and in dramatic work that is true as well, so I must find a different entry point to make myself feel that sense of the work that can go beyond an individual piece.