Some of them I know, and will write about, I guess.
I wrote a draft of a play. On one hand, this is a minor accomplishment, because it's very messy and doesn't make a ton of sense right now, and it might not even be a play that I or anyone else has any interest in. On the other, finishing things is incredibly hard, and I finished one part of the process of writing something. It's not easy.
(A note: I am writing this while watching various 'SpiderMan' movies, and I am buoyed by my prospects as a writer because the dialogue in these is DREADFUL. Maybe I just need a steady diet of crap to make me have some confidence. No, that is a complete lie. I want a steady diet of inspiration, with casual breaks for 'Parks and Rec' and 'Community').
But I did write it. It has like, kind of an ending, and it's of sizeable girth. I think it will ultimately be a play of more than an hour (it has been reading at about 1:25, but that's not accurate). That takes a long time. For me, anyway.... In a meaningless and quantifiable way, it is 'more' than I have ever written creatively before. Or at least since I was a kid and would write endlessly and prolifically, at a pace I've never been able to recapture.
So, this new play is being read and worked on by some people who I either have worked with before and trust a lot, or people whose work I have admired for a distance for quite a while. Which is incredibly lucky. Actually, the cast is so good that I am struggling to believe it came together.
I went to the first read to hear it, and feel terrible about what I had created, and listen to everyone do a better job than the play deserves, and then I made some cuts, and now I've left the room.
And of course, the first read had a pretty great spread:
It's kind of out of my hands now. I have been writing it for what seems like ever, mostly because I had the regiment of being in a writer's circle. While I'm not sure about how to write as a group, and how to take suggestions from other artists, when we're all trying to learn and become or create who we are, having to have something written every time we met was incredibly helpful. Really, I think I'm writing this play in the hopes that I'll be able to apply to another unit or circle, because I need some sort of small demon insisting that I write more, faster, better.
But anyway. My friend Christopher is directing it, and I'm not going to the rehearsals. He's going to do a great job and so are the actors. But they now (finally, it took longer than I wanted to for me to get out of the room, because it just seemed like there was and still is so much that could be made better) have a draft, and they're going to do things with it, and then I'll see them when everyone else does.
Yes, this is a backlogged picture of Christopher, but I love it so I am using it.
I wanted a break from this play (maybe from theatre in general?), in part because it's been my writing focus ever since 'Modern Love' ended and I need to look at some other things, and partly because it's a way for me to see what's clear in the play for outside eyes. If this reading comes back and has nothing to do with what I wrote, I know I've written some problems. But it's still hard to leave something that's a part of you, in a way.
I'm trying to deal with my own control issues of my work, but I also want things they way that I want them. I'm not sure if that makes me an artist or an asshole.
I've been reading a lot of David Mamet, his advice and criticism, not his plays, and I'm totally into it, but one of the things that I feel he's telling me as I read is 'do what you do. Don't listen to anyone else. Push the way that you push for the things to be the way you believe'. This is obviously my own desire to hear this, but I do feel that I'm being drawn to him right now because of these things.
I'm negotiating this balance of wanting to do things my way and knowing that everything needs a second pair of eyes, that things need to resonate with more than just me to be successful. But does that mean I have to give up everything? Does that mean I have to take all the suggestions that are lobbed at me?
There has to be a way of working that lets me feel that I have ownership of the work but that lets other people in, and lets them feel their own ownership of it. I just haven't figured it out yet. It's difficult. I'm difficult. I realize that. And I flip wildly back and forth between thinking that I might have something valuable to contribute to theatre, and that the reason I'm not as successful as I want to be is because I'm just not as good as I want to be. And never will be. I'm not sure if there's a point at which I can ask people for feedback and feel ok with it, and not feel like it is an infringement on my own process, or even who the people I should ask for feedback are. Are these things I'm going to learn? If they're always things to negotiate, how can the work be as good as I want it to be, instead of just as good as it is?
But anyway. This is a great experiment and I'm lucky that the people who have agreed to work on it have, because they're all so talented. Why would they want to work with me anyway?
Because who am I?
I'm Spiderman.
(These movies are really terrible!!!)
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