Doing much better than when i last checked in. finished my draft of The Play That Was Lost yesterday at an airport terminal – again. (incidentally wondering if The Play That Was Lost is a better title than the one I’m currently working with.)
fuck yes
there are few good feelings like the exhilaration of finishing a draft of a play but this time i feel tremendous relief to be moving on to other projects – some short form, completing that screenplay, etc.. And although i have little justification for feeling this way, i’ve been scolding myself for months for taking too long and doing too much work on what is essentially a first draft. my gut is telling me that i must have done something wrong to be trudging along in the mud and obsessing over and incessantly tweaking this silly draft in a way i’ve never obsessed or tweaked before.
Am i being a little mean to myself? To expand on some themes Chiara touched on in her last post… How can a young writer ever measure how successfully they are doing their job? by the number of completed works? by hours spent plugging away? cups of coffee consumed? What?
as unanswerable a question as this should be, there are always those with strong opinions indeed:
when you are a writer first learning your craft, there is never a shortage of people available to give you some advice on the topic of productivity: you should get up early. you should set goals. you should let it happen naturally. you should write in solitude. you should write in cafés. you should take criticism. you should listen to your own voice. you should not worry if you’re not producing work. if you aren’t writing every day you aren’t a writer at all.
Mario Fratti, badass playwright
while at NYU, i had the good fortune to meet Mario Fratti – a playwright who was a guest speaker in my renaissance drama class. he was pro-structure, pro-discipline, pro-craft and big into the de-mystification of the writing process – no “muses” no mysterious natural “voice”, just hard work and craft. And if I really needed more proof that this guy had it all figured out, the gentleman is a master of productivity. according to his website, Fratti has written nearly 70 plays and his work has been produced in over 600 theaters. what the fuck.
the time i had to question Mr. Fratti on his incredible success was sadly limited. I squeaked in just one question: “Mr. Fratti,” I asked. “You must work on multiple plays at once, am I correct?”
“Never,” he said.
Never?! You gotta be kidding me, sir! Like many college students it was in my very nature to be a multi-tasker. How could such an extreme level of focus be possible by a mere mortal…? But this was Mario Fratti talking. Mario Fratti, my newly adopted Hero of Playwriting. It had to be true. The only conclusion to be made was that I was on the wrong track and I needed to seriously rethink my process if I was ever going to amount to anything at all.
Three years later I am not yet the Perfect Playwriting Machine – and I’m afraid I’ve even let other more loosey-goosey, hippy-dippy writing philosophies infiltrate my otherwise robotic mind. Sometimes… I even let writing happen all on its own.
I figure probably 95 per cent of why I have been discouraged with my progress on this piece has nothing to do with not feeling productive – but rather that I am disturbed that this piece has been the sole, primary focus of my heart and mind for nearly a year. Where does that come from? I got the idea somewhere along the line that as a young person I should be a certain kind of writer. I have the enormous expectation of having dozens of projects, one after the other… simultaneously — dozens and dozens of projects until damn, you can’t believe I’ve got so many projects because really – that’s a lot of projects. But this year – my first year out in the real world as a real writer – that just hasn’t been the case.
If I can put forth my own self-serving platitude for the ermging writer, I believe that the most difficult thing that (s)he will have to learn is when to stop listening to all the damn advice about what a writer is supposed to be – and just allow his/herself to be a writer of whatever kind that works.
icbins
jraemaldonado
misterpatches
lbferrel
chiatola
mannycbins
rmaranoff
I figure probably 95 per cent of why I have been discouraged with my progress on this piece has nothing to do with not feeling productive – but rather that I am disturbed that this piece has been the sole, primary focus of my heart and mind for nearly a year. Where does that come from? I got the idea somewhere along the line that as a young person I should be a certain kind of writer. I have the enormous expectation of having dozens of projects, one after the other… simultaneously — dozens and dozens of projects until damn, you can’t believe I’ve got so many projects because really – that’s a lot of projects. But this year – my first year out in the real world as a real writer – that just hasn’t been the case.
I think it’s a uniquely American tendency to reward multi-tasking, rapidly shifting attention, and constant business (busy-ness). There’s a growing learned instinct, I’ve noticed, particularly in people of our generation, to always be doing, always moving from one place to another, to have a hand in everything, and most of all, to produce. The rest of America wants to consume what we produce, right, so the more we make, the more can be taken in.
It reminds me of a twisted and degenerate idealization of the old persona of the polyglot–the Renaissance man, who did (and mastered) just about whatever he turned his mind to. Perhaps now we have got it into our heads that we should all be polyglots, otherwise we are only limited.
Save a few short stories made for classes, my novel has consumed my heart and mind for nearly five years now. Does that make me limited? Perhaps imperfect (since I’ve started over this thing three times, and soon will start it again), but I think that what I am limiting to myself is Something Big, perhaps even beyond me. And that may be what the polyglots were really after: something so big they could only understand it in a thousand different ways.
Can you call it lack of progress if what you’re working on is bigger than you? Can you call your view limited if you want to try and understand what you can see through only one way?
Well, you can call it “lack of progress” if the big consuming thing isn’t worth while – which is the pandora’s box no writer wants to open. “Is it actually good?” What a scary question.
[...] Takes a Husband at Stella Adler, and what a tremendous relief it is to unburden myself of the play that caused me so much grief during its incubation and watch the characters come to life in the hands of the actors. This is [...]
[...] Takes a Husband at Stella Adler, and what a tremendous relief it is to unburden myself of the play that caused me so much grief during its incubation and watch the characters come to life in the hands of the actors. This is [...]