from my son, was a couple of hours of cafe time to write. Which I did. I worked on my thesis (that damned black cloud that hovers reminding, haunting, annoying, identifying as incomplete, marking as unfulfilled--worse than King Hamlet's ghost!). Actually it's not that bad - I'm only struggling to get it written in the snippets of time available at the moment. In fact, I spent last week making a chart of those such times (I'm bad with time and need the visual). Is that an act of desperation? It felt like I was being productive.Frankly, I feel like Jane Austen. Not that I have to hide my writing in my needlework or under the desk blotter, but that I have to steal little moments throughout the day to get down a line or two of anything. What am I thinking trying to write seven scripts? Well- why not? Of course, I see the obvious, if time is so short, why am I blogging? Instant gratification. Community. Time to stretch out my brain and figure out what's going on with me (ooh, that sounds so crunchy).
See, before I had kids, I split my time working in/on my massage practice, rehearsing, and writing. In between clients, I had a time to write in my notebooks (I follow the Nathalie Goldberg practice of trying to fill a notebook a month with writing. Well, I used to follow that practice). I find this kind of extended pen to paper writing yields unexpected results, opens my writing up in ways that working on the computer doesn't. Plus, the act of spending 4 - 6 hours a day in a meditative state doing massage also tapped into a creative source that fed my work. Both practices became severely curtailed after my first son was born. The birth of each child has put more limits on the amount of time I can write. But I agree with Malachy and his Coppola theory, my time may be limited, but that limitation has made me a better writer. The process has become more distilled with the arrival of each child. And perhaps I need to write seven scripts right now because of the urgency I feel to make sense of the world, to put things in perspective for myself and for them. Oh, and there's making a living at it. But one thing at a time, eh?
That's where the plan comes in. Visuals again. And I've been inspired by these posts and am convinced I just need a plan. So in addition to working on my thesis yesterday, I began formulating a writing plan for each play. I'm still working on that. Plus I belong to the Playwright's Center and get two nice emails each week of all the grants and theater companies looking for submissions. Every week I find a few that interest me. I need to create a list of those so I can keep track of them. These mental notes are getting too long to maintain.
I know these lists work. I did it a couple of years ago for my screenplay - created a list of 20 producers, 20 production companies that might be interested in my script, 20 agents, 20 screenplay contests, etc. It may seem far away from the art part of writing, but I found that by looking at the work of these companies, it helped me understand my screenplay better and to identify the ways in which my script fell short. It helps me with rewrites. I don't feel like I'm trying to fit a mold, but trying to emulate work I genuinely admire. Semantics are important.
I must stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment