Monday, November 26, 2007
Quick hello
I'm really enjoying the new play I've just started writing, the ideas and inspiration just keep on coming...keeping me awake at night. Although I suppose that's because I'm still in the honeymoon stage, full of overflowing puppy love (or something like that).
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Where I am in the grand scheme of theatrical things
And on to another-- it doesn't have a title yet. It's a three hander: two women & one man. And the following is it's 'tagline', for want of a better word, the first ideas/ideas/words that came to me about the play.
"An Actress, Her Understudy, and the Producer in their lives. A comedy about biting thumbs, breaking legs and the proverbial dirty dressing room."
The following is what dialogue I have written...will look at characters/questions/scenario later, but needed to start this one with dialogue, they just started speaking and I started translating. (The following is copyrighted to Mary Davidson, November 2007).
(Dressing room. The Actress is putting on her makeup. Her Understudy is knitting.)
Actress
What are you working on tonight?
Understudy
It’s another sweater for my dog.
Actress
That poodle—
Understudy
Actually, it’s an alasa apso—
Actress
Like I said, that poodle must have a positive plethora of knobbly knitted doggy clothing to choose from in the morning. Goodness knows, he must have a larger wardrobe than I do.
Understudy
I find knitting calming.
Actress
You can just stick around for the first half, darling, and leave at intermission.
Understudy
Really?
Actress
Yes. I don’t think I’ll drop dead.
Understudy
It’s just that I heard…
Actress
Heard what?
Understudy
Nothing.
Actress
Everything is about something. Was it a rumour about me?
Understudy
No. It was about after the show tonight.
Actress
Ah, yes, the usual curtain calls and flowers, the clamouring fans and the martinis.
Back to the words. And got to get on that vacuuming.
*National Playwriting Month
Sunday, November 18, 2007
some quotes for thought
Some quotes for thought, digestion & inspiration--
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."~Anaïs Nin
"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. " ~Charles Peguy
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ~Sylvia Plath
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. " ~Vita Sackville-West
"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. "~William Wordsworth
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."~Vladimir Nabakov
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. "~Anton Chekhov
"Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum." ~Graycie Harmon
Thursday, November 15, 2007
I don't know if I can do this, writing a first draft in a month, or at least of this particular play. I've done it before, just never in this context, I feel so uninspired, or just blah, I'm really not sure. I absolutely utterly hate when writing feels like a chore to me, and I have to do it, and then I come up with crappy writing. Or maybe I'm just thinking about it too much, harping on the negativity that it keeps on expanding and expanding and getting worse.
(Breathe.)
Okay, than stop thinking and just write. Stop all that unpredictable, ridiculous worrying and just write.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
About my play...
I want a write my great grandfather’s life, for the stage: Daniel Maloney, an ordinary man, ordinary hero, but extraordinary at the same time. How everyone’s life with worth telling and exploring. A mythic retelling, across two continents— love, family, freedom, identity, hard work, determination, pride and passion and balancing all this…everyone has a life worth telling and exploring. There are still stories to be told.
-Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones
I want a write my great grandfather’s life, for the stage: Daniel Maloney, an ordinary man, ordinary hero, but extraordinary at the same time. How everyone’s life with worth telling and exploring. A mythic retelling, across two continents— love, family, freedom, identity, hard work, determination, pride and passion and balancing all this…everyone has a life worth telling and exploring. There are still stories to be told.
-Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Grappling
November 7...about 20 pages...so far so good, at least I think so but that is partly not telling myself the truth. In the sense that mine is a semi-memory play I'm worried I guess about its drive and above all else I don't want it to be a bad crappy play. Bred in Your Bones is so important to me and I know why I'm writing it. I'm passionate about the subject, about the characters, specifically Daniel & Edith (my great grandparents), but I'm finding it hard to translate. Maybe I'm coming at it from the wrong way, the wrong point of view. On the stage it is always the present moment, the razor's edge, even if the play is "a memory play" or a stem off of this form.
The saga continues...
It's a joy to be telling his story, the idea for the play has been mulling around my mind for sometime and his life has always inspired me. But currently I am stuck, which is annoying. I've focused in one why I want to write this play, its focus and yet...I'm finding the outline difficult. But I must remain positive and push through, and write. For NAPLWRIMO I must have the first draft finished by the end of the month. I can do this, I can do this, I really can.
The following is from Margaret Atwood's "Negotiating with the Dead/A Writer on Writing"; talks about it mainly from the point of view of a novelist but it pertains, I think to all writing:
"Specificially, I asked novelists , and I asked them what it felt like when they went into a novel. None of them wanted to know what I meant by into. One of them said it was like walking into a labyrinth , without knowing what moment might be inside; another said it was like groping through a tunnel; another said it was like being in a cave-- she could see daylight through the opening, but she herself was in darkness. Another said it was like being under water, in a lake or ocean. Another said it was like being in a completely dark room, feeling her way; she had to rearrange the furniture in the dark, and when it was all arranged the light would come on. Another said it was like wading through a deep river, at dawn or twilight; another said it was like being in an empty room which was nevertheless filled with unspoken words, with a sort of whispering; another said it was like grappling with an unseen being or entity; another said it was like sitting in an empty theatre before any play or film had started, waiting for the characters to appear. Dante begins the Divine Comedy-- which is both a poem and a record of the composition of that poem-- with an account of finding himself in a dark, tangled wood, at night, having lost his way, after which the sun begins to rise. Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway. Margaret Laurence and others have said that it is like Jacob wrestling with his angel in the night-- an act in which wounding, naming, and blessing all take place at once. Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey-- an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision-- these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing. I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: 'It's dark in there.'
Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. This book is about that kind of dark, and that kind of desire."
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Writing a play in November...this shouldn't be too hard
Well I am now six days into NAPLWRIMO or National Playwriting Month (http://naplwrimo.org/writetheplay) and I'm not sure about it...of course I'm still going forwards with it, no point to going back. Besides I don't want to be known as a coward. No matter how many plays I have written, been produced, had praise and/or criticism about; even as I get older and my career and life continues each play is a new journey and new process. And oftentimes a terrifying one.
Signing off for now, must head off to bed (I know it says this was posted at about 8pm, but I guess I'm in a different timezone because it's 11:30 where I am). Job interview tomorrow and more writing!