In my circle of friends (and with readers of this blog), my antipathy for “The Descendants” is well-known. So, of course, I got an email from a sympathizer aghast that “The Descendants” won a Golden Globe tonight for “Best Picture.”

Here’s what I think:

It’s good to bear in mind that “Citizen Kane” lost the Oscar to “How Green Was My Valley” (a film now more obscure than Charles Foster Kane’s sled).

And it’s also good to know that one year, the Nobel committee was tied between giving the prize for Literature to Beckett or Ionesco — until finally one guy just switched his vote to Beckett so they could go home.

I once won an award for a play that I wasn’t sure was the best in the festival; the following year, in the same festival, I lost, when I know I had the best play.

Awards:  meaningless.

Except as marketing.

And “The Descendants” still stinks.

Here’s something that’s never going to get old:  that little lancet of joy when I learn that something I’ve written has been accepted. I just had a short play chosen for a festival in San Diego in February. (More about the particulars of it another time.)

Let’s be honest:  most successes, when you dig deeper, are countervailed by many, many failures. If I’ve never been quite as dogged as Thomas Edison (“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”), I nevertheless got used to rejection early on. At age 11, I started sending short stories off to magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s, Analog, Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the like, and just as quickly, they’d come back, but even then my response was akin to: “Wow! They wrote back!” I was thrilled when some assistant would scribble a note onto the form rejection letter, as the time some kind woman wrote, “But thank you.” I still think about her. (Thank you, unnamed kind woman.) I never got rejected at school dances, because I just liked to dance, and would dance with all the girls — the big ones, the small ones, the pretty ones, the homely ones, the popular ones, the shy ones — in sixth grade, it just seemed wrong to leave any out. When I started actually dating, girls felt freer to reject me if they liked, and that seemed fine because there were others to ask. I wasn’t emotionally invested in it; I just wanted to go out with a girl and see how far I could get. (Results varied.)

When I started to get published, first in fan publications, and then with non-fiction and fiction in magazines and newspapers, it was thrilling. I liked opening a newspaper and seeing my byline. I liked getting some obscure little magazine in the mail and seeing my story (or, gasp, poem!) in there. Then I fell into the theatre and here’s what I discovered:  that live audience response trumped printed byline. How could seeing my name in print in a magazine — perhaps read, perhaps not, by unnamed and unknown people far away — possibly compare with actually being there when a live audience laughed out loud or was visibly moved by my play? One night, during a performance of my play Happy Fun Family, a woman literally Fell Out Of Her Seat laughing. To this day, I love her. Night after night, when women would sob at the end of About the Deep Woods Killer, I felt golden.

Rejection has never really bothered me. If it stings, it subsides almost instantly. I’m fortunate all around:  I’ve got a strong family, terrific friends, and the trappings of a pretty interesting life that I’ve snared and dragged back into my den. But acceptance is obviously preferable, especially acceptance of a play, which means that there’s going to be another audience experience with one of my plays, and if I’m even luckier, I can be there for it.

When Andre the Giant was a boy, Samuel Beckett used to drive him to school — in the back of his truck because that’s the only place he’d fit. All they would discuss was cricket. The absurdity of this situation — the future professional wrestler and adored star of “The Princess Bride” growing up carted by a future Nobel playwright of the existential — cries out for a play. Maybe I should write it. (I know Ionesco would have, had it occurred to him.)

Here’s something that I can’t imagine I would have said when I was in graduate school:  I like writing to spec.

I do it now for a living — writing all sorts of things for clients with my firm Counterintuity — and I did it for years as a newspaper editor and freelancer. (For the LA Times and others, book reviews had to be a certain length; as an editor, headlines and captions had to be a certain size to fit.)

But for some reason, it never occurred to me how liberating it could be to write plays this way. In the past few years, though, I’ve fallen into the habit and it’s been oddly liberating. Instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering what was on my mind that I didn’t know about, the prompt has become:  “We need a play that fits these requirements, in this timeframe, and works this way. Can you do it?” The parameters in these instances direct you to solutions.

In the most recent example, I was asked to write a short play that was 50% silent and that takes place in a very constrained space. That was fun. I had numerous launching-pad ideas, drilled down into one, started writing it, then my wife called form work and actually happened to give me what I thought was a better idea. I finished it and sent it.

While in that mode of mind,  I happened to be on Facebook and responded to a comment left on my wall that “that sounds like the title of a play. I should write that.” Within minutes, I had an email from an actor friend of 15 years saying, essentially, “Seriously. You should write that. Let’s have lunch.” and linking me to a set of guidelines for a theatre series here in LA where this play might fit.

Now I just got an email about someone else looking for a short play with very specific guidelines. I’m considering writing one. Even if they don’t take it, someone will.

We talk a lot about breaking the rules and going outside the box and coloring outside the lines. I understand why that’s appealing. But many artists far greater than we are forged great work within those rules, that box, those lines.

My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.

Here’s a fun stunt:  Neil LaBute and Theresa Rebeck will write plays next week in a webcast event, based on prompts provided by the LA Times. Vote here for your pick of prompts. For the record, I’m drumming up support for this one: “Kristin enrolls in a figure studies class, then realizes that she knows the nude model, Ron, from church.” I’m eager to see what former Mormon LaBute and feminist Rebeck come up with on that one.

“Learning not to dislike Hemingway.”

That was the title an editor gave to a piece in today’s LA Times by book critic David Ulin. (Here it is; points go to the print edition’s copy editor — online it’s tagged “Under the influence of Hemingway,” a headline so weak that it seems a subtle jab at Hemingway’s manly writing style.) I read this piece with great interest because I’ve always read all of Hemingway with great interest since first coming across his short stories in high school, when one of those stories taught me the word “milt,” as Nick Adams strips clean a fish he’s caught. Almost 35 years later, this word has stayed with me. Indeed, I used it in my play “He Said She Said,” written two years ago and produced in LA and, recently, Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play concerns a vacationing PTA mom reading bad erotic poetry she’s written, and that setup flashed me back to the oddly sensual description of Nick Adams cleaning that fish. Here’s the comically bad poem from my play:

                        AMANDA

This is called Deep Sea Diving. Except the “Sea” is spelled “s-e-e.”

Deep see diving.

I can see you down here with me.

The shellfish scuttle out of the way

Forming a cloud of ocean dust around you.

There you are.

Don’t hide.

I can see you.

Peering at me from beneath your coral

Thinking that you’re safe and protected

I reach for you and pull you out

And take you above and slit you open

And run my tongue down the length

Of your milty flesh

Careful not to get your bones

Stuck in my throat.

Hemingway finds the right sensual word — “milt,” the sperm-containing secretion of the testes of fishes — and then in my play Amanda adulterates it into “milty.” Even as a teenage writer, I could see that Hemingway had the knack of finding the right word, something I struggled then and now with.

I picked up other tricks from Hemingway, purposely or accidentally. Here Ulin quotes Hemingway in “Death in the Afternoon”: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things strongly as though the writer had stated them.” Note the circular reductionism, as Hemingway returns again and again to the baseline words:  writer/writing; about; enough. There’s a rhythm to this that just pulls you into it; it’s practically Biblical. This element of style infected my writing early on, and that’s fine; I got it from Hemingway, and Hemingway got it from Gertrude Stein, just as Shakespeare got Troilus and Cressida from Chaucer, and Chaucer got it from Boccaccio. All of which means that whether or not I admire Hemingway’s work (and I do), I certainly have been influenced by it.

(Who else was I influenced by? My friend Joe Stafford likes to point out that many of my plays contain what Joe calls “a laundry list” monologue in which someone complains about a host of items or events. In retrospect, the inspiration for this is obvious:  Harold Pinter,  and The Caretaker specifically.)

So here I am, filled with admiration for Hemingway, and somewhat put out by the Times’ book critic writing a piece bearing the headline “Learning not to dislike Hemingway.” To add insult to injury, Ulin goes on to say:

“The one who most spoke to me was Faulkner, with his flowing sea of language, his sense of of the past, of history, as a living thing. Next to him, Hemingway seemed flat, two-dimensional.”

Oh, William Faulkner. You  mean the famous writer I cannot read. The irony here is that, much as Ulin doesn’t care for Hemingway, I can’t abide Faulkner at all. Ever since I posted Doug’s Reading List six years ago, I’ve received many emails and personal comments that the entire list should be held suspect because Faulkner isn’t on it. But I can’t imagine a reason to put him on; I remain unclear what his impact is (on writers in general, or certainly on me). And oh, I have tried reading him, most notably Absalom, Absalom! (three attempts) and, just recently, Light in August again, this time getting to page 152 before bailing out. Here’s an excerpt prototypical paragraph:

He was standing still now, breathing quite hard, glaring this way and that. About him the cabins were shaped blackly out of blackness by the faint, sultry glow of kerosene lamps. On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of Negro women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female….

What are “fecundmellow” voices? Like “milt,” the word aims to be erotic, but Faulkner’s neologism subtracts more than it adds, as do “manshaped” and “primogenitive.” To Ulin, Hemingway may seem “flat” by comparison, but I would respond that he doesn’t yank you out of the milieu with awkward showiness.

While I disagree with the Times’ book critic, I respect him for coming out with his opinion about Hemingway. I’ve been out about my dislike for Faulkner for six years, and I’ve suffered the slings and arrows of lit-snob derision — and I’m not the book critic of a major newspaper. I’m sure Ulin is in for a pasting from readers (and I’m betting he’ll be delighted to get a reminder that people are reading him). Ulin notes Hemingway’s influence — on Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson (I would add Charles Bukowski) — but he doesn’t care for what Faulkner would call the primogenitive Writer.

All of this reminds me of something that happened last night, after the latest round of readings from my “Words That Speak” playwriting workshop. A couple of weeks ago, some of us in the workshop had plays performed in Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays,” and another playwright and I spent a few minutes last night discussing some of the plays we’d seen (of 26 different car plays, I’d seen 10). We came to the subject of one that neither of us particularly liked;  “It just doesn’t go anywhere,” I said, and my friend agreed. Then he said, “But I saw some people come out of that car wiping tears away.” We think it’s a bad play; others were emotionally swept away; and neither one of us could figure it out.  Just as I still can’t figure out the appeal of William Faulkner.

Speaking of people who “in the cosmic scheme of things have no problems,” I submit the current “debate” generated by Tony Kushner, the everything-award-winning playwright of “Angels in America” and many other globally produced plays, including “Caroline, or Change,” “A Bright Room Called Day,” “Homebody/Kabul,” “Slavs” and “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with the Key to the Scriptures,” which is currently playing off-Broadway. Evidently in a recent interview, Kushner said in passing that “I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anyone can.” Which ignited this controversy.

While I know that they are rarer than a royal flush, I have met some wealthy playwrights, including Stephen Sondheim and Edward Albee, and got to know one of them somewhat well, Jerome Lawrence. Jerry and his writing partner Robert E. Lee were responsible for “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” “Auntie Mame” (which led to their further hit adaptation, “Mame”), and “Inherit the Wind.” Each of these was wildly commercially successful. From its premiere in 1955 until at least the early 1990s, there wasn’t a day that “Inherit the Wind” wasn’t in production somewhere in the world. Judging from his house alone, which Jerry had built on a bluff with a three-quarter view of the Pacific Ocean, the UPS man was arriving every day with boxes of more cash.

Granted, times have changed. But on the face of it, the idea that Tony Kushner can’t support himself as a playwright is ludicrous. His plays are in constant production around the world, his lecture fees are noteworthy, and I imagine he’s received any number of awards, fellowships, scholarships, and distinctions, that come with monetary rewards. (Note that I’m leaving out his screenwriting career.)

Kushner’s complaint strikes me the way movie stars do when they say about a pet project, “I did it for nothing.” What they mean is: They did it for scale (which every actor I know would be delighted to get), and for back end (which almost no actor I know gets). Jerry Lawrence was a playwright, not truly a screenwriter (although he had credits there as well), and made millions upon millions from his plays. Given all the productions “Angels in America” alone had, including the current one, plus all the productions from his other plays, plus print royalties, plus lecture fees (which are part of being a playwright), I find it hard to believe he can’t make a living. Perhaps what he means is that he can’t make the living he’d like to; that’s a different matter, and to that I’d note that I’ve yet to meet anyone, from my low-wage theatre friends to the two billionaires I’ve met, who felt they should have less.

After I posted this sentiment online, someone else weighed in with something even more to the point: “He can’t make a living as a playwright and he’s surprised? This is a joke, right? I once helped Tony Kushner move a daybed that he bought in Austria for $10k. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over his checking account or how he manages to pay his bills.”

Exactly right.

I haven’t posted on here in so long that for a moment I was afraid I’d forgotten the login.

Not sure why I’ve been absent. I last posted just before leaving for the Great Plains Theatre Conference, and I guess 10 days of constant talking and writing left me talked-out or something. At the same time, I’ve been stockpiling some things I did want to post here, so expect more frequency going forward.

While in Omaha, I led two playwriting workshops; served as a panelist on I think six plays; attended evening play performances; attended rehearsals and tech for my play, as well as the performance; and participated in the requisite bouts of drinking and cigar smoking.  I also petted a friend’s pet piglet (and here’s that photo):

I know — it’s difficult to see. That’s because my friend Max Sparber decided to get arty with the photo.  I guess that with photography, arty means you can’t see what’s in the photo.

With all that walking around teaching and talking, you’re bound to say a few things over the course of 10 days. I’m pretty sure that in one of my workshops, “Starting at the Start,” I advised people to stop worrying about it and just write. I’m pretty sure I said that because I always say that, and for two reasons:  1) whining and complaining drive me crazy and I’m especially tired of hearing it from people who in the cosmic scheme of things have no problems; and 2) it’s unproductive. Whereas freeing yourself to just write, and edit later, often leads you somewhere good. Perhaps I stressed this philosophy of mine even more than usual, because here’s the quote I later saw posted on the conference whiteboard:

In case you can’t quite see that, it say, “Agony doesn’t work. Lee Wochner.” So I got quoted. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but then I figured that since I evidently said it, I must agree with it. I thank the anonymous person who posted it, and wonder if it was intended as further inspiration to others, a reminder to himself, or a combination of both.  Or, since the message stayed posted for the remaining eight days of the conference, maybe no one bothered to notice.

Courtesy of the conference photographer, here’s a photo of me in my official duties as a panelist, giving post-show feedback to a playwright. Note again the arty photography that inhibits seeing what’s in the photo.

A playwright in my workshop in LA saw this on Facebook and said I looked “very Citizen Kane-y.”

And evidently I said this, which I saw on Facebook because the playwright tagged me:  “Do what you want to do. You can have all your careers. Just make sure they’re all creative. – Lee Wochner.”

Yes, I remember saying this, and I think it was on the first bottle of wine. This was probably part of my discourse that we should “plan to live to age 120,” built around a speech I attended last year given by an osteopath, the gist of which was that because we can successfully replace more and more body parts, we should all make plans to be here a lot longer. (This did indeed go into my planning: I’m trying to get rid of things at an even greater pace, now that I understand just how long they’re going to be weighing me down.) Mostly, though, I was inveighing against pigeonholing; this young woman was concerned that people were trying to fit her into a specific box. Barring that mythic bus that may strike each of us out of the blue at any moment, we’ve all got plenty of time and options.

I left the conference on Sunday, and have been in southern New Jersey staying with my mother and family since then, at a low bubble in the local heat, humidity, and troublesome flying insects. More to come about the conference and other things soon. Right now I’m hearing myself say that it’s time to go back outside.

I’m extremely scheduled. It is not my favorite aspect of my life. But when people ask me how I manage to get so much done, I have an answer:  I’m scheduled.

Last week I promised someone that while I was in the area on Saturday, I’d stop by her new coffee bar to sample the coffee. Which I did. Because I put it into my schedule, and my iPhone reminded me.

How do I remember to pick up my 8-year-old from school? It’s in my schedule. (And woe to me — and the kid — if I ever lose the phone. I hope he’ll have enough snacks for overnight.) Haircut? Concert? My wife’s work schedule? Even something as simple as “Get up”? They’re all in my schedule. As I said, I’m not proud of this.

Here’s what’s not in my schedule:  my memory. Because  tonight at five minutes before 7 p.m., there was a ring at my door and I greeted the nice theatre people outside this way:  “I thought we said 7:30.” And yes, I felt pretty crummy the moment I blurted that out. At the very least, I could have said hello first. To make it worse, it was correct in my schedule (and wrong in my brain), because there it was in my schedule that tonight’s rehearsal was set to start at 7 — and it’s Wednesday night’s rehearsal, for a different play of mine, that was scheduled to start at 7:30.

So now I have to put something new in my schedule:  “Remember to read schedule before making ass of yourself.”