I didn’t flip over The Road to read it again because now my son is reading it (apt, considering that the book is about a father and son, except the only struggle for food we have is once a week carrying it into the house from the supermarket).

Instead, I’m now reading World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” (which, staying abreast of the news as I do, I think we’re still fighting).

Why so much apocalypse?

Because it seems to be in the air.

Because while there are things to fear, we more than ever are being conditioned to fear.

Because when you’ve finished a novel like one of these (including Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) you can close the back cover and relax: It didn’t happen here.

Yet.

Get up.

Urinate.

Coffee. Grape nuts or eggs. Newspaper.

Internet (email, blogs, miscellany).

Gym or not.

Ablutions, etc.

Work/write/teach.

Lunch or lunch meeting.

Work/write/teach.

Dinner with or without family, or dinner meeting.

Family time or work/write/teach.

Read/write/view.

Sex or not.

Sleep fitfully.

Repeat until finished.

After a rehearsal run-through for my play “All Undressed with Nowhere to Go,” the director gave the actors notes. Insightful, intelligent, penetrating notes that impressed me and made my head spin. Then he turned to me: “Anything to add?”

I looked up and said to the actors, “Do it better.”

And y’know what? Next time — THEY DID. Maybe that’s all they needed: “Do it better.”

I said it on a lark — and it got a big laugh (the desired response) — but it worked. Sometimes we need to know what “better” means; we need more guidance. But other times, we only need to hear that whatever we just did didn’t work and we need to do it better.

I know I have that feeling often when I look back on what I’ve written. “This could be better,” or, more often, “This needs to be better.”

And then I do it better.

After 16 years of teaching writing, both at the University of Southern California and other institutions of higher education as well as in private workshops, I don’t believe that writing can be taught. And I say that to my classes and workshops.

What I do believe can be taught is craft. (What will play, vs. what will not play – and why. And how to make something more playable.) And what I do believe can be given is encouragement of what is good, because playwriting like all writing can be frustrating and lonely and every writer’s world is full of discouraging voices including his own.

It is that latter discouraging voice – your own – that is most potent. That is the one that will stop you in your tracks. It is the one that tells you while you are writing it that the play you are writing does not work, cannot work, will not work, and that you are fooling yourself in writing it and will make a public fool of yourself if it is ever presented before an audience or even read by someone else.

You cannot listen to that voice and write anything. Including, some days, your own name.

Better to just write.

Write without the worry and write certainly without that voice in your head. Write with the freedom of impulse, in the way basketball stars effortlessly sink ball after ball when they slip into a non-thinking zone. Write as though you are on a well-provisioned sailing craft with no fixed destination and no end to your days and no storm clouds on the horizon. Write with the pulsing thrum of your blood.

Give yourself the freedom to create and you can. And then, later, in the harsh reality of the after-writing, look again at what you have written, switch on the critical voice, and edit.

Because you cannot write while you edit, and you should not edit while you write.

Whereas in times past I may have acted cartoonishly, now I’m acting in a cartoon.

“>Take a good look. If there were a prize god — an omnipotent being who correctly judged who and what should win what — this is the book He would choose: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

It will take you one day to read and a lifetime to forget.

More about this in coming days, because I’m actually considering flipping it over and reading it again. Immediately.

What the welcome mat outside every door really says: “Please wipe your feet before entering.”

That’s what we call subtext.

I don’t know how that applies here, but I’m thinking about it.