I wanted to get one last post in for September before ringing out the month, so this is that post.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing, just not a lot of posting.

Sometimes — frequently? generally? — I can do both. But lately I’ve been trying to finish a draft of my new full-length play, a play that I have been working on off-and-on for years, and what has helped me make real progress has been staying in the universe of that play. That means:  restricting my writing to being writing about that play. About those characters. About their overall situation. Even when I’m writing scenes and bits and pieces that I suspect won’t wind up in the play. So, in addition to the play itself, I’ve got a notebook full of scenes, and monologues, and notes, and other bits… and I think they’re adding up to something.

For most of my writing life, I’ve written more than one thing at the same time. Sometimes, I’m writing three plays at the same time. I’ve written my share of short stories, a couple of abandoned novels, dozens of terrible poems, innumerable essays and book reviews and blog posts and what-have-you, as well as about sixty plays of varying length and plenty of folderol and also lots and lots of advertising and marketing copy. I’m always writing something. So it’s been strange to restrict myself, as much as possible, to this play, but it’s a play I’ve wanted to finish for a while and I decided to make this change.

You know what else consumed some time? Well…. Last week I had promised to send a director friend the pages that I had so far. That means about 60 pages plus scattered notes and a general structure, with lines in the play that sometimes read “Scene 5. Missing.” or summations like “in this scene, X will do Y.” In other words, not a finished draft. I opened the file on my laptop to work on it and started to read it from front to back just to check that structure and see if it would be clear what was going on to someone unfamiliar with the project. When I saw what state it was in, I was alarmed:  What was this? It was a mess! I thought I had straightened all this out, and toned down the embarrassing lapse I had committed in presenting one of the characters as an obvious, unsympathetic, antagonist; not only was he clearly a two-dimensional villain, but things seemed to be in the wrong order everywhere. How had this happened? So I spent an entire evening two Fridays ago fixing all of that, smoothing out that supporting character and letting him have a fair point of view; moving scenes around; clarifying the general arc of the play; and then adding several pages of new copy over the course of the play. Satisfied, finally, I went to save it back onto the laptop into the directory where it should be…

And I found another version of the play, from earlier in the week, in that same directory.

And when I opened that version, I found that in that one, I had indeed fixed that character, and straightened out the arc of the play — and also had written eight new pages that now weren’t in this new draft. Which also had five pages of new copy.

So, in other words, somehow… I have been working on this play in two different drafts. Updating them both. Adding to them both.

Am I busy? Sure. Distracted sometimes? You bet. But I don’t think I have Alzheimer’s.

After that discovery, which as you can imagine was not a happy one, I spent further hours straightening all of that out, at least preliminarily, so I could send the pages to my director friend. When you find you’ve got two separate suits you’re tailoring and then realize that really they should be one unified piece, it takes some ripping and tearing and redesign to make that work.

My goal is to finish a good strong draft of this play by the end of this year, and then have a reading in January. I should be able to do that, so long as I don’t start working on a third version of it.

In the meantime, now that I’ve written all of that other stuff going on in it, I should feel more secure in that universe, and able to post here more frequently.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2018 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.