The lifetime of homework
“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” Lawrence Kasdan
Last night around 9, I finished draft four of my new play. And then I felt pretty good.
Before that, all day in the non-writing part of the day, I hadn’t felt pretty good. In fact, I’d felt caught up in notwriting it, and feeling that I should be writing it, but not really wanting to, but feeling deeply that I should be writing it. At some point, writing it had indeed felt like the homework you don’t want to do.
Except: Once you start it, you see that it’s actually easy and kind of fun.
Which elicits this quote, from Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing, but I love having written.”
Me: “I love writing, I just hate getting started.”
For me, the gym works the same way. I know that once I get there and start working out, I’ll love it. (I always do.) But no, I never want to go there — I just somehow want to magically be there and already be on a mat on the floor, or lifting, or on the beloved Stairmaster. I know for a fact that I do 45 minutes on the Stairmaster, which tracks the time. I estimate that I do hours of putting it off. Three to four times a week, getting over to that gym is a matter of dogged determination — and managing my schedule by brute force.
I’ve been assured by other people that they play these mental games with themselves too. But that doesn’t do anything to help my situation.
The play is done for now. Yes, I’m going to move two scenes that I wrote as addenda into the framework of the play where they belong, but that’ll take about an hour.
But until I have to steel myself for that, sometime in the next night or two, I think I’m going to play “Skyrim” for a while (yes, I took it back up last night, when I felt I just could read or write any more).