I was planning to write about political theater and the
theater of politics… but I have a mild case of election fatigue so I think I’ll
save that post for Inauguration Day.
Instead, I’ll stick to the topic I planned: “Writing:
The Fast and the Furious.” (By which I
mean to make playwriting sound cooler than a Vin Diesel movie. Which it IS, people. Come on!)
Lots of people have taken part in quick and frantic writing
projects, and some of them turn out OK – well, more than OK. (I read that Chuck Palahniuk wrote “Fight
Club” – one of my faves - in two weeks, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in three days.)
And
then there’s “365 Plays for 365 Days” in which Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a
day for an entire year. (Most of them aren’t long, of course, just a page or
two.) The result? A
published collection of shorts and a worldwide premiere of the pieces at the NY
Public Theater, on the internet, and across the country. Now since it took a year, Ms. Parks's project seems neither fast
nor furious – rather, grand and contemplative - but I’m going to write
about how her achievement inspired me to undertake a play cycle that ended up
both huge and speedy. Ready? Here goes...
Now, I think Suzan-Lori Parks is an awesome writer, a cool
person, and a rock star. So when I was
given a copy of “365 Plays” at Christmas 2006, I got a crazy idea. “Why not try this myself?” After all, wouldn’t it be a good thing to get
the pen moving every day? To face the blank
page constantly? To have a stack of
short plays by the end of 2007? And most of all: how hard could this be?"
Pretty hard, actually.
Oh, I started out strong, only missing an occasional day which I’d make
up by writing two short plays on the next day.
One by one, I managed to write a short play a day for every day until
early May. But then… what? I guess I could say that, beset with grad
school finals and shows I was producing, I missed about three days and never
went back. In May, I stopped writing my
365-play project, just like that.
Okay, okay: in digging deeper, I have to admit something
else. My “busy” excuse is only partially
true. Really, I
stopped writing my play-a-day because I started thinking about this as an
exercise, and started criticizing it instead of just doing it. I stopped to
read what I’d written, and found to my horror that most of the plays just weren’t that good. Sure, some of them had their moments, but… by
and large I was really unhappy when I looked back. I started to ask questions of myself: Why are
you doing this, again? What is the
purpose of this? Why aren’t these
turning out well? And: don’t you know
these will NEVER be published or performed – so isn’t this a waste of time?
Suddenly, my own personal project became an unhappy self-imposed
chore. I grew overwhelmed and
discouraged – then dropped it altogether, almost overnight.
But something happened on the last day of November that changed my life. Back in Burbank from Thanksgiving in NYC, I felt a hankering for a big expansive project to
nurture my own writer’s voice… and I came across the folder of that ‘play a day project’ I had
abandoned. Man, I thought, I wish I
would have completed that! Too late, now,
I guess… Or is it? I did a quick
calculation. December has 31 days,
right? And I already had in the ‘bank,’
so to speak, plays from Jan through April…
I realized that if I could write 7 or 8 short plays a day, I would be
able to finish the whole 365 by the end of the year.
So every night last December, I went to Starbucks, got a pumpkin spice latte, and wrote 7 or 8 short plays. Sometimes they were really short
ones, just a line or two. And I did it
so quickly that I had absolutely no time to wonder about whether they were any
good or not. And you know what? I stopped caring. That speed and that pressure was liberating – I started to enjoy myself
again! I found a nugget of determination and felt driven to finish 365 plays before the end of the year. And guess what?
I DID! I did it! I
finished the last of my 365 at a quarter-to-midnight 2007 – 15 minutes
before it turned 2008. And when I was done I had a giant honkin’ manila envelope
full of 365 sheets of canary yellow legal paper which I put away for a
month.
When I looked at the plays again,
I found the following things:
1)
Many of the plays are dashed off, and most aren’t
‘good’ in any conventional way…
2)
…but all of them have integrity on their own and
as a group…
3)
…and better still: some of the plays ARE plays
I’m pleased with! There are a few small
gems in there.
But overall…
4)
…in the end, I kind of don’t care if they are
‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The project, I see now, was about completion, self-expression, determination, and
joy.
That’s right: joy. I
planned my project as a joyful blurt of creativity, so I should NEVER have
begun to overthink it, reread in the middle, or to criticize it – and I never
should have looked at it as something utilitarian: something that HAD to be
performed, published, read, or anthologized.
I should have just been concentrating on getting it DONE: amassing
pages, having fun, and keeping the pen moving.
When I look at that giant folder that sits on my bureau,
it’s one of the things in my life I’m most proud of. And I’ve actually gone back to the enormous
pile when I’ve found submission opportunities for 1 minute plays or 4 minute
plays (more of them than you may think!)
But again: I think that whatever I do with these plays in the future is
way beside the point – it’s that I DID them, committed, and completed. And that has a joy and an integrity all its
own.
Awesome! Since I gained
all this insight from my project, you might think I’d be somewhat
enlightened when I’d go to undertake a big project again – wouldn’t you?
Well, not so fast!.
This year, I’ve undertaken NaNoWriMo – otherwise known as “National
Novel Writing Month,” when tens of thousands of people (hundreds of thousands?) each attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of
November. (Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.org/
.) I’m 20,000 words in, with 13 days to go -and I’ve started to ask questions: Why
are you doing this, again? What is the
purpose of this? Why isn’t this turning
out well? And: don’t you know this will NEVER
be published – so isn’t this a waste of time? Uh-oh.
More about my current fast and furious writing project in
Part II, and you can have the chance to talk me down from the ledge. In the meantime, find me at Starbucks typing
away furiously and hitting “Word Count” like a maniac.
