When Roland Tec asked if I’d be interested in spending a weekend in CT with him and John Yearley, writing, I was onboard. I liked the idea from the start, but I also wasn’t sure what I’d work on. Though Roland had labeled it, “writing weekend” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind if I worked on my documentary, A Life’s Work. But something in me said, “Write.”
Fine. But what? I had stories that were close to being “done” and I could revise them. That would certainly be a good use of the time, and might not require a push start.
A push start?
In the past, changing gears from filmmaking to writing took transition time. Also, when I’ve done residencies, it’s taken me a while to settle in to the new place. I need to feel it out, stretch a little, start slow before I hit cruising speed. A weekend didn’t allow me that luxury. So revising seemed like a good idea.
And yet… I had an idea for a story, an ember, really. I thought if I could write 1,000 a day over the course of the three-day weekend, I might have something like a first draft of this thing.
I don’t want to write too much about what I was writing, because that’s how it works. “You can’t see it ‘til it’s finished” to quote a Talking Heads song. Here’s the gist: I intended to take a traumatic event that happened to me when I was 11 and fictionalize it. I had a character I thought I could give this event to, make it part of his history.
And so Friday, the day I arrived, I started. And I wrote 60 words. And though there was an interesting image, the words sucked and it seemed false to me.
So the next day I began again, but this time I wrote about the event in the first person, as I remembered it happening. Essentially reliving the trauma as a writer. I’ve journaled about this event, but writing about it as a “work” was different. I was going deeper. It felt riskier to me and it made me a little shaky.
But this felt like a good place to do it, and the people who I was there with, they were the people to do it around. I sat at a desk in a room while Roland and John worked outside, Roland frequently by the pool and John under a giant maple tree. Turning my head from my computer I could see them through the second floor window. It made me feel safe.
I didn’t discuss what I was working on with John or Roland, it didn’t matter. What mattered was their presence, their camaraderie, their energy directed to their creative work. It was a good, long weekend of work, and the work produced feels somehow different than what I produce at home. And certainly, the nights were different: we sat around and, usually over meals, talked about film, plays, books, music, rhubarb pie, children, parents, and just about everything. It was great knowing that once I made it through those 1,000 words, that awaited.
And then there was the pool.
