Retreats and fleeting connections
One night off this month…
Thoughts won’t settle this evening. I’m deep in the heart of Pride and Prejudice with a young talented cast that I want to see succeed beyond their hopes and beliefs about their talent. I can pin down what they need, how to get them there. Writing for myself is another matter.
It is very easy to dream without action.
There’s the fear that what I imagine will always be better than reality. And what if failing ruins the lovely, lovely dream? I tell my students that failure is the path to knowing. Not so easy for them or for me.
I’m sure that’s why a writer’s retreat really appeals to me. It’s class, after all. But it’s also a special thing for writers. Everyone is writing at once – there’s no other choice – nothing’s supposed to be earth shattering. It can all be disposable, but so often that leads to freedom of mind and exciting writing.
The only really frustrating part is when the writing prompts don’t let me gear the prompt toward the project. But it’s class. It’s an exercise. Honing your craft, I tell my acting students. Or I’ll start writing and really get going and we only write for 20 minutes. I attended the Interlochen summer writing retreat with my sister, Beth. So, while we found time to write away from class – especially if there was a deadline (reading night, etc.), time together was so precious, it was difficult to spend time apart writing. So the desire to write becomes overwhelming, but the time gets cut short.
Beth and I are returning to Interlochen for a short memoir retreat in a few weeks. Memoir isn’t really my thing, but it’s my experiences that meld into story, so a more direct exploration should be interesting. Going to the source of inspiration for me. It’s a short one. Two and ½ days. (I’m staying an extra day to do a movement workshop with students from their theatre program. Always a joyful thing.) Which gives my sister and I more time together, more time to talk writing, or life. I’m interested in observing my process this time. To understand better what gets me excited and makes me angry when I have to stop. If I could just pin that down --
Because, what I find puzzling is that I could structure my own personal writing retreat. That’s certainly how writers get anything done – writing hours. But without the escape, the event, the specialness of a writing retreat, I struggle toward rewriting or writing every day – or even more than a few times a week. Not so when I’m working on a play with a deadline. Just the act of having to finish something brings so much flurry of open, active thinking. School was like that. If I gave myself two weeks to write a paper, it gave a mundane result. But when I had to finish in two days – to focus everything on the act of putting together this opinion, this treatise — it held together. The ideas swirled and tumbled into really good descriptions and a structure that built toward an interesting and more cohesive paper. A pain in the ass, but really exciting. I’m trying to learn to be more long term about the swirling and tumbling of ideas – to hold them from day to day so that the story has depth and recurring themes from start to end.
Is it actually writing or just the dream of being a writer I love? It’s both. Strangely enough they’re very different joys.
Like anyone wishing to write, I see these stories. They exist somewhere… I just need to get them into concrete form. And when I actually write it feels great. It feels like – a great steak dinner, like an autumn trip through the woods, like the first time a great dog looks you in the eye. It feels like pouring out pictures of your real secret self. And sometimes it’s as awkward and stuttering as those images I just listed — communicating only to myself. And it just confirms there’s more work to do. This personal disconnected pouring of images isn’t enough. But it’s closer. It’s reaching for the thing that will let me connect to the world – the universe; that will help me to understand a particular piece of it and how I might connect to it. If I can see the image clearly enough for it to pour down into words, capture it –
Very odd that – to capture something in order to set it free.
more disjointed images trying to find home