Lost Words

Lost words

I am haunted by past writing.  There were specific ideas, stories, poems I wrote years ago that I cannot locate.  I forget how many old thumb drives I have until I start searching through all of them for a specific piece.  My recent writing is kept on one drive with a back-up.  But before I admitted to myself that I wanted to be read, well, who knows if any of it was kept.  So 20 some-odd thumb drives. And the external hard drive, the recycle bin.  Perhaps it was written on paper, I tell myself.  I need to sort out all of my old notebooks and papers anyway.  This most recent is a piece I wrote in a park in New York.  I cannot recall any of the words, only the feeling of the piece.

It was during a difficult theatre workshop I was taking.  The instructor kept referring to my weight, my age.  “That character looks tired, doesn’t she.  Like she has ten kids at home.”  It wasn’t at all what I was working for during that particular exercise.  But every time I got up he seemed to think I looked worn out, put upon, no matter how straight I stood. Attending theatre workshops are some of the more demoralizing experiences I’ve had. Writing workshops have been just the opposite.  I much prefer them. 

            Anyway, with a day off between two sets of workshops, I found myself in a park one afternoon, eating lunch.  It was one of those small neighborhood places, men playing chess, kids running around, a microcosm of cultures and types.  I remember writing the details exactly as I experienced them.  I remember loving the piece, feeling better about myself than after 4 weeks of expensive theatre workshops.  But it is lost — somewhere in the journals that I kept to record what I’d learned in class.  I use the techniques in theatre classes, but the journals, considering how I felt during that time, may have been deleted.  I recently ran across that journal – somewhere.  Somewhere.  My mind won’t give up the file that tells me where I saw it.  So I search.  Rewriting the piece isn’t an option.  It was a specific day, a specific view of the world influenced by the time in which I recorded it. A specific moment of finding perspective in the world.  Perhaps someday I’ll find it.  Letting go is tough.  I know it’s out there. 

Submissions

Ten-minute-play submissions seem to be my more successful genre.  I was commissioned for a book-banning event at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati. I revised and extended it and submitted a version to Michigan Playwright’s.  It was chosen to be read this coming week.  Beth and I are going up next Sunday.  Very exciting.  

            I did the math for submission fees for this past year.  It was offset minimally by a few acceptances.  This is an expensive hobby, but I continue to feel the need to send my work out to be read, even if it’s only by 100 subscribers or so to a given journal/magazine. And I continue to wonder about my writing – a common thing I’m told.  I was trying to write 500 words a day, but after a few days of mediocre forced writing that just couldn’t compare to the quality I’d already managed in Possum, I’m allowing myself to wait for the pull again.  Not recommended writing advice by any means, but more enjoyable and less restrictive. Also having trouble getting through the books I’m reading for potential comp titles.  The conflicts are unclear and I think my story suffers from the same problem.  The flow is not continual.  I have the time right now.  But the talent is on hold.  And the proverbial middle madness of novel writing is in full swing.

This may be a novella.  Which isn’t originally what I wanted, but the story dictates the page count. I continue to try to improve my description craft.  The dialogue is my go to place – of course, after writing numerous full-length and short plays.  Subtext through dialogue is second nature. 

And so the thing that I excel at, dialogue, slows my progress in descriptive writing. I can’t rely on my scenic, costume and lighting designers to flesh out the world of course. There are those times when I wish I had pursued a creative writing degree for just this sort of thing.  I have 57 writing books, 57. Time to find one more on descriptive passages. When I think of it, those are the sections of the comp titles that are boring me, literally putting me to sleep.  I want to seat the theme or character view in the scenery description, yet not be so obvious that the reader feels preached to, or overly subtle so that it turns merely to purple prose – which is worse? 

Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, help.