How Much Me

I started yet another script today, and this is the one I'll be presenting on Friday. This one is a little more grounded, and I feel comfortable going on with it. What I realized today was that my writing has a style. And when I noticed it, I realized that that is what I wanted, a style. Patterns in my writing are proof that I exist! If I have my own style, I can be okay with making things that are not replicas of my influences. This is often the temptation when you like someone else's art very much. Just try to do exactly what that artist did, and then you'll be good. But if I have my own style, I don't have to worry, because I'll show up in it no matter what. I am not free of worry about this script though. I might know my issues a little too well, and they may get in there a little too literally. In fact, this script is a literal-metaphorical depiction of my life at this moment. What a narcissist I am! I need to pay attention to story before meaning. I think this is going to be the main idea behind my editing, but I'll see what my community has to say. I also need to work on my characters. It's easy to write myself as a character, it's not so easy to write other people in. I know what works for me- I need to have a clear vision of my people. I don't need to know that a character eats oatmeal for breakfast and played tennis as a kid, I just need to get some image of her in my head. Or else she's going to come out as me, the default image. Hope to get something good out of this!

Not A Good Day

Writing the beginning of this play is scaring me out of writing the end of it. I have started two separate plays, and so far neither of them are good. They're not well written, and I would fix the writing if I thought the ideas were worth continuing with. On both plays, I got the idea, thought it was pretty good, started writing, and realized it wasn't. And then had no motivation to continue. But what I noticed is that they are bad for the same reason. They are both rooted in something unreal, and I'm getting lost in the details I need to justify it. For example (I'm embarrassed to even say this idea), one of them had to do with a person calling her past self on the phone once the technology for this has been created. What was I thinking? Then I had to wonder, in this world, is this technology available to everyone? So is everyone in the past world getting called from people in the future? And then there's the issue that it wouldn't technically be her past self because she never got a call from her own future self. And how far back in time do the calls go? By the time this is all explained, won't the listener be bored? But if it's not explained, will it make any sense? I might be thinking too far into this but my script wanted me to answer these questions and I didn't know how. Then I didn't even like the idea anymore, so why bother? I don't feel like a good writer anymore. I don't have any ideas, and I don't have any discipline. I know that I need to just keep doing it and doing it, but I'm holding myself to too high a standard and it's making it hard for me to live up to myself. I've been approaching art the same way I've been approaching everything else in my life, negatively and with minimal effort. How can I call myself a writer when I'm hardly writing anything? I want to be going faster and getting more done on this, but I keep starting over or gonig back to research. I just want an idea now that is rooted in reality so that I don't have to worry about those silly explanations that make things hard for me.