Wednesday, May 2, 2012
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.
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I know exactly what you're talking about here - the same thing happens when I write or paint - sometimes it happens when I'm script doctoring, too. It's awful, and you back yourself into some sort of corner, fenced in my the confines of the idea and menaced by some stupid logic, like you're cornered by some sort of retarded animal, but it's scary and it stops you.
ReplyDeleteI end up remembering , or rather, forcing myself to remember, that I'm involved in a fiction, not a fact-tion, that it is art and ideas and therefor not subject to the laws of physics or chemistry. If there are fish flying then there are fish flying, and in the world of the work, that is fine and accepted. One doesn't question a violinist floating over the town in a Chagall painting, one just deals with the image. The trick, in the Chagall painting, is perhaps to have the overall image provide a certain type of space - a "logical" space, for a violinist to float in the sky.
I'm thinking that one must avoid justification and instead concentrate on the nest in which the ideas sit. Or forget all of it and just write a story that is interesting, or provide some sort of visual narrative that is interesting. I think you can take a clue from your own poetry. In your poems place, ideas and people are shifting, sometimes sharp, sometimes vague, and the "narrative" of the poem might jump from a bedroom to someone coming in at an airport, but it generates meaning and scent what the poem is about more than see it, which I think is better anyway. Movies can be like this, are like this, they shift and juxtapose like dreams do. Just keep the train moving and let it be compelling.
So, the above is the JUSTIFICATION for why you should just throw in the ideas - why it is fine if a woman calls herself in the past and the issue of the technology isn't an issue - but it isn't a road map to HOW you ALLOW yourself to do this.
How... from my own experience it is a matter of getting a hold on what you want to say and getting a hold on the key moments, those key moments in the plot, and knifing towards them with vigor. Momentum carries us past and over a lot of the gaps in construction or plot. Can you imagine The Wizard of Oz, if they slowed the beginning down and spent a bit of time on the physics of tornados, how hard it would be for the audience to make the jump, along with Dorothy and the house, to Oz? But we don't, we're pulled along and the movie is always moving so we go with it. And it helps that it goes from black and white to color.
That shift to color is funny. Oz in color, compared to Kansas in black and white... Oz is colorful and that helps us accept its unreality. But to an audience, the real world is color, and the world of the movies at that time was black and white, so the shift to fantasy actually happens when we go to Kansas in the beginning.
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ReplyDeleteYou need some sort of "disclaimer" at the very beginning such that the audience knows the parameters of reality and what is to be expected. The beginning of Metamorphoses had Ellen dressed oddly playing an accordion and singing and talking, and this was done to lay out the ground rules for the audience - the 4th wall will be broken, there will be a low fi cheap looking element to the show, there will be music, it will be funny and perhaps a bit snarky. The stage, all dark and moody, establishes another side of the stage reality, that there's minimalism at work, that the audience has to do some constructing in there own heads (I think people waiting for the show to start spend some of their time guessing as to what the set was suppose to be - is it a castle? A cave? A bridge? In this respect they're priming their own pump of imagination for later in the show when they're asked to let the set change as the scene changes. Then there's the whole bit with the tea lights and the cave men, etc., which establishes more of the production conventions, the pace of change, etc. All this is thought out and provided at the top of the show so the audience doesn't get sidetracked by girls holding up sheets to be trees. We don't want the audience wondering, "why don't the girls have tree costumes?" If the stage was filled with realistic trees, then we could't have done the sheets.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing a lot here. The point is take control of your world from the start and lay down its particular logic.
Now... that you're negative and minimal in your effort is more about ending high school and less about talent or the material you're working on. Cling close to the momentum of the work itself. I find I feel better going out to the studio and painting crap than staying inside the living and thinking of perfection.
L