I'm always processing several life lessons at once, but one of this
year's big lessons has been about understanding the fears that hold me
back, and how my mind inflates these fears far beyond their actual
consequence. In other words, It's Never As Bad As You Think. This goes
for a lot of things, whether it's cleaning the bathroom, or phoning a
cute guy, or sitting down in front of the blank page to write. (Why do
you think I am writing this blog post? Because I finally managed to
stifle the fear that my next post would have to be one of real
consequence and earth-shattering importance in order to atone for my
absence from the blogosphere.) I always, always inflate my minor
trepidations into major obstacles -- and then, when I finally force
myself to do what I need to do, I always, always find joy in the
journey. For, if you never do anything, how can your life have any
purpose or narrative zest? And I do love a good story.
And so it is with revising Pleiades. After
several months of feeling like I should sit down and do a new draft, I
now have an urgent reason to do so: it's going to be published! Volume 2
of Olympians Festival plays will be coming out this autumn (buy volume 1 here), with Pleiades
as one of the ten scripts therein. Labor Day is my deadline for
submitting a revised script to the publisher -- so I have one more week
to get it into a form that will be printed on actual paper and sold in
actual bookshops. (Eek!)
And for a long time, I dawdled. The reading of Pleiades
last fall was generally successful and I knew the revision wouldn't
involve major structural overhauls, yet there were also moments that
didn't land correctly, moments that could use more pop. I was stymied,
however, when it came to figuring out how to solve those problems. I'd
think for a while, not see a way to resolve it, despair of ever getting
the script into a form I could be proud of -- all without actually
opening up the document on my laptop and playing around with it. I fell
into a fatalistic mood, convinced that the problem was intractable, and
felt slightly panicked whenever I thought about my deadline for
delivering the script.
But when I finally forced myself
to look at the actual script, I found my instinct guiding me to where I
needed to edit. Change a few words here, get rid of that overwritten
passage... and hey, wait a minute, maybe if I approached the scene from this
angle... if a character reacted to that revelation with fury rather
than fear... if I wasn't so concerned with keeping the play under a
certain number of pages, if I gave my climactic scene a bit more space
to breathe... could that solve the problem that had given me such grief?
It
was not a flash of insight, more a steadily growing certainty that I
knew what to do to fix the scene. I had read about this kind of thing
happening to writers, but I guess I'd never quite believed I'd
experience it for myself. My old enemies, again: fear and mistrust. I
doubted myself, I feared the worst, I forgot how good it feels to come
up with a new idea, test its strength, and finally say, yes, yes, I think this will work.
Only
a couple of days before that, I'd read a quote from Hemingway about how
to write: "Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about
it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way
your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about
it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will
be tired before you start." Bah, humbug, I thought. Yet perhaps
that quote provides an explanation for what happened to me: my
subconscious, not my conscious mind, discovered what I needed to do to
fix the scene.
The famous advice "Kill your darlings"
has also been attributed to Hemingway. And the great thing about
returning to a script after several months away is that killing your
darlings becomes less painful to do. You find yourself attacking the
script with Occam's razor. Anything needlessly complicated or weakly
motivated will stand out in a way it didn't before. Things that seemed so important when you initially wrote them now cause you to ask yourself, "Why was I so convinced that this was the only right choice for this moment?"
For instance, in Pleiades, I had a very difficult time getting one of the characters onstage for the climactic confrontation. This scene needs
to happen, in order to wrap up the plot and provide a catharsis, and
yet one of the characters (Bruce) has good reasons to avoid the other
character (Moira) entirely. When I initially drafted the script, it took
me a whole afternoon to figure out how to get Bruce onstage -- finally I
decided that he would have a preexisting appointment with Moira's
father, so he'd show up at the house and run into Moira. But this raised
other problems: Moira's father is an unseen character in the script,
mentioned several times but never appearing. If I used him to motivate
the climactic scene, wouldn't the audience then expect to see him come
onstage and play a part in the climax? Wouldn't the audience start to
wonder where he was, and then say "Oh, right, he doesn't appear in this
play because then they'd need to hire another actor, and this play has
nine characters already," and then wouldn't that shatter the illusion
that I was constructing?
I realized that the less I
mentioned Moira's father, the less these questions and doubts would grow
in the mind of the audience. Very well -- but then that brought me back
to my old problem of how to get Bruce onstage. And then, suddenly, the
solution seemed blindingly obvious. As I said, it's not a
two-character play, it's a nine-character play. So instead of having an
appointment with the unseen character of Moira's father, why couldn't
Bruce have an appointment with one of the characters who does appear onstage -- Moira's sister Elena, say? And then that would allow for a nice little character beat between Bruce and Elena, too...
Plays are about action, not thought. And so, too, is life. You
can't get any sense of how to revise your play from merely thinking
about revising it. You have to open up that document and hack away.
2 comments:
Hi, Marissa! greetings and some news from Spain.
The Ceres Award (after the roman goddess, of course) is a yearly distinction to the best last year theatrical performance and has gone to Agosto (August) the Tracy Letts play. It was on stage from Dec 11 to Feb 12 in Madrid by the National Drama Company (a public theatrer of course). It had been premiered in Barcelona by the so called National Theater (another public company, of course) in catalonian.
The funny side is that the award is given in the National Classics Theater festival in Mérida (another public event, of course) that performs greek and roman plays on the original first century AD location of Mérida (Emerita Augusta).
felicitaciones a Tracy Letts y el Teatro Nacional!
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