I’ve not been very clear about this, but I’m in Orvieto during these months for more than Italian language and culture. It is also a kind of self-styled writer’s retreat. This fact remained hidden even to me until I described my days to a friend and he clarified by giving them a name.
I spend three to seven hours a day writing, how much depending on I know not what. Initially it was all on plays. I resisted beginning this blog because I didn’t want to steal writing time from theatrical projects, but have found instead that these essays support the plays. I’ve learned much about narrative structure writing this blog, and all learning slops around like beer in a barrel on a bouncing ship; the pressure builds up and eventually it foams over everything.
At first, I cleaned up older projects that I’d never had time, perspective, or inspiration to finish. There were a number of them. I had had a play read by actors in Washington DC just before I left for Italy, and was feeling empowered as a writer. So, I began with revisions on that project, and kept right on going through the list. In late November, I picked up the single, very vague, opening scene for a play I thought I might begin work on last spring but never did, and in a single week a remarkably taut first draft flowed from it. I was so excited I went out for dinner. Of course, first drafts are tricky animals because while writing them I see connections in the story that barely exist on the page. I have to quickly return so as not to forget all the brilliance that is not actually there, and even then much of it escapes into the ether.
But this play (called Risotto) was different. It’s based on real people and events, even though the setting and circumstances of the play are invented, and I have a strong personal connection to the material. So, subsequent drafts rolled out as easily as the first throughout the month of December. On the last day of 2015, I felt good enough about the play to submit to a festival in upstate New York.
But there are spiders in the attic that don’t hatch for weeks. Here’s an example.
I wrote a short play three years ago for a festival in New York City. It was a rush job, I never really got it to submittable fit, and it predictably went nowhere. But I liked the story and characters and the overall shape. I last took it out in November, just before I began Risotto, and spend a few days on it — cut five or six pages and clarified the storyline. I was so pleased with myself, I submitted that one, too, in early December.
Then I continued to write everyday for a half-dozen hours for two and a half months.
Last Friday was the deadline for a short play festival. The script I had worked on (The Loyalist) was the only short play I had that seemed to qualify, so I planned to submit it, confident that November’s revisions had brought it up to snuff. On Tuesday night I decided to glory in my own fine work and read it through before submitting the play a few days early.
Good god. I was horrified! Horrified, I tell you! It was in no shape whatsoever to submit as anything other than an example of a meandering, formless, over-written early draft.
I experience an odd phenomenon of feeling embarrassed by unfinished writing even when no one else has read it. I shift into furious editing mode, slashing away, humiliated by what I previously thought good. Of course, it’s just me humiliating myself, but I often forget that’s the case. With The Loyalist, however, others had read it; or at least, I’d sent it out quite confident that those who did read would find it mighty and irresistible. The more public nature of that humiliation spurred immediate revisions late Tuesday night, as if I could take back the sloppy, meaningless, and pretentious dialog — that I had, in some distant way, forced on others — by wasting no time in changing it.
Wednesday and Thursday flew by in a flash. Seven and eight hours a day. Each morning I opened the file to read, and was horrified all over again at what I had thought was fine work the night before. By Friday, either the play had become stronger, though as yet unready, or I was growing accustomed to being horrified, and horror downgraded to despair. Despair being a more passive mood than horror, I had to work at keeping myself going on Friday, but I did, for another eight hours or so. When I put it and myself to bed that night, I felt like the piece had finally seen the beginnings of being a possible candidate for something someone might actually call a play, someday, maybe.
Blest by time zones, the Friday midnight deadline didn’t happen here until six the next morning, so I was able to rise early and take a final swipe at the script before sending it off. I’ve not read it again since. I’m a bit frightened . There is nothing can be done to improve its chances as a festival entry; and if it’s still bad, I don’t want to know until March.
In the meantime, I’ve discovered that Ristotto has a sequel, and that the sequel is a prequel to what will someday be the third in the series based on a script begun in 2014. The new, middle, play is called Fried Prawns. All three are pretty conventional in form, but seem to have potential for being otherwise pleasantly quirky. I would really rather love to end my self-styled writer’s retreat with a trilogy, or at least the bones for one. Lots of hours between now and then, but divided up by days, it is surely doable.
How does one ever declare a script (or a blogpost) finished? That is, I suppose, the next great lesson, and like all lessons so far in this hall of mirrors, one that will shape itself for me and me alone — just as it does for all of us who plunge into the night hoping to discover candles.