Dark night of the soul -- hers, or mine?

Yesterday the pages flew by ... I described them as a river. Today: a trickle. After I'd been writing for hours, the page count was ... four. Four pages. To be fair, today's pages are mostly monologue, rather than dialogue, so they add up to more minutes than the usual four pages, but still. Difficult to get those words down today. It seems that writing the dark night of the soul is not so easy as I thought it would be. Oh, I so blithely tossed it off yesterday as I forecast today's writing. Oh yes, today I would put my protagonist through hell. Ha. Methinks it was the other way 'round. I am literally sweating today as I write. I realized as I wrote that I am sitting here with the windows closed, even though it has warmed back up to 80 degrees. So, I got up and opened the windows. Doh. Much better. Still, I did feel as though I were pushing the words through a sieve to get them out of my head and onto the computer. I'm hoping the rewrites will be easier.
Tomorrow I'll add to this scene, then on to the next where she will arrive at the solution.

Asylum No More ... Dark Night of the Soul tomorrow

I can't believe I wrote the entire Bad Guys Close In section today. It flowed like a river. I feel so bad for my protagonist! Of course I know how strong she is. I also know what lies ahead. But right now she is devastated. Every thing that could go wrong has gone wrong. As she goes to bed tonight, even her mother is having chest pain and trouble breathing. She seems to live for work and family and her extended family has pulled away from her -- again -- her mother is ill, and she just got laid off from work. Worse than that, her cousin whom she promised to help free from prison is now lying in the violent ward of the State asylum, with no hope whatsoever of being freed and in danger of being lobotomized. Oh things are very bad indeed.
Tomorrow she has to realize that she is beaten. Hope is gone. Then and only then will she realize that she has the solution and think of it. Of course the risks are unbelievably high, but then so are the stakes. Once she thinks of it, she will have to put it into place, start overcoming obstacles, and so on. Stay tuned.

Asylum No More ... halfway point

Writing plays has changed for me since I discovered "Save the Cat!" by Blake Snyder. Yes, it's a handbook for screenwriting, but really it's about structure a story. Once I've spent the necessary time setting up the foundation and framework, the rest is like painting the walls, decorating the house, getting ready to welcome the guests. Today I passed the midpoint, I finished page 56. Tee has reached her false peak, where everything seems to have come together. Starting tomorrow the bad guys are going to close in. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. By the time I get through with her, she will be reduced to a pile of wrung out snot. She will be hopeless, clueless, maybe drunk, possibly stupid. She will be ready to jump off a cliff. But she won't. Because while freedom is worth any sacrifice (the theme of this play), it isn't going to require her to sacrifice her actual life. She will somehow find a way out of this mess using her last best efforts to beat the bad guys. Well, we hope that's what is going to happen. Stay tuned.

Wanting to be a good person

My friend Jenny is doing her Mussar year. This is a year of doing something she has never done every single day. But it is so much more than that. She is also doing something called Mussar practice (see http://www.mussarleadership.org/), telling her readers about that as she goes along, how the practice relates to whatever new thing she has done that day.
I am following along, day by day. And I have been changed by Jenny's writings. I have been led to deep thinking about my own life, my own practices, my experiences. I have written about several of them here. And after today's entry by Jenny, I sought out the Mussar website and read about the practice because I wondered whether it was restricted to Jewish people. I see that it was developed for people of the Jewish faith, but I don't see why a person couldn't adopt these practices in order to become a better person. One would have to read the Torah. I've never read the Torah. I am a Buddhist, I guess I'm actually an agnostic. I believe we are all one in the sense that we are all made of the same materials, we all exist in oneness. I believe in the collective unconscious. I believe in reincarnation or parallel lives or something like it because I know for a fact that as a child I had memories of prior lives as an adult. That came from somewhere. So, I'm not looking to convert to Judaism, because I'm not looking for religion of any sort.
I do believe in morals, ethics, being good to my fellow beings, to the world. And in being thoughtful. Jenny's Mussar practice seems to me to be a practice of deep thinking, one of creating balance in one's life. I don't know whether it is for me. Certain aspects of it have been for me as I have followed her blog this year. Have you checked it out yet? Her post today is one I highly recommend for anyone. It is about all those thoughts that run through our brains when something unexpected happens -- and how she dealt with them, given her practice. Truly something to think about.

Writing Asylum No More

Yesterday went fairly well, once I spent an hour completely screwing up my Style format that I had set up to write my new play. I should never try to do technical work before I have my tea. So I stopped that and had my tea while answering email, reading Twitter, looking at FaceBook, reading NYtimes.com, and so on. When I finally returned to my play, thinking I would format it old school, Word wouldn't let me. My format was so screwed up, I couldn't write at all. Copy and move to a new blank document? that doesn't work in Word.
Only one thing to do. Learn how to fix what I had broken. Well, that took another two hours out of my day. Not to mention how many more gray hairs I sprouted, and cortisol hormones I sprayed throughout my body. Probably took a few years off my life as well. But, I did learn how to properly create Style formats! Still, it was 5pm by then, and I decided it was time for lunch. After that I might as well just hang it up for the day.
I didn't though. I kept going, and actually managed to produce some pages. Enough to realize that while I had been busy recruiting actors for the table read I have already committed to on October 4th (oh be quiet, I'll have a draft by then, I will!), I don't seem to have outlined any scenes onstage for one of the actors I have cast. Hm. In my mind, he's an important character. In the outline, he's never onstage. Ruh roh. I foresee a change acoming. Either on the page, or I have to cancel an actor that I really like. It has to be on the page. I like the balance of characters with him on the page. How to get him there? flashback? or do we have to visit him in the Pen? that's no fun. Looks like a flashback scene is coming up. This should be fun. Oh! Put that in the fun and games section! Thank you, Save the Cat!

Asylum No More

My new play is becoming real. There is a lot of work that goes into a new play before the writing of the script begins. At least there is for me, now. Now that I use "Save the Cat!" as my method for scriptwriting. Although the book is a primer on screenwriting, I have found it works for me for writing stage plays. Now before I start writing scenes, dialogue, I already know the spine, the theme, every character, what the protagonist wants, what are the obstacles, what the climax will be, when it will occur, and what the first and last scene looks like. I know what the catalyst will be, and on what page it will occur. Still, when I start writing the scenes, everything comes alive, it is all exciting and brand new and anything can happen! Sometimes things happen that have to be excised. I gently cut them out and put them in another file in case I can use them some other time. So, today I finished Scene Two, and in the next scene I will write in the catalyst that will send me off for the next 15 pages or so. I will bring in two more characters tomorrow and more conflict will ensue. There will be food and drink involved. (Director's nightmare. I'll try to keep it simple. Maybe the conflict gets so intense the food never makes it to the table.) This play already has a table read scheduled. October 4th. So, in addition to writing, I'm also busy finding actors to read the roles. This is exciting too. I have three lined up already of the seven. Two will be wild cards (playwrights) at the meeting, so only two more to nail down. I'm thrilled with the ones who have already agreed to read. This is why I write plays: it's fun. Like being a kid and you say, let's play (whatever), you be the king and I'll be the knight, and you be the dragon, and you two be the fairies, and you be the witch, and you be the queen, okay you can be a princess, and now when the dragon comes in .... etc. Only with luck and a bit of skill, you get to do it for a paying audience and they laugh and cry and applaud. We have a staged reading scheduled for this play as well. Fertile Ground New Play Festival. Jan 20, 21, 2012. 11pm at the Backdoor Theatre. You can come see it for yourself. It will be a bit more finished and polished by then. I promise. :)

Going forward ten years later

This past month, Pema Teeter has written daily, bringing memory to light, showing us a way to grieve, to share our stories at www.storycharmer.com and has done so in many different ways, some painful, some beautiful, some mystical. If you haven't checked out her site, please do so. As for me, I have remembered 9/11/01 and the days after as well as the grief that was reactivated by that horrific day. I've honored my own dead, and have spent some time grieving my past loves and dying friends as well as my sorry ass sins. Not necessarily all in this blog, some only in my mind. Today, I seek peace and peaceful reflection. The opposite of terror and war. And I send peace and healing light and love into the world.