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Amiel Gladstone

Frank Borg

Joy Russell

Maiko Bae Yamamoto

Tim Carlson

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i hate writing, but I love...

"I hate writing, but I love having written."

I looked up this quotation on the Internet, as it's one of my favourites, and it pretty well summed up what I'd been feeling lately (it's now two weeks passed deadline on this piece). I thought that Dorothy Parker had made the statement. I could practically hear her saying it, in that languid way of hers - or that languid way of Jennifer Jason Leigh's, anyway. So I Google the quote, and I find it attributed to a variety of writers; Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Joan Didion, even Stephen J. Cannell, creator of such hit TV series as The A-Team.

That's really how much of my writing process works. I have an idea, or a random thought, or an image, and I sit down at the computer. Then panic sets in. I immediately abandon the idea and see what else - anything else - I can do to keep my mind off the anxiety of filling pages and trying to come up with more good ideas. I make some tea. I stare at myself in the mirror ("Who are you?!"). I pace. I listen to music. I clip my toenails, outside on the back porch. I think about the brilliant play that I'm going to write for Jillian Fargey. In it, she is standing alone onstage, her face shining. The audience is rapt. It's theatre at its purest form. Then I think about what she's actually saying and the panic starts creeping back again. I surf the Internet. I organise the CDs. I make more tea.

Music can be an important part of the process. I tend to listen to things that have lyrics that I can plagiarise. I was listening to Radiohead's Kid A while writing The Black Box (the last play I've written). In the song "Idiotheque" lead singer Thom Yorke starts wailing "this is really happening, this is really happening." Thom has said the lines were chosen for phonetic sound rather than the actual meaning of the words (that's on the 'Net, I just checked). Wouldn't it be fun if we could write plays that way? No regard for meaning, just sound. I suppose some people do. I suppose sometimes it seems like people have. Anyway, there's a character in The Black Box that says to the audience "this is really happening."

I also use music to underscore, so sometimes I write to the specifics of a track of music. I'll write so that the rhythm of the music informs the rhythm of the speech. I like to write words that actors will get a kick out of saying. Lines that empower them somehow. That they can really get behind. Maybe it's ideas that they always wanted to say. Maybe it's stuff that they will never get to say in real life.

Beginnings are easy. There are always too many ideas for a beginning. There's one character, with a monologue about how it all began. Or two characters about to fall in love. Or out of love. Or they're brother and sister and this is a play about their parents. Or it's all the characters, not sure where they came from or how they got there. It's a man alone at the piano. Or alone with a guitar. It's a young girl on a tire swing. Or she's an older woman playing herself as a young girl. It's a young actor fresh out of theatre school wearing a pig mask. It's two boys drunk in a car. It's a man and a woman dancing. It's four characters setting the table - it's a dinner party. It's three people on a back porch in the middle of the night, when two would be much more comfortable.

Endings usually make themselves known, too. It's the middles, all that middle stuff, that's the real work.

There are images that keep recurring in my head, that keep wanting to be written about. Losing my virginity. What the fuck is happening between me and my father? True love. This neighbourhood, filled with low income families and drug dealers, and Asian woman that seem to troll the alleys, and come into the backyard looking in garbage cans while I'm clipping my toenails.

I want to write about The Way We Live Now, the way we have relationships, the way it seems like most of us aren't getting married, the way we get by, my God, just getting by. The way life just blows you out of the water, the way it's never what we expected. We are told that life isn't going to be what you expect, but we don't really know what that means, and then WHAM! you're living - like, as an adult - and one thing after another comes along, and you think, "I didn't expect that."

So, there's some writing. I feel better already.