Some of the details are fuzzy....clouded by grief or clouded by distance...I was on the payphone at the pool of the apartment complex in Tahlequah where I was doing an outdoor drama. I'm not sure who I was talking to...I think I had called to check in...but that doesn't make sense, because no one would have been there at the hospital...it was already over...maybe I had called a friend of his...I remember that whoever I was talking to was surprised that I didn't know yet.
Even now, the guilt floods in at the loss of details...why don't I remember who told me...why don't I remember his birthday...
He is more on my mind this year...maybe because fifteen is a more commerative number than twelve. Fifteen years ago today. Maybe because the first play I ever wrote (14 years ago) was about his death and I've only just started writing again. Just started facing the fact that my life is about more than that one story...or is it?
We talk in class about how playwrights tend to write the same play over and over...same theme/story, slightly different way of illuminating it. I've even noticed that in the two plays I've been working on, two entirely different plot lines, two entirely different time periods and settings, that my two main characters are strikingly similar and seem to be searching. And neither of them know exactly what they are searching for. My instructors say they can tell that I, as playwright, don't have the answer either. They see it in the writing.
And I return to the theme of my story I started writing fifteen years ago...my search...and I find this line: "It's the knowing that's tricky."
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4 comments:
I don't remember most of J's funeral. It's all a haze of little things.
And who says we have to have all the answers? Maybe it's OK to just not know.
I agree with you. And I think the search is an important story.
I'm just trying to navigate it in a way in which my characters can still make strong dramatic choices.
...not be so wishy-washy...
It is the knowing that's tricky.
I just ask myself, "What would Xena do?" & I always end up with over-dramatic dialogue & great fight scenes. Of course, that might not work for your play. Seriously though, keep on writing! I think the knowing & the finishing are what's tricky. I don't have a single writer friend or partner who have yet to actually finish anything. Write, but make sure you get to the important part: THE END.
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