Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

The “everyone loved it” concept is not a sound method of playwriting. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this from writers. It’s a mark of amatuer writing. A kind of writing by emotional validation. I have found, for instance, actors are often not a good barameter of what is great writing. I’ve seen in my own workshop, how attached actors can get to characters they are playing, and they will make allowances for the writer instead of pushing the writer to do better. Not all actors. I love actors. Absolutely love ‘em. I just don’t write by how much an actor may love what I have written.

Lately I’ve been delightfully struck how members of my playwrights group have become invested in certain aspects of my current play. And they want a very desolote ending to my tale. Their ideas of where the play should end up, does not reflect what I believe I am writing. Nor would it reflect who I am as a writer. They are expressing how they would write it, reflecting their political, emotional, spiritual bents. In a low moment, I fretted over feeling I was out of sync with my beloved writers. Then I remember I am often out of sync with them. (I am the one, after all, who shamlessly proclaimed Wicked had the best musical book since Gypsy.)

This is the fine, crucial, line. Listening to what works, what doesn’t, and staying true to your own vision.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote,

Hope is the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.

More me than you, I’m sure. IMHO

Yeah.