It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

Just when I feel I have a handle on the new site design, it all falls apart. Suddenly, all the design ideas, the rules, the declarations, all the CSS/PHP/WordPress/Ajax/JavaScript/JesusHChrist means nothing. I question my sanity, much less my abilities. Who do I think I am trying to write this thing myself?

Time to put the code down, take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else. Come back later, and  go through everything step by step.

Time to … take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else.

Playwriting can cause similar head spinning. What seems like a good idea, falls apart, often near the end of the first draft. Sometimes by page 30. Sometimes in the second or third draft. Whenever. I find the play1 always falls apart at some point and necessitates a break. Sometimes a short coffee break will do. Sometimes a break requires a whole summer or two.

A dear friend, a wonderful writer who has been away from playwriting, is trying to pick up where she left off with a play from some eight years back. She kept referring to a pile of notes from a workshop we’d been in together, facilitated by a mutual mentor. She ran in circles, writing scenes from scratch, re-writing work she’d previously written, and worrying about those old notes. “They contained such valuable suggestions,” she kept saying, yet couldn’t bring herself to read them. The notes were keeping her from moving on. She’d let her Editor’s Mind create a great Distraction from writing.

I reminded her of her longevity as a writer in many other forms, her vast knowledge of theatre, and her great dramatic instincts. I suggested she set aside two hours, pick up the pile of notes, read through them, and then put them away. Perhaps keep a notepad nearby to capture good suggestions, or new ideas that came to her while reading. To read only the notes and enough of the script for them to make sense. To not linger over them in order to not treat the notes themselves as genius. When finished reading to put the notes back in a box, a drawer, the trash, or the fireplace. Be done with them. Move on, and return to the present, which happens to be writing now, not eight years ago.