Slow going

I have to finish writing the last three acts of a four-act play by Tuesday and it’s difficult. I think people have this idea that writers can just sit at a computer and words flow through their fingers on the keyboard, but it’s really not like that at all, at least for me. I have to be in the right mood, in the right setting — but I think most importantly, I have to know what the hell I’m writing about. One reason why this is going so slowly is because I wasn’t sure where the story was going. I knew important plot points but I didn’t necessarily now how these points were connected. Being self-aware about everything finally has its positives though: I realized I needed to map out what I was going to write so I made an outline/beat sheet, which helped. Now it’s just a matter of getting to it and finishing it before Tuesday… wish me luck.

Reading Program

What most people correctly assume is that there is a lot of writing to do in the Creative Writing program. What many don’t know is that there’s a ton of reading to do too. Since all classes are workshop classes, there can be a lot of reading to do for classes, especially if you’re taking longer-form genre classes. Like what I somehow got myself into this year.

Last year, I was taking lyrics, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Lyrics and poetry were pretty one-pagers. Not much time to spend reading.

This semester, I’m taking stageplay (where we’re now reading 20-page one-act plays), TV pilot (where we’re workshopping four to five pilot/specs a class, but we’ve just finished doing outlines and now heading to scripts, which will be around 30-60 pages each), and creative non-fiction (where even the shortest submission is four to five pages). It’s my fault for signing up for these classes, but I guess I didn’t factor in just how much time I’d spend reading and giving feedback. I’m pretty sure others don’t spend as much time as me as evidenced by a short paragraph of feedback I get, but I really value feedback so I can spend quite a bit of time just writing good notes. It’s not really fair, but what’re you gonna do.

At least I had the privilege of handing in a 4,000-word personal essay for workshop last week… which, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if people will have actually read for tomorrow. Ugh.

What I’m writing at the moment

Well, I’m not going to give anything away just yet, but here’s something that’s inspiring me right now for a play I’m writing in consideration for the Brave New Playrites Festival. I think it’s turning out to be one of my better scenes.