I: Emotion thief

It's rare that I capture myself in a really good mood on this blog, or even, as I am tonight, merely content with my life and glad for no real drastic reason. Most of the time I'm down, distraught, procrastinating, fraught with self-loathing, bored, tired, some combination. Tonight I'm groovy, and as I've barely been around SWP lately, and particularly given the mid-crisis tone of my previous entry, I owed it to myself and my readers to get this mood in text.

I wrote yesterday about certain issues I was having with my creativity. It happens a lot, that I'll catch myself in a moment of doubt and it'll all come exploding out. And that's not to say those feelings aren't valid to a degree. I'm entitled to fear about my creativity, because after all, it helps spur me on and try to conquer them. The trick is not to be paralyzed by them, and I haven't yet. Writers who aren't the least bit critical of their own work are usually shitty writers. Ask Chuck Austen, who was frequently defending his brilliance to anyone who would listen. By contrast, John Lennon hated a lot of what he wrote.

This is of course no affectation on my part, it's as legitimate as I get. It's gotten to the point where Manda usually threatens to start throwing things at me when I muse about how hard it was for me to be sure Half-Past was really funny (hint: it was, by popular consensus.)

Part of my problem, yesterday, was that I had written this thing and it overlapped with Half-Past in certain ways. Bryan left a fairly insightful comment on that entry where he noted "I don't think it's always a bad thing, if you're new play is seeming like you're old one, maybe in writing this new one you uncovered something you didn't have before." And to a certain degree he's right, because I took a different angle on the same situation, and it had validity on its own terms, to an extent.

My problem was that I had stuffed this similar story inside another, promising one that got short-shifted in favour of the repeat, and the repeat was stripped of a lot of the stuff that made Half-Past so intriguing and outrageous. I had done myself a disservice. It also isn't that funny. There are some laughs but there's nothing in there that would've knocked 'em dead. It was a bunt when I should've swung for the fences. I was worried that I'd found the limits of what I was capable of doing as a writer, and it scared me.

So I was agonizing over this, in my private creative hell. Cary and I were brainstorming ideas for ways I could reformat it, ways I could inject some of that Half-Past magic, the Billys and Nancys and of course Perry Robbins. And of course the go-to-phrase was "Make it two acts," which I was keen on, so long as I could come up with something intriguing for that first act. I had a starting point, although to a degree it would've seemed like the premise of Half-Past with different characters, so there's me looping back on myself again.

So I was on the train today, reading "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" (a very engrossing read indeed, how I do love my nonfic) and my mind was drifting as it has a writerish tendency to do and suddenly like a sledgehammer against drywall I busted through this problem, I figured out how to tear the entire story down and rebuild it properly, not only so that the plot wouldn't be so meandering, but I would also be able to excise a greater volume of laughs.

Because you won't know what I'm talking about, I'll not outline the entire process for you, but essentially what I'm looking at doing is eliminating one (major) character, merging his story with an existing character (the one who was getting slighted, should've been the focus from the start,) and adding in the first character's opposite, who can be played for laughs.

It probably won't need the second act (or that is, it would be a new first act,) depending on how well I write this. I think a lengthy one-act might suffice. We'll see.

So when this all occurred to me, I felt a great deal of elation, that amazing, instant feeling you get when you know you've got something. The comedic possibilities were particularly exciting, because comedy is frigging hard.

I have a lot of insecurity about my ability to write comedy, because comedy is fickle. You can get an amused smirk or a chuckle out of a funny wording or an unexpected reaction. "Big laughs" take a lot of construction, or at least talent on the part of the performer. I credit so much of the laughter in Half-Past to the actors who were acting out things that seemed, a lot of the time, merely rather amusing to me on paper. Ryan Moran, who played Perry, was like a friggin' godsend. Not that that was a hard role to get laughs from, but he got pretty much all of them, and added his own.

Anyway, enough gushing. The day pretty much proceeded innocently from there, no stress, no complaints, a normal grocery shoppin' Tuesday. Although one of the shirts my dad brought back from out west for souvenirs was a girls' shirt, so... yeah.

I ordered a Halloween costume. It's funny, about Halloween. I usually had pretty crappy costumes as a kid. nothing elaborate but at least tailored to my interests. One year I was a ninja. One year, the Scream killer. Some years I just slapped on whatever random mask I could find. Mom was keen on homemade costumes and one year event attempted to gather materials for a homemade Spider-Man costume when I asked to be him. Once I realized what she was up to I nixed the idea in favour of, well, anything else, and quite frankly I can't remember what. But goddamnit I was not going to wear Biway hosiery for Spider-Man pants.

I've said too much.

Anyway. A few years ago, I went to Cary's ArtSci Halloween party, and had to basically improvise a costume, a pro bowler, an idea I'd already had years prior but never had an excuse to use. Given I already had the stuff, it wasn't too much of a stretch. The next year I went and gathered materials for a "Dude" Lebowski costume, which some got and some didn't.

This year, I actually spent some dough on it, a facsimile DHARMA jumpsuit, complete with Swan logo. I noticed a while back they were selling them on ABC.com for some ridiculous price, so I entertained the idea of buying one but decided it wasn't worth it. Then I found a decent-looking independently-made one on eBay (I did check the sizes) for about half the cost so I figured "Sure, what the hell." Eric joked that I could still use it afterward. Sure, if I wanna examine electromagnetic phenomena! Amirite?!

So I'm in high spirits. I just had a little brainstorming session with Cary, and things are looking good. now for reality to smash me back down to Earth...

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto