0202: Clear-eyed and able

The prophetic words of Jack Kerouac linger in my ears, 5 years later: "If I do nothing/ nothing does."

Those lines are the closing words of "Mexican Loneliness," which is the first poem that really convinced me poetry could be cool. As much as you would expect me to excel in Writer's Craft, I always did languish. At the time I just didn't have it in me to expose my inner-writer to the world. I was writing shitty poetry and crappy, insignificant stories.

Growth is important. That was the first of many growing moments for me as a writer/person. Definitely not the last. There was an initial burst of creativity after reading that piece, and then I spent about 2 and a half years growing into it before finally writing my first poem that I'd say was good, in 2007. The Kerouac poem also loomed large over my short stories, which have followed their own growth cycle. I've been working on these stories since 2005, and I'm still not sure whether I've written any really good ones, although they keep getting better.

I've been tinkering since 2005, yes, although any work I did before 2009 could be considered irrelevant in the light of another revelatory moment in Kuhn's short story class last summer. It wasn't the first time I'd read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," but it was the most impactful. Perhaps "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" was a bigger influence. Shut just started getting clearer for me, and I've been tweaking and refining ever since. I have two surviving drafts from before then that I intend to revive wholesale, and a bunch of others I totally ditched.

I tend to work on them in isolation. I do my best to let them create a context for themselves, but I am wary of over-repeated and over-explaining elements that are dealt with elsewhere. Whether it'll all make sense when put together, I have yet to be certain. This isn't even about them.

No, as I've been building up my cache of stories (ones few people will likely read) I've been neglecting my slightly more pressing concern: the stage.

It was just a little over a year ago now that I was coming down off the incomparable high of my first true stage production and preparing for its follow-up. The first play I churned out didn't work the way I'd hoped (not that I've scrapped the idea, I'm keeping it up my sleeve.) It was a few months before I really came up with a good alternative, and even that, again, had a shitty start. The difference was, I was more capable of seeing how to fix the problems with that one, rolled up my sleeves and got to it. As of December, I had a pretty decent working draft.

Time goes by, and you begin to second-guess yourself (this, incidentally, applies to everything about my life far beyond writing.) I was in fact working on a major revision of the play when Cary revealed we wouldn't be doing EAS this year. This kinda hurt my motivation and I just dropped it in favour of those stories I'd been putting off even longer, now that I had creative energy and focus to spare. It generally worked out and for the last 5 months, I've been fairly pleased with my output. But.

With everything going on in my life, everything's sort of gone on on hold. And I say "everything going on" and it implies I've a busy, exciting guy, when the truth is just that I have a garden of distractions and irritations to contend with. This week I've been working extra hours because we decided to rearrange the store, so I got to do some wonderfully repetitive tasking while sales probably plummeted. It was actually kinda fun. But anyway.

Tonight I was doing my usual "sitting at the computer doing absolutely nothing" shtick when, as it occasionally does, it occurred to me that I could be writing? But what? But WHAT? If you've been reading this entry, you should be able to guess, because even if I was a shitty writer (and I don't believe I am) I'm at least capable of building to a proper conclusion.

So I did what I've been intending to do but putting off for months -- fucking scrapped the earlier draft. That's not true, it still exists and will largely be incorporated into the new draft. But whereas previous drafts were written by grafting new dialogue into the established framework, I started a new document and will be wiring it together without as much allegiance to those old lines, so as to encourage myself to do better. So far it's worked. I've got a couple of newly-written pages that cuts down on a fairly lengthy opening scene that probably wouldn't garner as many laughs as I'd hoped. I only got about 4 pages in before losing steam, but it's important to dip one's toes in. I intend to keep going back, rather than return to procrastination, and eventually rebuild this play. Many of the jokes are strong, and most of the characters have gotten quite sharp. But hey, it took 6 years for Half-Past to get to its ultimate form, so getting this one into shape in just a year would be a good feat.

Anyway, it was good to do this, since issues pertaining to my course selection for next year have gotten me a bit wound up. I need to straighten this shit out. After all, if I do nothing, nothing does.

See what I did there?

I'm a writer, sometimes.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto