Spring at Last

Spring really did come to River Writers last Friday. Everyone had new work - it's been a while since we were all so productive in one week - and it was all good work. Bill had the second act of his new play, a one woman show which will delight actresses of a certain age, who very seldom get such fabulous roles. Andrew had a new installment of a story which has been in progress for some time, in which he explored the emerging identity mystery at its center. Claudia had a first draft of a meaty new poem which took a very unique point of view. Hilary responded to the workshop's demand for more with another installment of her memoir. And I actually managed to produce five new pages of my own short story.

Sometimes it does seem like the stars fall into alignment, and maybe we shouldn't ask why. But of course, being writers, it's our job to ask why, all of a sudden, following a month in which we hadn't had any particularly extensive contact, we all suddenly produced new work. Maybe we all just needed a little more sunshine. But it might be an interesting trail to follow - do we always write more in the spring? Are January and February just universally depressing? Is there such a thing as Seasonal Writing Disorder? If we all moved to Cancun for the winter would our word totals rise? And, most importantly, are there any generous billionaires out there who would care to subsidize the experiment?

Table Manners in Buenos Aires

Trips can be a wonderful source of inspiration for a playwright. Out of my trip to Mexico City last year came my play, The Best Place I’ve Ever Lived. My trip to Argentina last month inspired me a little differently. Sitting at a cafe (or perhaps more of a lunch restaurant) in Buenos Aires during a rainstorm one afternoon, I couldn’t help watching an older woman having a cup of coffee with a much younger, but bored, woman--her daughter, perhaps? I don't know why the woman fascinated me--her glasses? her old-fashioned hairdo? her judgmental expressions? -- but she did. As I continued to stare at them, I couldn’t help wondering about--and composing--their back story. Who were these people? Why were they here, and what were they doing? What made them the way they appeared to be? I felt compelled to write something about them--especially the older woman. 

Then I remembered that I came up with the idea for my short play, Table Manners, in the same way--staring at some oddly-behaving people in a restaurant in Manhattan. Throughout my stay in Buenos Aires, I kept seeing people in restaurants whose back stories I wondered about. Before you knew it, I had come up with ideas for several such short plays or vignettes and eventually tied them all together into the idea of a play consisting of a series of such stories--in cities around the world. I still like the name Table Manners and think that’s what this longer, episodic play should be called, too. I’ll just have to consider how to avoid confusion with the shorter play with the same title.

Six Days Until Spring

It's been a long, cold, snowy winter, and I can't say it's been quite as productive creatively as I wish it had been. For some reason, I haven't been finishing the stories I've started, which is a bit of a relapse back to an earlier mindset of almost a decade ago, when most of my stories sat around half-finished. I was on a short story tear for about five years, getting most of them done and published. Then I began a novel, now I'm 2/3 of the way through the novel and suddenly I've produced the first five pages of three short stories.

This may be all back to fear of finishing the novel, or it may be that spring is coming and ideas are bubbling up, and I'll get back to the stories and/or the novel during the (rapidly approaching) warmer months. Or, hey, it could be the collapse of the Dow (but wait, isn't that rising again?) or the impending mayoral elections (although, who am I kidding? I'm voting for Bloomberg).

Or more likely it's all the energy I've been putting into my nonfiction lately. Although I would vigorously scold any of my coaching clients who said so of their own work, I probably don't think of my nonfiction as requiring the same creativity as my fiction. There must be some unacknowledged scale in the back of my mind, with fiction, drama, and the odd libretto or song lyric on one end and nonfiction of all kinds on the other. This probably requires some rigorous examination and revisiting - but I'm much too tired after this weary winter to take it up right now. As soon as I see a daffodil somewhere, maybe I can start thinking about it.