Following the Trail

As some of you may know, our next full-length show is by me. It's the first full length play I've written since Halcyon was founded. I've stayed pretty busy, but haven't written (read: completed) as much.

A lot of it will be written (or re-written) in the rehearsal process, but it's been a little weird at times. It had been a while and I had forgotten how I tend to write. Some of it is like riding a bike. Other parts have really been rediscovering what gets my imagination revved up.

I tend to start with images. I can't write anything if I can't see it. It starts out fuzzy and as the image becomes clearer, I can start to hear the rhythm. It’s like I’m walking up to a bonfire in the woods at night, if you’re coming in from a different direction than where everyone else parked.

 I know you're probably supposed to start with the dialogue. The words. After all, that's what a text is. A string of words on paper.

No matter how much I try to change, it's the same now as when I was five. I see the image hovering around me. If I can catch it and hold on long enough, I can start to hear the rhythms. If I'm lucky, it starts pulsing in me and it's as if I was rolling back the wheels of a wind up car. If can hold on long enough, and pull back far enough, dig down deep enough before the spring breaks, the sparks will go up in the air and I can start to hear the characters voices and the words will shoot forward.

Usually I think I have a pretty good idea where it is heading. Usually I'm wrong. I have to follow the trail of the story. If I can hear the music off in the distance, I head that way. It  tends to be the exact opposite direction I thought the story was going. (Though more often than not, it ends at the point I had thought it would. It just takes a different trail.)

At one point, I thought Trickster was going to be a futuristic, dystopian hip-hop play. However, every time I tried to steer it that direction, I got stuck. I lost the trail. It had been a while, but I should have known better that to fight the current. Some writers may be able to. I can’t.

Instead of hip hop, this sounds a lot more like what is swirling around me as I’m writing it.

What works for me probably doesn’t work for anyone else. Just about every writer know has a different way of working, a different process. Whenever I forget to just follow the trail, I get blocked. I can't seem to cut a different path. And if by some miracle I can veer off course and still write, it's usually crap. I end up fumbling around in the dark looking for a path.

If I'd just remember how I work and go with it, I could probably cut out half the time it takes to write a play. But no, for some reason, every time I start something new, I think it's going to be a new process of writing.

But it's not. And once I finally give in to that, I can actually write something worth actually sharing with someone else. For me the stories change, how I write doesn't.

Once the first drafts are sketched out, I like re-writing with actors in the room. That's what we're starting to do now. More on that to come...

Playwrights out there what does or doesn’t work for you? How would you describe your process?