When Asked for Advice on “The Writing Life”…

The directness of writing can make it very torturous. A vague desire for goodness is constantly shattering my own trust in my work.

There is an extremely valuable challenge in mitigating the voices inside of my head. As a playwright, the multiplicity of perspectives I have held in my work is sometimes a great asset, but if it’s so loud in my head, I can’t think, that’s a hindrance. Discerning between the voice of intuition and the voice of ego is a really good place to start when considering the inner critic. I think ego has to be a vehicle through the conflict of your inner dialogue. Urgency is a point of contention in my inner dialogue. If something feels urgent, all of the me’s need to think through why that is.

In the work that I have done with teaching artists and as a creative consultant with game designers, filmmakers, theater producers, and multi-media artists, I encourage everyone to develop some kind of writing practice. The page is a place to get things clear first for you and then decide if what arrives there should be private or public. I am really interested in annotating my journal writing to find patterns, recall words, and see how the story of my life has developed.

Writing nests well within a broader practice that I partake in, in between writing full plays, and screenplays, which I call creative archiving. This is an expansive way to think about archiving beyond cataloging what has happened with names, dates, places, and evidence. It’s a way to collect the material that encompasses the process. For me as a writer, I cannot work with just a computer. I write long hand daily, and I also love to collage, to literally tear up the paper ephemera of my life and reframe it or create new compositions with it. This helps me think twice about the stuff of my life which can be directly applied to my dramatic writing practice. Finding Ikea directions behind a couch inspired a whole play for me.

That’s the final thread I want to weave in here: Finding requires paying attention. Artists need to pay attention. Writers particularly need to pay attention to tone, to repetition, to how they feel inside, to how the world responds to feeling. At this point in my life, it actually has become easier for me to hone my skills in paying attention than it has to become a “good” writer.