Writing

It's funny. I have written three drafts of this new play in five weeks and on a day that I'm supposed to be taking a break, I decide that I have to write more blog entries. I feel lost if I'm not writing. It's how I make my way throughout this world. It's like not walking. I have to get exercise.

I was driving down California in Pasadena today and something about that street really moves me. It's idyllic, of course. The tree lined streets and the big houses. But I can really calm down. It quiets me, I suppose.

I started writing when I was in the seventh grade. My teacher, Miss Russell, a very fat woman who could have been an unhappy lesbian, encouraged us to start writing fiction. At the time I was into comic books: The X-Men and the Fantastic Four especially. I really responded to the family drama aspect of it, although I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to articulate that at the time. I loved that these people had superpowers and still reacted to life as normal people would - with motivation, with their own personal issues and sometimes they wouldn't make the best decisions. I liked the human aspect of these comic books.

Then Mr. Molinelli encouraged me to write when I took his fiction writing class. Then Alyce Miller in college loved one of my short stories and it was published in the Santa Clara review probably my sophomore year. Then I discovered plays. I loved the theatre but I was a shitty actor. And I was an okay dancer at the time, but I loved to write. And the most amazing human being named Erik Ehn came to my school to teach me. And he changed my life. I became a playwright at the tender age of 20.

And since then I've done a lot of writing. I've written plays and I've gone to grad school and I got interested in TV. Then I started writing lots of specs. Will and Grace, Sex and the City, The Bernie Mac Show, Two and a Half Men, Entourage, The New Adventures of Old Christine, The Office, 30 Rock, and Modern Family. And countless spec pilots. On and on and on...

For a while writing wasn't about how I saw the world. It was a way to make money. To get known to get opportunities to write what I care about. Then I wrote a play called "On the Subject of Lilla" about my grandmother and my Dad and an abusive relationship that started out in one generation and affected another relationship between father and daughter years later. People loved it. My ex loved it. My friends loved it but no one wanted to produce it. So I went back to try and do the TV thing.

Then one day years later I realized that I had about two or three play ideas stockpiled that I had put off because I was working on TV spec pilots that weren't seeing the light of day. So I wrote a play called "Curse of the Asian Child" that was about a woman who had sex with her teenage son years earlier and what happens when her other children, now adults, find out. Then I wrote an adaptation of Medea I had an idea for in grad school. Then I wrote another play about a man's search to find the animal who had given him his life back after cancer and it was called "Endanger'd Species." All of those are sitting in a drawer somewhere. But I had written them over the course of a year.

Then I had this idea for a play based on a painting I saw. "The Snake Charmer" by Jean-Leon Gerome. The image of a young naked brown boy from the back holding a snake and trying to make money as older men sat entertained seemed to affect something in me. So then I made up a story about a 17-year-old Jersey kid who dances for money in New York in 1978. And a story about an art history professor and her Mexican student from East LA. I threw in a fictionalized account of Gerome becoming obsessed with the subject of his painting. And that reading is happening on Monday.

When it came time for me to submit material to the O'Neill Playwrights Festival last year, "The Snake Charmer" wasn't done. So I decided to send in "Lilla" even though it was an older play but one I had never submitted to the O'Neill. Then it became a finalist. And it was because I didn't get into the O'Neill that I decided I wanted to be in a room working on a play with a bunch of actors and a director. So I gave myself a deadline and I wrote the play starting on May 20th. Then turned in a finished draft to my director around June 9th or 10th. Then we read it, I took notes. Got notes from Casey, my director. Wrote a new draft up to page 99 and turned it in the following week. And while I was working on it, my father was admitted to the hospital because of his chronic congestive heart failure and kidney problems. His lungs were filling with fluid. Then I had rehearsal and it went poorly. The modern storyline still wasn't working. I cried after rehearsal because it felt like my world was crumbling. But something had stirred in me after my breakdown and it was with renewed focus that I started draft number three. And that's what we're going in with tomorrow.

Then in the Fall I'm going to workshop "Curse of the Asian Child" at this NYU Grad Actors Showcase. With one of my fave actresses and an all Asian cast. So I'll start that rewrite right after we finish our workshop with this play. Then there's the play I want to write about a band writing an album. And I need to go back to Endanger'd Species at some point.

I was also working on this Art Thieves Pilot in the winter and spring that I did six drafts of. But I'm just not happy with it. So I might make that a different pilot about superheroes.

I'm learning to see the world again through my writing. It's not like I don't want to make a living at it, but more than that I want my life to be enriched because of my writing. That's ultimately more important and I believe that encompasses the same goals I had before and more.

I hate writers who write about writing...but look at me, I just did it. Raspberries!