When I was a kid, I thought everyone wrote about personal things. I mean, that's the way I started writing. I started writing things that were personal to me.
Sure, I loved comic books. But I even felt like some of those major storylines which are still considered legendary were personal.
The Dark Phoenix Saga: about a woman who has such evil in her that she has to split her personality to keep the evil guarded. Then when it becomes unleashed, she destroys everything in her path. When her humanity returns to her, she knows she has to pay for her destruction and sacrifices herself as penance.
The Judas Contract: a woman infiltrates the Teen Titans with the sole purpose of destroying them from within. It actually has a sort of thriller, horror quality to it.
In both cases, the story was driven by a woman, who ultimately had to square off with her own sense of humanity and justice. Those stories seemed to have a power to them that seemed like it would come from personal experience.
I wrote about the cute boy across the street who I used to stare at from my window, who seemed so cool and cute but who ultimately was living with a family that was using their garage as a meth lab.
In my teenage novel, he swam in a pool across the street and I would stare at him from down below. I used to read a lot of my Dad's Penthouse Forum. Obviously, the reader's letters were a hell of a lot more interesting to me. They had a voyeuristic quality to them and a forbidden sexuality to them as well. I remember the one where this guy had hidden in a closet at the local sorority and the women dressed him up in stockings and made him service them. I remember one where a guy was masturbating in the woods and another man watched him from afar and they started having sex. Anytime that a guy described another guy going down on him or kissing him, I was interested. I loved the forbidden. And I was reading these magazines while my parents were out of the house. So everything pleasurable seemed like it needed to be a secret.
The play I wrote to get into grad school was about the homeless youth I worked with as a guy fresh out of college.
Everything I see now seems to be about some sort of issue or historical notion. There aren't a lot of characters. The characters are an afterthought. And a lot of these plays are written by people I know personally and admire. They are my peers. It's just not what I do. And maybe that's why my work isn't produced more. Among countless other reasons, I imagine. But I have to keep it personal. I write from my personal experience and I have a very expansive, non-judgmental, non-moralistic, non-white point of view. Certain things matter to me that don't matter to a lot of my peers, who are mainly white. It just is what it is. And it's a big blanket statement. But I've discovered this along the way.
I'm thinking of applying to this commissioning program that takes certain themes and asks writers to write a fresh play based on certain criteria. One of the criteria is that race doesn't need to matter and that you can have characters of various ethnicities. That seemed like a very white POV or at least a very homogeneous point of view. Certainly not homo generous and certainly descriptive of what I need to get away from. My world isn't just one ethnicity and I normally don't write with specifics in mind, although in a recent play I did because I felt like the play would benefit from making one character black. Partially because it would turn a certain idea in the play on its ear and it would place the emphasis on class versus race. The same actress would play another character in the play who has a white child. And I don't want to explain it. I don't want the actor playing her child to have an ambigious look. If this kid is blond and fair and she's a dark black woman, I'll be super happy. I don't have to explain that maybe he was adopted or maybe she's a step mother or make her light skinned. I actually want her to be darker complected because she's a University professor in one story line and I want to see a dark African American woman in a position of power. And I want to see what happens when she tries to "save" her young Mexican American student from East LA. The whole story was different when this woman was white.
For me, it's all got to be personal. I can write something that's not. But it's not usually very good. And writing from a personal place doesn't just mean that I'm writing people who act and talk like me or who are from the same races that I'm from. Or who are gay. I can write those characters in just as impersonal way as I'd write anyone. Sometimes those characters that feel close are the ones I apologize for because I feel like I need to make those characters the "super" version rather than the flawed version. I almost idealize them or smooth out all the edges. And true equality is when you can write a character who does things that are complicated or open to judgment and still have that character be from an underrepresented group. That character does not need to speak for all black, latin, asian, gay, lesbian, transgendered, dumb, mental, handicapped person. They just need to speak for themselves and they should still be allowed to be misguided, misanthropic, stupid, crazy, weird, imperfect assholes when and if they need to be. That's real equality.
But I do feel like those of us who have been outsiders are better writers. If you have been an observer, on the outside looking in, then you can see everyone free of judgment and just let your people be who they are. And that's a beautiful thing. But that beauty can only be exposed when you keep it personal.
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