Celebration Day

I have written these blogs for a semester and a few weeks and have mostly focused on problems a writer might have when trying to work. This week, a stage play I wrote went into live rehearsals. It is going to be produced and performed by Lehman College in late October. Yesterday I attended the first live rehearsals and I honestly am speechless to describe the experience, but I am going to try.  For a person who lives by his words this is a quite strange dilemma.  I have been daydreaming my entire life. Some of those daydreams have become coherent stories that I have rendered on the page. However, at no point have my fantasies evern walked and talked in front of me, and yesterday that is exactly what happened. The character that I made up in my head were taken up by actors and portrayed and my head can’t wrap around it. To further contribute to the otherworldliness of the situation, this play has very little autobiographical content in it. The death of one of the character’s father is the same as my own grandfather, but that is where any parallels to my ends.  These are just characters I built in my head to tell a story that came from a fragment of a dream I had.

I am sure that veteran movie makers and playwrights eventually get acclimated to this feeling but right now I honestly don’t know how that happens.  My close friends have asked me what it was like and I still don’t think I am conveying the emotion correctly with the vocabulary I have. And we are only at rehearsals. I can’t imagine the feeling I will have when I see the full production happen.

All of this is said because when I reflect on my journey as a writer, I think that one of the things that is hardest for me is to acknowledge my successes.  Being a perfectionist, and being in awe of people who do the creative things that I like to do: writing, music and art, I have trouble accepting praise because I feel that the work I am producing is not worthy of comparison with the masters of the craft.  So, when my professor and the director of the play was lauding the writing, I felt uncomfortable. That is something that needs to be worked on and I don’t think I am alone in needing to address this.

Writing is a mostly lonely occupation. The feedback we get is usually few and far between and is either trusted readers who are biased to our favor in their opinion, or cold editorial rejection of our submissions that we try not to take to heart but whose cumulative effect can be discouraging. So, we must celebrate ourselves. If you have a goal of 1000 words a session and you get 750 instead, don’t beat yourself up over the 250 you didn’t get done. Be grateful for the work you got done, and celebrate the fact that you are in the fight and trying.  And should you actually complete something, then take a moment or two to acknowledge the lofty ground you are standing in. I read something a long time a ago that said one in ten people who said they wanted to write something ever actually attempted it, and that only one in ten that attempted it actually completed anything. If you are in that one percent of writers, pat yourself on the back. I think that we word people, who devour books and read the dictionary for fun, take for granted that we can communicate effectively with our words. The danger is that we hold ourselves to a personal standard that most of the population cannot aspire to, and we feel like a failure when we don’t attain that standard. At the risk of sounding elitist, I will say that even our worst completed drafts are better than a drawer full of false starts and vague outlines. 

I want to leave you with this thought in mind. You are a unique, creative being, and you will stumble through the process a lot of the time. Sometimes, though, you will get it completely right, and it is a feeling that needs to be acknowledged and nurtured. Those memories will help you through the dark time when the words are far from you mind and fingertips.

Keep writing.