Local Theater

Saturday night I attended a local performance of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the Beowolfe Alley Theater in downtown Tucson. I was reminded of Steinbeck's comment that writing should uplift the human heart. His play gives voice to the worst and the best of humanity in difficult economic and cultural conditions. http://www.steinbeck.org/MainFrame.html The local actors were superb.

Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men as a play-novelette (a form in which the play can be read like a novel, and the novel can be read as a play). He was not happy with it. That at least gives a novice writer like me a sense of hope.

With my own writing I often get lost in the writing. I start with a clear idea. As I go into the writing the whole idea becomes muddy as I go into it. Characters don't behave. They go off and do their own thing. Point at hand: last summer I drafted a novel about climate change in the Southwest. It was plot driven right from the start because I did not know much about character development. I had no less than twenty characters and the whole book was something like "and then this happened."

Now I am engaged in the arduous task of redrafting the story-in fact, just about throwing the first draft to the wind and starting over.

It's scarry because I wade into the story and then sink in a guagmire of writing starts and stops, bad writing altogether, and it feels like I have lost the purpose of writing it in the first place. Being an impatient kind of person, I am willing to only go so far into the agony of creation.

When does a writer know what is a false start? When should one start over, when file it away for posterity? Supposedly writers possess an intuitive sense, but I have never been intuitive about anything. I am one of those people that has to "go there" then try to make sense of it and hopefully understand where to go from there.

I look to my mentor, Margaret Atwood: Many of the things I've written have begun, and indeed have continued, against my better judgment. Okay, at least I am in good company.

Susan