Any Writers Blues? by Pat Hanson 11_09
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Every Writers Blues?
Subtitle: Feel the Fears and Write Anyway.
“There’s something to be said about the humility and feeling exposed you’re going through,” Michael, the most erudite of member of my Thursday morning writing group said.
“Great,” I replied, clutching my stomach and pretending to double over, “I can’t wait to figure that one out.”
“Yeah, of course,” other friends replied, “just performance anxiety … it’s natural, it’ll be over soon.”
Well, the public staging of my hardly fictionalized screenplay called ‘Hopelessly Heterosexual?’ that I’d started ten years ago is over, and yes the dreams about walking naked from the waist up into a junior high auditorium of teenagers, and serving a meal that recipients complained ‘didn’t have enough meat’ are over. As are some of the feelings of embarrassment at the dated theme of my story set in a Human Sexuality classroom in 1990, long before the Vagina Monologues, way before the issue of gay marriage was even an issue, much less it soon to become old news, before cable TV ran series as blatantly realistic as Fornification and True Blood. It was an ‘old me’ that seeded this story and I wasn’t as enamored of her now as I was then. I found myself not liking much the Pat/Jackie that was eagerly searching for love but using sex as the vehicle to get there. I’d ‘shown’ her spiritual awakening through a love song at a concert (Time after Time) but people didn’t really get it.
The fears I’d been having were only partially founded. The 12 actors and the sparse audience that sat through the two-hour reading told me they liked Jackie, they really did, and that the script moved (after page 30). Only that it wasn’t linear enough, was too explicit and they wanted ‘more fire’ between protagonists. My screenwriting teacher told me, as predicted that now was the time to let it sit, and then truly step away and fictionalize the story. She felt Jackie lacked discernment, that she felt she was god’s gift to sexual freedom, but in the process of her self-absorption she could have inadvertently destroyed a student’s life (Julie). Now to fictionalize that and let it rip. Truth be known, I did a lot of work for more than a month on the screenplay, only to learn there was more work ahead. Rewrites are the name of the game in screenwriting and all writing guess. But I feel burnt out.
So I moved to my fourth major ‘deadline’ of the semester: a full book proposal on ‘Invisible Grandparenting,’ a concept I’d invented about how I write letters to a seven year old I can’t see and save them. I do that in order to heal the hole I feel in my heart when what feels like the rest of the world is going ‘goo-goo’ and ‘ga-ga’ over their grandchildren. I discovered there were more like me ‘out there’ and my writing group indeed said this was a powerful process, a place where my ‘voice’ needed to be heard.
But even after last week, when that teacher and my critique group heralded the originality and palpable-ness of my letters, and suggested that I write an entire memoir of this situation in letters interspersed with my reflections, I still found myself waking every morning with weird dreams and anxiety. Is this a universal writer’s dilemma? Before the words even hit the page, do we worry about what people will think of them, their impact?
Think of us?
So since deadlines work for me, and I’d set a two hour a day minimum of clear ‘at the computer’ writing on IG till Dec. 7th, I re-read the dozen or so Celeste letters I have written, and the ones that are merely outlines. I discovered there weren’t many ‘happy’ letters. Each told a story or taught a lesson like the recent ones about dying. But the process of one-way writing is half empty. If I go to the MPC production of Sleeping Beauty with some other children this weekend, merely imagining Celeste’s response will be difficult. Again a reminder of the poignant pain of invisibility, and what I we do with it.
I also looked up some back writing I’d done in journals and essays about the ‘alternate’ way my motherhood story unveiled itself, about the struggles I’d survived but obviously not left behind: about recreational drug use, enabling, confronting addiction and finally then letting go. Old ghosts I thought I’d left behind about how I feel about the mothering I did and didn’t do, have recently been coming back to haunt me. This morning’s dream was about someone handing me a crumpled up blanket with a screaming baby at its center. I woke before I got handed the pacifier and bottle I’d screamed for as I asked for help.
So, I envy writers like Stephen King, or Sue Monk Kidd, or Pat Conroy or Raymond Carver who can weave stories from their imagination. I know by now that Pat Hanson’s gift is about honesty and synthesizing learning from some experiences that have been part of her journey. A poet or fiction impresario she is not. But do I, will I, take the time and apply the discipline to face some things again, publicly? Is this ‘Every Writers Blues?’
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