The Best Feeling in the World
Sitting beside me here at my desk is a hardcopy edition of my one-act play that I’ve been bitching and moaning about here on makelimeade.com for over two months. I must say, the physical hardcopy edition really gives you this tremendous feeling of accomplishment. When it’s just sitting in your word processor, you have no physical connection with your work. Once it’s actually printed, you start to feel the paper, smell the ink, and realize what all of that banging on the keyboard has done. But there is also this great feeling that the end product is crap. You panic and start to think that maybe all that hard work produced a boring piece of shit no one wants to read. I try to convince myself that all of these feelings are just part of the greater play writing process, but I just can’t picture O’Neill reading over A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and saying “ Oh man! This is so stupid. All those nasty critics are going to make fun of me.” Maybe that was a bad example, O’Neill was dead long before A Long Day’s Journey Into Night was published, but still.
The thing I’m finding is that a play is a living an breathing thing. I may have finished writing it, but the characters, in my mind, still exist. All of the language, the motifs, the events, are still occurring. I look back at some dialogue I wrote and interpret it totally differently. Part of this, I think, is what makes stories so compelling. You don’t just read a book, but you live a book. Think about it, you are reading a James Bond novel, and pretty soon you start trying to act as cool as James did in Casino Royale. You’re at Olive Garden, the waitress asks what you would like to drink and you say “A Coke please”. But when you say this, you are really thinking “ I’ll take a dry martini…in a deep Champagne goblet…shake it well until it’s cold, then add a think slice of lemon peel” The act of ordering a beverage has evolved form a mundane task, to an opportunity to mimic your favorite Double O agent. We all get to escape our life, which is, let’s face it, boring as hell, and jump into another world where unicorns do exist.
~ optionshiftk
Filed under: life
