Wright Right?

It’s the quiet season. At the very least I’m heading into the quiet season. After back to back auditions one week I suddenly had no auditions for two weeks. There will still be a few auditions in drips and drags but the stream of auditions will probably start up again in September. Which means its time for me to start writing my own work. My Masters is finished, so there are no excuses not to be writing. Creating. Making.

I’ve done a lot of writing in the past. Plays, songs, music for university shows, for shows I’ve written, or just for myself. It had always been rather simple. Either I, or my partner and I, would sit down and create and it would be wonderful. Or after 15 minutes we’d throw in the towel, have a glass of wine and regroup the next day. Usually we’d write what we needed within minutes. We had also learned if we tried to force a melody or a lyric on a bad day it usually wasn’t very good.

I’ve never really needed a creative process before. It was as simple as sitting down and writing what I needed to write. Now I’m a new space physically, emotionally and spouse-ally. My writing partner is an ocean and a continent away. I’ve been stripped down to bare essentials which leaves just me with my life as it is right now. Writing about that has its own unique set of complications.

“I know the storyline. I know what I want to write. The ideas are rattling around in my head but I can’t get them onto paper.”

My mom raised an eyebrow.

“Metaphoric paper. I can’t get it into my word document in a ready-to-export-to-pdf form.”

My mom knowingly waited for me to finish.

“I’m not in a space where I can write. I"m not feeling it.”

“Then write about that. Write about your life. Write about why you feel you can’t write.”

And it worked.

I sat behind my computer last weekend in my husband’s office for hours as he worked on a deadline. I started and stopped. I went on to facebook, twitter, pinterest. Instagram. I stared at the script I started writing months ago, the cursor flickering in anticipation of pressure on keys. I’d written the first scene over and over again. Somewhere between boredome and frustration I opened another document. I just started typing. About anything and everything. 

As those words spilled over the digital page my other stories started to shake loose.