Issues with What We Want

In the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years at Brandeis I took an online Playwriting Course through the Brandeis summer school. I had never even attempted to write a play before, so this was a challenge, but a thing that I enjoyed. We progressed through the course writing scenes and then finally finished with a 10-minute play. Mine was called What We Want and it is about a girl who was (mostly) raised by her mother and step-father, and eventually goes to confront her biological father. I am not going to give the entire plot away, because while I would like to think no one would steal my ideas, this is the internet. Also, if I ever publish this story I would like it to actually sell at some point and that cannot happen if the whole thing is given away for free on the internet. It was a cute little play, at least I think so, and I do hope that I get to share it with the world ― following serious editing of course.

I first got the idea to rewrite the play as a prose story from one of my professors. He suggested this as a creative exercise, and to use as a prompt for the fiction writing in his class. At the time I was hesitant, because I liked the play as a play, and felt overwhelmed at the idea of changing something I loved dearly. This was Spring 2016, and shortly after I got concussed and forgot all about writing for a time. Now that I have remembered however, one thing has become very clear.

this play does not want to be a frickin' story. 

I spent a summer semester working on this play, and a few months post-submission I was still writing it. I'll be honest, once my software expired I let it fall to the wayside. But now when I look at it, the story feels like my baby again, and I don't want to hurt it by forcing it into a new medium. I've made some progress, but with all that has been going on this summer I dropped the ball a bit, and now that I am heading to Middlebury at the end of this week it's a bit too late to work on a project that is being written in English. I'm going to try again once the program is over during my nonexistent free time. For now, I just have to shrug and say hey, I've written worse.

Cheers,
Talia

Creative Nonfiction

It is certainly not the case that I don't like to, or don't want to write. For as long as I can remember, writing has been one of my most favorite things in the world. I think my problem is that I do not fully know what it is I want to write about.

Another problem is that I need time to fully grasp and anchor myself to an idea. Starting in on a writing project, I need to write two or three essays before I can go back and revise even the first one because I need the distance from the piece in order to see what I want from it and what it wants from me. Of course, sometimes that distance grows too far and I can no longer relate to the person I was when I wrote it. The beauty of it all is that these are still my words, and they can be adapted if I simply look at it as something to reflect on - that something being my somewhat flawed past.

What I am talking around is my struggle to write meaningful work in writing workshops. This (Creative Nonfiction) is the fourth writing workshop I have taken, and it is certainly more draining than the workshops I have taken before. I suppose it is because I find difficulty in writing about myself* since my life is a personal one that feels uncomfortable when exposed. That is precisely why I want to stay in this class however, because it pushes me to my limits and past them. If I only do the things that are comfortable in my life I won't grow at all.

Cheers,
Talia

*Trust me, I understand the irony of this being a personal blog post.