AUTHOR UNKNOWN

My newest play is called THE ROCKER and one of the themes that pops up in this story is grief.  Unlike my last play WAVES which primarily focused on grief and its many stages, THE ROCKER is more about the mystery and secrets of family and how we come to accept, reject or make conclusions of each other without really understanding who we are as life marches on.  More about grief and its price at the end of this blog.

With THE ROCKER, I’ve been struggling to map out the story in a way that makes sense. I outline an entire play with a very specific beginning, middle and end and most scenes in-between those beginnings middles and ends. I know every character and their entire background before I even start to write one word of dialogue. It can be a long, arduous process and it doesn’t always feel creative.  That certainly is the case with THE ROCKER. For me, at this time, I attribute it to a combination of distraction, rejection and finding the quality time to write.  I don’t know who said the following quote, but I couldn’t agree with it more:

Grief has a price and so does being a writer/artist. In fact, anything we love whether it’s family, a friend, a career, etc… has a price.  Most of the time when I sit down to write, I don’t know what I’m doing.  I just kind of make it up as I go along, which I guess is what every writer does. But I’m also still learning the craft.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve been doing it all these years.  Every time I start a new project, the doubts become that much more pronounced.  In other words, it doesn’t get easier. That’s one of the biggest challenges – you want to be better than you were last time and that can lead to more pressure.  Pressure equals distraction (hello Internet!) and wallowing in rejection. That’s the price you pay.  Ernest Hemingway has a great quote about writers:

And look what writer Sylvia Plath wrote – a writer, like Hemingway – who suffered with severe bouts of depression and anxiety.  Miss Plath understood how demanding creativity can be and how those demands play havoc on a writer’s mind:

And so the only way to crush that self-doubt is by facing it head on. Be fearless. Bold. Committed. That’s anything in life.  We put off things that are hard to deal with. The longer you linger in uncertainty or lacking confidence, the bigger that self-doubt grows. I work through feelings like this daily. Writing is nothing new for me and neither is being blocked.  However, writer’s block is just an excuse not to write, not to face that page, not to be scared. You need to be singularly focused and put in the work.  What does Nikc say:

Or better yet, read this elegant quote from American novelist Louis Dearborn L’Amour.  Mr. L’Amour wrote a TON of work.  Check out his Wikipedia page.  His quote is spot on with this clever analogy on writing:

I began this blog with a quote about grief.  Today marks 2 years since my mother’s passing.  My siblings and I are feeling her absence. I know we’re all missing that quirky sense of humor and that calm nature that she often showed even in the midst of her own struggles.  She was our hero.  It’s no coincidence that I’m writing this mini-cycle of grief plays. I’m tapping into a subject that people often have a hard time dealing with or articulating. But WAVES and THE ROCKER also have a great deal of humor and joy along side the sadness. These opposite feelings/emotions are partners, they need each other. This brilliant line of dialogue from the film Ordinary People, which deals with the loss of a son/sibling, capitulates what I’m talking about:

If you can’t feel pain, you’re not going to feel anything else either.

So grief, pain…it’s part of our journey.  There is no getting around it.  If you avoid the hurt, you miss out on part of the joy. This pic below was an impromptu photo we took at the computer. This is who my mom was.  She understood and embraced the joy and happiness along side the brokenness and fragility that life brings. Despite the many painful obstacles she experienced throughout her journey, that sense of peace in the hurricane seasons managed to always resurface. I saw firsthand from her that peace when she was dying.  She left our siblings a powerful example of what it means to be human.