A cry in the dark

Up until a week ago, I’m pretty sure I’d never cursed in anger.

Like many people, I’ve used a swear word occasionally as spice, a bit of cardamom in the conversational stew.

But on January 9th, 2012, at about two in the morning, I swore.

I’d written a good chunk of a play. And then lost it.

Damn.

We were on vacation.

I write every day, pretty much no matter what, but vacations are uniquely productive: new settings, new stimuli, ample, relaxed time.

Normally I write on my laptop but I hadn’t taken it with me, and writing in ink on a spiral notebook was liberating, a good change of pace.

The play I was working on is a longish one-act, a thriller in the technical sense of that word; a protagonist is caught in a dark web that’s larger than she knows. A good thriller has twists and turns. The audience members identify with the main character and so should experience things they didn’t see coming.

It was (and is) fun to write.

But then I left the notebook containing my one-act thriller in a seatback on Delta flight 412 from San Jose, Costa Rica to Atlanta, Georgia.

When we arrived home in Los Angeles, late that night, and I saw that my notebook wasn’t in my backpack, I cursed. Almost immediately, I knew that it was probably gone for good.

I decided that the way to think of it was not that I had less written down than I had eight hours previous but that I knew more about the play than I had two weeks earlier.

The next morning, I started to write it again.

That’s been an interesting process.

As a writer you train yourself not to second-guess your first draft. You know you have the tools to make it better, so the point of the first draft is just to get it down.

But what I’m working on now is neither first draft nor second. This is draft 1.4 or so.

This time, as I write, I occasionally remember something that I’d done in the previous incarnation, and the path forks: should I follow my new impulse? Or my old impulse? Or attempt some possibly excellent/possibly mutant fusion of the two?

Every time you sit down to write, you’re a slightly different writer than you were the last time you sat down. You’re more (or less) relaxed/distracted/thirsty/knowledgeable/you-name-it than you were the last time you wrote.

That’s a good thing. It means that over time the sum of who you are becomes part of the script, gives nuance to characters or fresh ideas to scenes. Normally the differences between the writer you are today and the one you were yesterday are small. But sometimes, when life events intrude—a friend’s parent dies, your kitchen catches on fire—they’re larger.

This time, the main way that I’m different from the last time I wrote is that I already wrote the play. That plays with my head a little bit, disorients me. But:

Somehow it seems fitting that, as I write a thriller, the writing process itself takes an unexpected twist, a strange dark turn.