 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Growing WordsMarch 26, 2006 This past week I pulled a project out of cyberstorage, a short play that's supposed to be no more than 10 pages/10 minutes long. It's been hibernating since I started it in late January. The most astonishing thing isn't that I'd written more than I remembered, or even that what I'd written was pretty good. The most astonishing thing is how it started to grow as soon as it saw the light of day. This little play, strange but true, has two identifiable parents. (Dunno who's the mommy and who's the daddy, or whether it matters.) Late last fall I clipped an ad from the local paper: a theater company on Cape Cod was running a "Ten-Minute Playwriting Contest." In the mid-1990s I wrote three pretty good one-act plays. They've all been staged at least once, and I discovered in the process that seeing my work live in three dimensions delivered a high that no black-and-white byline had managed for a long time. But the local theater scene was contracting, the annual spring short-play festival stopped happening, and I buckled down to The Mud of the Place.
Writing short is barely in my repertoire. My three one-acts range in playing time from 20 minutes to almost an hour. But I like a challenge. I figured the key to writing a 10-minute play was picking the right subject, so for several weeks I walked around looking for one. Since much of the walking was done in my neighborhood with Rhodry as escort, it will surprise no one that the subject turned out to be dogs. Well, sort of: one neighbor's black Lab is another neighbor's bête noire, and the resulting battle is being fought not face-to-face but via the local dog officer. I wrote three pages that looked pretty promising then I got crazy busy and hibernation set in. The two women didn't even have names yet. Exposed to light and a little authorial attention, one of them now has a name (which may, however, be about to change), and more important, both of them now have stories attached. This is the wonder, the mystery, the miracle of writing; don't ask me how it happens. I listen to them talk and after a while I start to sense what's behind the words. Why is the dog running loose? (First I thought the owner was trying to finish a job; now I can see she's on crutches and her ankle is swathed in Ace bandages.) Is the dog running loose? Why is the neighbor so upset? And, in back of it all, why don't these women talk to each other? Well, the contest deadline is April 1, and I'm not sure it'll be ready to go anywhere by then, because my energy is being sapped by a copyedit that doesn't and will never appreciate all the time I'm putting into it. But it's alive -- it's even got a working title now: "Dogfight," of course -- and it's the best sign of spring I've seen yet.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||