My Writing History

Why do writers write?

Some of my friends are trying to get jobs on TV shows.
Some people I know try to solve puzzles, whether they're structural puzzles or the puzzles of their own memory and experience.
Some people see the world through the words they create.
Some people are voracious readers so they become writers.
Some people just love words.

I think the reason I write has changed over the years.
When I was 13 I started writing because I read comic books.
I had been reading comic books intensely since I was about 10.
And I read comic books intensely until I was 14.
My comic books of choice were all Marvel and they were:
The Fantastic Four
X-Men

 I used to walk home from the liquor store on the corner on Wednesdays and come home with comic books.  I was fascinated by the stories and the pictures.

The two DC titles I read a lot were of course:
Wonder Woman
The New Teen Titans

I responded to the female heroines the most.
I loved beauty, strength and mythology.

So I started writing because I loved the fantasy.
Then I got older and started writing because I had crushes on boys.
I loved the written word, but I loved stories that were universal.
When I was young, I would watch TV and I wanted to tell the actors what to do.
It's not that I wanted to direct per se, but I wanted to put words in their mouths.
I remember that very clearly.

Then I started writing seriously in college.
Fiction at first because I had a beautiful instructor named Alyce who
really understood what I was trying to do
without me having to fully explain myself.
Then I met Erik Ehn and my life took on a whole new meaning.
I found my life path.

I wrote poems and plays simultaneously.
My plays were about finding words that caught up to
my feelings and the heavy things I wanted to
express.  But it would be years before that happened.
So I wrote poems that were all about music
and sound dynamics.
I wish I could find those poems.
They were a perfect first marriage
of sound and theme and rhythm.
Really beautiful,
naive but sophisticated stuff.
Gorgeous stuff that deserved
to be heard more, but it's okay.
Maybe I'll find them one day.

Then I stopped writing.

Then I started writing again
and went to graduate school.
I wrote a play that saved my life about
the street kids I worked with
in Portland.

And all the writing I did in graduate school confused me
because all of a sudden it became about
an expectation.
I am going to be a writer.
I am going to be a famous writer
because I go to a famous school.
I'm still recovering from that.
But my writing was confused
then, the most confused my writing
had ever been and will hopefully ever be.
My heart started to disappear from it
because someone told me I should write
for TV.
And so I moved to LA.
The advice was great advice, by the way,
and he was right.
But just like my childhood, there are horrible things
that happened to me that
contributed to me being a better person.
And graduate school was like that.
There were confusing messages
that really fucked me up for several years
and now on the other side of it,
I know I'm the better for it.

I started writing plays again after I moved back
to LA.
I wrote a satire about race that no one liked.
I wrote a play about my grandmother that a lot of people liked,
but it still remains unproduced.
Then I wrote a bunch of TV specs.
My heart was not in any of them.
I kept writing,
but nothing was coming out.
I wrote plenty of scripts,
complete.
But nothing was coming out,
if you know what I mean.
Then I wrote a play called The Snake Charmer.
It was structurally something I hadn't done before.
It was complicated.
I think it's still a play that not a lot of people understand.
It's not told in a traditional way.
But it's constructed beautifully.
Then I wrote a play about open marriages.
Over the past two years.
And something happened in the writing
and rewriting
and rewriting
and rewriting
of that play.
I found a style.
I found that I wrote plays that reflect my ideas about the world.
But that's not enough.
Then I wrote plays that were provocative.
Then I found an interesting style for that play.
Everything had to be married:
style
structure
substance

And now that's what I identify as the hallmarks of my work:
style
structure
substance

The plays have a rhythm and a musicality that's particular.
The structure reflects that.
I write plays in different ways each time
and that's integral to how I write.
Then the plays has to be about something that's of a concern.

I'm writing a new play now that's about a priest
and it takes place
backwards.

I had a reading of it a couple of weeks ago.
It's bloated.
It's got a lot of ideas.
I wrote it in 30 days.
I had been thinking about it for a lot longer.

Now I'm working on a new pilot
that's about fathers and sons.
It takes place in the art world.
But it's achingly about fathers and sons.

Why do I write?
I write because it's the only way for me to get these ideas off of me.
I write because I like the challenge
I write because I want to tell stories on the stage that are full, with big chairs, fluffy pillows, a lot of tchotchkes.
I write because I want to write minimalist stories for TV.
Maybe I meant that in reverse.
I write because I have to.
I write because I have a reason to, that doesn't involve just trying to get a job.
I write to remind myself that I am human.
I write to show off.
I write because now I know how to, at least more than I did a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago.

I am grateful for the words.
I am grateful for the continued lessons that keep getting handed to me that remind me that I am a changed person than I was three years ago and that I should keep going.
I am grateful because I know that writing matters.
I am grateful for tea and sleep and libraries.
I am grateful that I know exactly what I need to survive.
I am grateful for today.