Monday, February 18, 2008

On Writing

So, in the interest of trying to get more content in this space on the progress of my other writing projects, here's a little update.

After finally hacking out the annual Academy Awards predictions (late, though not quite as late as last year, if memory serves me correctly) it was early enough for me to jump from that onto a completely different project -- a one act play tentatively titled "One Act Play."

Basically, it's a play about a character in a play who, upon discovering that he's going to die at some point in the play that he's in, refuses to accept his fate, drags the playwright on stage, and the two of them end up in a heated discussion that ends up being about life, death, misery, happiness, and the relationship between a writer and his characters. It's sort of a crazy, brain-hurting, experiment in meta-writing that I may not ever see through to completion, but the idea first started jangling around in my head last week, and I figured I might as well try to put some of it down on paper, just to ensure I didn't completely forget it. I don't know specifics about where it's going to go at this point, just vague notions of their conversation, and the idea of the character stepping into and out of a variety fictional situations, conceived of by the playwright.

The only problem I see with this particularly project is that it's pretty much unstageable, as the playwright actually appears on stage, and I don't want it to just be an actor *playing* the part of the playwright. That's not really meta enough for me. It'd have to be me. Which means that we could conceivably put the play on stage here, but not anywhere else. Which is fine, because I wouldn't imagine anywhere else would have any interest in a pompous meta-theatre experiment like this. I'm not sure the local theatre would be interested in a pompous meta-theatre experiment like this either, come to think of it.

On the writing agenda for tonight: I'll hopefully be returning to "Epiphanies" at long last, for some mostly mechanical work -- specifically, splitting up the most recent chapter to facilitate the addition of the chapter I think I missed while I was speeding ahead towards the resolution. I don't foresee a lot of creative work tonight, but this mechanical work will have to be done at some point before I can press on with the novel. And I do want to press on with it.

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