summer notes: on finishing

I’ve been a bit absentee from substack this summer. Hard to know, in a space like this, whether anyone notices, or cares. But I like feeling a sense of obligation to a thing, if I’m going to do it. To you, out there, on the other end of the line, whether you’re listening or not. So — okay — a little series for August to catch you up. Here is one of three.

Word-wise, a play is nothing compared to a novel.

It’s fewer words than a thesis, maybe more than a book of poems, more than an instructional manual, less than an extended judicial argument.

If you taped all the pages end to end, they would probably reach the top of the silver maple in my back yard.

How big is a play?

It’s big, but it has spaces.

It’s a whole world, made of paper dolls.

It’s a soundscape, waiting to be stood up.

It is, in this case, 18,723 words. 118 pages. And for now, it’s finished.

A play is the biggest shape that I’ve learned how to write. Is that true? I have forms that have grown longer over time — a semester’s worth of lesson plans, a year’s worth of substack posts — those, too, require attention to an overarching shape. But a play is the biggest fictional world I’ve practiced building. Two hours, give or take.

Finishing a full length play happens infrequently enough — once a year, maybe less — that I have to remember all the things I forgot I knew about this particular act. Even though it is the act around which, I would say, everything else is organized.

I read an interview recently with Elena Ferrante after finishing the fourth of her Neapolitan novels. In it, she talks about how easy it is to get drawn away from writing:

“My greatest fear is of suddenly feeling that to devote so much of my life to writing is meaningless. It’s a sensation that I’ve felt very often, and I’m afraid that I will again. I need a lot of determination, a stubborn, passionate adherence to the page, not to feel the urgency of other things to do, a more active way of spending my life.”

I feel this keenly, this sense that writing, in the context of the rest of life, often feels frivolous or at least distinctly non-urgent. Once I’m in, I’m in, and the rest of life almost falls away, but the boundary has to be crossed. I have to submerge myself enough in the fictional world that it becomes real. And because this final push happens only once or at most twice a year, it’s like a box opening in my mind full of sticky notes and measuring tapes and lessons and chronic frustrations that I forgot about. I remember familiar but dormant ways of thinking.

I remember dots and strings. how each bit of information in the story is like a dot on a map: if the dots are too close together, it’s too obvious. If they’re too far apart, they might not be connectible. Between each dot is a string of energetic tension. How long can a string be before it starts to sag?

I remember how I’m always working to stay in a scene longer, and how different this is from most narrative forms I consume. Picture a tv show you know well: there are two, three, even four plot lines; scenes last a minute, maybe two; dialogue builds to a key moment but always cuts away before we have to deal with the after. It’s not that this type of writing is always bad (though I do think it leans lazy); it just doesn’t work on stage. You can’t get the instant cuts. Good stage writing is so often about the economy of how long you can sustain a single scene, how much you can accomplish within the limitation of one setting. I think about how we now make these tv-like splices in our own conversations by turning to our phones to fill the lulls. What does the transition between one part of the conversation and the next even feel like? Yet another way that theater’s human pace is beginning to feel artificial.

I remember rhythmic placeholders. I know this section of the scene needs to be longer — the climax doesn’t work unless there’s more time for us to build towards it. But what should that build consist of? I don’t know, I just know it sounds like dadada… dada… dadada…da, da. I don’t actually use “da”s, I use dialogue, but it’s empty dialogue, it’s not there for meaning. Later, when I know more about all the characters, I’ll find something to go there. Interesting to remember that writing is rhythm and sound as much as it is meaning.

I remember the perfect scene that doesn’t fit. There is always a scene written during an early brainstorm that is perfect, but no space where it seems to belong. Little by little I adjust it, trying to shoehorn it into various places, which of course ruins it. What to do? I remember there is no reliable rule. Sometimes I have forced myself to let the scene go, trusting that once the play takes shape this one scrap won’t feel so important. Other times, I have reshaped everything around that scrap on the hunch that it holds some key to the play, and been glad I did.

I remember that finishing is not really finishing. When I say finishing, I mean as finished as a play that has not been produced or workshopped can be. It’s an important kind of finishing, though, because it’s the end of the purely private phase of the play’s life, the phase where it’s just me and the characters and no one else. For me this tends to be at the completion of the second draft, which is sort of the third draft, depending on how you count it. My first round of writing, which I call the zero draft, is just an amassing of material. I write into the idea without concern for chronology or consistency. Characters appear and disappear, the same event might get written at four different ways, themes emerge. Once I have a sense of the thing — usually around 100-150 pages — I’m ready to make the first draft.

The first draft begins by sorting and piling. Laying things out. Making an order. If the shape that emerges has some big holes, I will try to write into those first — propose something that might belong there. Then I’ll begin “sewing” from the top, connecting one piece to the next. Because I already have so much material I like, I always, ALWAYS believe this draft will be good enough to share. And I’m always wrong. By the time I get to the end, I’m so aware of its failures that I don’t want to show it to anyone. I can tell that it doesn’t build right here, has a missing piece there, sags in the middle. So I take another pass, which I always start out calling a “pass” because I think I’m going to go in surgically, make fixes, but no, that never works, it always ends up being a brand new draft, and that draft, draft 2, is the one I’m talking about finishing. You finish the attempt. You finish the gesture. You choose a shape and you complete it, so that people can see what you are attempting.

I guess people imagine that you write a thing and then you rewrite it. Or that’s what I imagine people imagine. But I remember, when I’m doing it, that it’s more like chasing an idea down paths that keep splitting. The more forks you encounter, the more multiverses are running simultaneously in your head. There’s the version where the character Gus has lost his wife, and the version where he never had a wife. There’s how everything unfolds if the protest is at the beginning of the play and how things unfold if the protest sits at the halfway point. In the version with the dead wife, her favorite fruit is important. In this version it’s not important but you find yourself writing about oranges anyway, the echo of it still stuck in your brain.

It gives me sympathy for my middle school students, who struggle with exactly this. We improvise a scene, we agree on its facts, we make an outline. When we return to that scene the following week though, they invent new details that complicate the plot in problematic ways. (“I’m actually running from the FBI,” one of them says, apropos of nothing.) In the absence of an audience, I watch their minds slip between story-writing and make believe. But the characters have already been to this coffee shop! They’ve already ordered this chai and discovered that this barista is their long-lost sister! Why would they do that all over again??

It is, basically, make believe. It feels secret and special, the time spent raising the walls and rooms of this made-up world. I remember, though vaguely, that it didn’t always feel this way. I used to have to promise myself I’d never write anything again to make it to the end of every anxiety-ridden draft. It is weird that I have spent years of my life uncovering the pleasure in something that it will never be practical to spend my time on. Maybe I just needed to understand how much things can change.

One of the best things about a time of intensive writing is that there’s no room to worry about what comes next. I remember how good this freedom feels. To attend to the dots and strings — to writing the thing, rather than writing about the thing, which is a shocking amount of what my time is spent doing.

Now that the gesture is finished, I feel the worry creeping in. I worry, preemptively, about rejections. I worry about years passing and the play starting to feel dated before it ever gets onto a stage, which so often happens, all that work gone to waste. Conversely, I worry about getting into a room with actors and finding that it doesn’t feel so special after all, not the way it did when I was alone with it.

It’s okay. Worry comes in the wake of finishing. I remember that. What I don’t remember is feeling what I feel now — and I do feel it, so clearly: that the time spent writing was worth it, either way.