I just returned from a week long retreat at SPACE on Ryder Farm with some of my colleagues from the Emerging Writers Group. I spent my hours digging my heels into my newest play, THE FORCINGS, which will be presented next spring at the Public Theater. Wonderful trees, food and company.
For three weeks this month I will be traveling to Veracruz, Mexico to research a new play I’m writing with the Emerging Writers Group at the Public. I’ll be talking to academics, farmers and young people about climate change and President Peña Nieto’s overhaul of energy laws which will soon allow US companies to enter the fracking game in Mexico.
From Truthout’s “Five Principles for Independent Media”:
1. Be Intentional.
It means being intentional about what voices we quote and promote; being aware that if we do not make conscious choices, invisible privileges will lead to the continued predominance of white, male, abled, heterosexual, cisgender and well-off voices. It means acknowledging power dynamics and seeking, wherever possible, to confront power and to avoid the cheap and easy satisfaction of criticizing those who do not have it – punching up, not punching down.
2. Be Humble
We must admit that we don’t know everything… Non-corporate media can and should provide a space to puzzle out possibilities for both dismantling current systems and paving new paths, and for this journey, humility is an essential ingredient.
3. Be Bold
…if our approach as writers and editors is tied too closely to chasing a bigger and bigger audience, and our desire to reach this audience is primarily tied to ensuring we stay funded, we are putting the cart before the horse in a way that risks falling into the same traps that hamstring the corporate media. If we commit to covering stories that would otherwise go untold, it should be with the understanding that this is a worthwhile act in and of itself. If we commit to giving a voice to the voiceless, it cannot be conditional on the immediate popularity of what the voiceless have to say.
4. Be Accountable
George Orwell famously defined journalism as “printing what someone else does not want printed,” adding “everything else is public relations” – this now seems to us somewhat incomplete without specifying that journalism is publishing what someone with power does not want to see the light of day… It means acknowledging that by virtue of the platforms we have, most of us enjoy “a tremendous privilege and an even greater responsibility,” and that, to quote Susie Cagle, “At the least, we should seek to minimize harm to those we use – and yes, we do use them – to tell stories and ultimately earn livelihoods for ourselves.”
5. Progress, Not Perfection
Journalists are uniquely positioned to provide an example of what it might mean instead to strive to be “progressive” in a different sense: committed to improving ourselves, our work and our society, but acutely aware of the inevitability of imperfection.
This happens more than I would like to admit: I will pick up a play or screenplay after some time away from it, read it through and immediately think to myself- what the hell?? What was I even thinking? I want to tear it all apart and build it all back up again – which I usually do.
Of course there’s an easy explanation for this: I’m not very good. And then there’s a more complicated explanation: this is a natural part of the process. You make a mess. Get some ideas down first and then give it a shape. And then repeat and repeat, logging hours and letting momentum build until you have something called a play.
But this takes time. Valuable, precious time spent running around naked in the wilderness of your own thoughts. And running around naked in the wilderness of your thoughts does not pay the bills – for most of us (click here and of course here for exceptions).
I can’t wait for the day when I can retire to my cabin on a mountaintop and pound out the next Proof. You hear these stories all the time. Arthur Miller wrote Act One of Death of a Salesman in less than a day. Martin McDonagh wrote his acclaimed Leenane Trilogy (Beauty Queen, Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West) and FOUR MORE plays in the space of nine months.
I’m wary of stories like these – from established writers or from my friends. It’s mythmaking. For most of us, a good play or screenplay takes time. You cannot skip steps. You cannot rush the process. Right? At best, for the gifted and experienced, it just goes faster: less drafts, less time.
I can only imagine what I’ll feel looking back five years, ten years at the work I’m writing today. Despite my very best intentions to make it active and alive, it probably won’t seem that way.
Martin McDonagh seems to agree:
I’m constantly bored with what I’ve done before. I always think it’s too weak. Everything I’ve done so far, even Beauty Queen, which I respect as a good play, and The Cripple, I could do it 20 times better. For me, and for people like me who like great, visceral, strange, tough films, I could do so much more from this position. I could tell a hundred better stories in the same kind of style with the same motivations as I have been doing up to this point. I guess I might as well hang on for a while and do it.
The only time I’m really happy is re-reading what I’ve handwritten the day before. Re-reading it and being surprised that I actually wrote that. That’s sounds pretty arrogant, but there’s a joy in that, flipping back the last two hand-written pages and being surprised. I think it probably gives me more joy than anything else I’ve done up to this point.
Small victories. Long war.