Friday, May 25, 2012

Commitment to Unblock: A Progression

I don't know if you can even call what I am experiencing as "writer's block."  That would take me considering myself as a "writer" which takes great psychological effort.  I have to use every new-age like,  psychobabble positive self-talk affirmation I know; "...you are a writer, you are a writer.  You are a writer because you write." Ah, there's the rub!  Because I am quite apparently NOT writing. It's not just days or weeks that go by but months, in deed years. I started writing my play about a fictional Black German character, based on my research into the lives of Black Germans before during the Nazi years, in 2005.  I have to admit I did not have a great deal of confidence in my ability to write a full length play and to write text that was not some what autobiographical in nature.  Prior to this both my excursions (successful excursions I might add) into writing were basically me putting down on paper a re-telling (or acting out) of very specific events that happened to me.  But for this I was doing research and attempting to fashion that research into an actual story that could come together as a whole massage about what I was discovering.  This turned out to be much harder than I had even imagined but there were moments when it looked as if I was on my way.  I won't go into much detail because I still hold onto my ideas as worthy of a play and I frankly I don't want anyone who may be skilled and quicker at adapting material and putting out finished scripts to nick my ideas.  Suffice it to say that feed-back (criticism) I got from 2 or 3 readings of different stages of the piece ended up creating a block where I became convinced that I don't really have a story or whatever story I have is so full of wholes that I can't make it work.  I have literally let it sit for almost three years.  Now I am committing to getting it written as of today.  I want to blog about that progress.

No comments: