Jan 2008. Artsy Schmartzy participates in Berzerk!!!

http://community.mkeonline.com/blogs/artsyschmartsy/archive/2008/01/10/pity-party-time.aspx

Pity Party Time!

I must have been crazy to agree to the criteria.  What was I thinking?  Crazy.  Crazy.  Just crazy talk, it all was. Writing a play in only 10 minutes for Insurgent Theatre's and Alamo Basement’s upcoming presentation of "Berzerk"?  How could I possibly choose to subject myself to 10 concentrated minutes of doing nothing more than considering the fact that, as a writer, I’m nothing but a sham?

Okay, I know that the 10 minutes I had to incorporate a phrase I was given by the orchestrators of this madness into a play weren’t meant to summon up all my artistic demons, but, damned if it didn’t work.

I was challenged by the ever-challenging Rex Winsome of Insurgent Theatre to join this maverick writing process.  It being a new year, and me being someone who has decided to get out of my usual comfort zone in 2008, I decided it was worth my 10 minutes.  What those 10 minutes did was rock any foundation I had as a writer, and make me question how I could ever expect any living human to read my words.  It made me start to think that my most captive audience in fact wasn’t the living, but instead the dead. They have nowhere to run in horror of what I’ve created, you see.

The writing process. Ouch.  It’s all a part of the artistic process and so bear with me as I write about writing, us neurotic types, and the many self-defeating actions artists are prone to take for a couple of days.  The Insurgent "Berzerk" process got me thinking about how many, dare I say most, artists think about their work in ominous tones at some point or another.  I think there is an inherent belief in the mind of the artist that they somehow are just kicking through life fooling everyone into believing that they have something of value to say about art and life.  It’s my heart-wrenching struggle to continue on daily with theatre and writing as I have this sinking feeling in my stomach that the world will finally discover I’m just a total hack and that my shim sham flim flam days will come to an end soon.

I also think that this artistically inclined neurosis is the very thing that keeps us artists going.  It’s what fuels our fires.  It’s what makes us fun at parties.  It’s what makes us total nut bags.

Stay tuned.  It’s time to delve into the dark side.  I’m going to take a look at the artist’s mind.  The artist’s flawed DNA.  Keep the kids far, far away from the computer.

Published Jan 10 2008, 12:28 PM by Jonathan West

SHOW UP, OR SHUT UP! (My 10-minute stab at writing the great American play)

It was 10 minutes of horror, I’ll tell you. Horror.

As I mentioned in my most recent past post, I subjected myself to taking on the Herculean task of writing a play in 10 minutes as proscribed by Insurgent Theatre and Alamo Basement as part of their "Berzerk!!" production over the past weekend.  It was one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve ever done as a writer.

Perhaps you think I doth protest a bit too much. Yeah, I’m a whiner. But, I’m an artist.  It’s just part of my ever-wavering backbone. You’re going to see me take some time over the next couple of weeks to talk about the nutty tics that come with the life choice of being an artist.  Those 10 minutes of writing sparked something in me.  I’m ready to purge.

You might justifiably ask why 10 minutes of sitting down to write might be akin to having your fingernails ripped out with pliers for me. There’s one big, all-encompassing word that explains it for me. FEAR.

It’s the same FEAR that regularly follows me to the coffee shop near my house where I write three mornings a week and sits down next to me and convinces me that it’s a good idea to fix the settings on my laptop, change the screen saver picture and organize some of my desktop folders before I type one word onto my eagerly waiting iBook.  It’s the FEAR that has grabbed the phone before I could reach for it to set up an audition.  It’s the FEAR that has stalled my desire to take a figure drawing class.  But when the clock is ticking loudly in your ear and you need to have a play written in 10 minutes, FEAR can’t crush you.  It must make you intuitively understand your strengths with deliberate urgency.

Perhaps it wasn’t even the 10 minutes of writing that gave me the ulcer, but maybe it was the time before those 10 minutes when FEAR was leading me by the nose, making me its ***, if you will.  Knowing for weeks that I would be setting aside 10 minutes to write a play that would be produced on a Saturday night in January was enough to make me slightly mad.  Was there anything I could do to prepare?  Should I be doing the equivalent of writing sprints?  Can a person prep for being e-mailed an innocuous phrase that needs to be woven into a spontaneous script?  How could I possibly present something stunning, something that would make the literary world stand up and say, “That’s our guy!”

That’s the rub.  Somewhere in my post-"Berzerk!!" scrambling, I realized that even John Patrick Shanley (the playwright responsible for "Doubt," which I think is singularly THE great play of the past 10 years, and "Danny and the Deep Blie Sea," perhaps singularly THE best play of the 1980s) has his bad days. But, at the very least, he shows up.

I admit it to you all.  I spend a lot of time thinking about writing the next great piece of fiction, but much less actually doing it.

I’m not alone it seems. Writer friends of mine tell me of their own struggles to just put anything down. I once heard that Graham Greene figured out that he only needed to write 500 words a day to remain prolific.  He would get up in the morning, write his 500 words, and stop, sometimes in mid-sentence.  ***.  That disciplined ***.  But, you know what, he was prolific.  And he was also pretty damned good.

But I just needed to stop being a total nutjob for 10 minutes and show up.

So, I had a glass of water, ate a cookie, and just tried to be normal as I braced for what I needed to do—show up.  On a recent Friday afternoon, I was sent the following phrase by Mike Q. Hanlon, the organizer of "Berzerk!!":

“It will be dawn soon.  I think the party’s over.”

I did as I was told, and didn’t read it until the moment I sat down to write.  Then I set the timer on my computer and strarted clacking away.  I came up with names, I came up with places, I came up with plot points, and I came up with a play.  Granted, it ain’t a masterpiece, but I see that wasn’t the point of this process.  This exercise in spontaneity was  a part of the process of creation.  Creation isn’t about planning.  It’s about action.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a good plan, anal-retentive obsessive compulsive Virgo that I am, but there comes a time when organizing the pencil cup just needs to stop.

Creating isn’t for the mouth-breathers and spoon-fed-eaters of the world.  It’s all about figuring it out as you go with the willingness to put some real crap together to get a seed of something grand.

Ten minutes.  Ding.  I was done.  I had written a play.  It would be performed, and, the crappy thing about it was, I realized I would never see it presented before an audience.  I had commited to this challenge with the knowledge that a long held place holder on my calendar was going to prevent me from hearing my words done by actors in front of an audience.  I wasn’t going to be around for the back-slapping camaraderie of the the whole company that had taken this on.  I was going to just obscurely go about looking at this snippet of drama, and realizing that in it was the seed of an idea for an expanded work.  Something I was excited about.

I’ll take FEAR along with me on the next steps of my expansion plan for my opus with working title “Sal and Murrray.”  But I’m driving this time.

Check http://community.mkeonline.com/blogs/artsyschmartsy/archive/2008/01/14/Jonathan-West.aspx  to read what Jonathan came up with in his 10 minutes of playwrighting.

Published Jan 14 2008, 02:12 PM by Jonathan West