Running errands

I love running errands -- as long as I am alone. Because if I'm alone, then I can turn the experience into a slow brooding creative private brainstorming session about whatever the hell I'm working on or what's bugging me to be worked on ... I can mumble, talk to myself, take my time, and otherwise take an hour doing a 15 minute chore. Doesn't work too well if the wife or anyone else is around.

Hence this morning, when returning library books and buying supplies for scrapple became a long session of brooding. Brooding is one a writer's most valuable tools. When those early producers in LaLaLand found the studio screenwriters staring out the window all the time, they didn't think they were working. Little did they know.

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Easy day in class, I think, the first couple weeks usually are because I introduce so many concepts that are new to most of the students. Today I'll try out the Portable Celtx I put on a flash drive and talk about format and writing style while developing a script on the screen. Usually I do it by hand on a chalk board or whatever they call those white boards that sometimes replace "black boards," as they were called when I was a student in class. Also have a couple short videos to show, interviews with screenwriters ... and then next Tues I'll show the feature documentary "Tales from the Script." I give them a lot of exposure to the pro's from the start, who of course say the same thing I or any competent screenwriting teacher says. But when so many are saying the same thing, more or less, it has an impact.

I need a short project of my own for this term. I'm not ready to get serious about the novella yet, I see that as being obsessive and taking most of my mental time. A summer project. I'll keep writing poems, of course, and I can get a jump start on putting the book together ... but I'd like a new project that takes a couple months. I've had a couple ideas for stage plays but I keep remembering what a "former playwright," now successful screenwriter, once told me, that now and again he had an idea for a stage play but he found that banging his head against the wall and drinking a lot of whiskey got rid of it for him. He was speaking, of course, to the lack of remuneration for such work, especially when compared to screenwriting. I mean, you can make more money on screenplays that go nowhere than on stage plays that do well!  This may have been more true in the 80s when Option Fever became a pandemic among producers. But playwriting can be thankless unless it's so much in your blood, you love it so much, that you do it, and theater generally, despite everything. I don't have the energy or dedication any more -- though I still flirt, now and again, with the idea of forming my own company and doing small serious plays, writing and directing myself. Well the video does the same thing with larger exposure.

On the other hand, I feel genuine relief and excitement about doing a project, the novella ahead, that requires no collaboration. I love working with actors. But I also love, and often more, working alone.

Well. The point is, I am fumbling around for a term project to get me to the summer. Or maybe I should just spend all that energy on practicing the banjo and get much better at it.

Decisions, decisions.