4 Things I Learned (or Remembered to Learn) in 2017

So, this has been a good year for me...in some ways. Or maybe I'm just grasping at silver linings. It started with a month full of trips to the doctor and then a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. Colorectal, to be precise, with tumors also in my liver and lungs. I'm not going to get too much into that here, but one of the ramifications has been that I have spent a year off-stage. Where I was originally going to act in two shows and direct one, I ended up doing nothing. I don't have the stamina for it. The side effects of the chemotherapy leave me too weak, and occasionally just plain too sick to do much of anything.

But, I still need my creative outlet, so writing - which had always had a lower priority compared to other things I was doing, became my sole means of expression and I'll say that giving it that focus has generated excellent results. In 2017, I've had two ten-minute plays produced plus one other given a public reading. I had a workshop production of my full-length play, Endwaters. And I know I can already look forward in 2018 to two short stories being published - one electronic, one print - and a world premiere professional production of my play, Dracula: Prince of Blood. And there are other projects still in draft form, but advancing.

Not all of that came about just because of what happened this year, but it is interesting how it all seemed to start to happen at once. Now, as I look back, I'm thinking about the things I learned (or remembered that I had learned) about writing through the year.

1) Dynamic Doesn't Mean Dynamite

I've read many articles, blogs, how-to tips, etc which exhort writers to be dynamic in their stories, which I used to take as meaning "energetic; vigorous; exciting". No problem - I'll take my story about a man learning to love himself before he can love others and put in a car chase and a big-band dance number and a shark attack!

But earlier this year, I had a realization. There is another definition of dynamic as in "relating to or tending toward change; opposite of static". And that really hit me. Suddenly I had a very clear sense of scenes in my scripts and stories where no one was acting as an agent of change. Things were just happening (or, more often, not happening). It's become something I look for in my own work in the editing process and in others'. It's a matter of asking, how do things change? How are characters trying to bring about (or maybe resist) change?

2) Don't Be So Damned Polite

I think of myself as nice guy, pretty reasonable but then, don't we all? Seriously though, at work my friends often use me to gauge the severity of a problem. As long as I stay cool, which is 95% of the time, they feel like they can stay cool. But if I seem like I'm starting to panic or freak out, then you'd better run for the lifeboats 'cuz we just hit the iceberg.

Being a thought of as generally a "nice guy" has worked well for me in life, but it's not the best in writing. I'm not saying there aren't nice people in literature, but "nice" can sometimes be a slippery slope down into the ravine of "passive" and then from there down into the pit of "boring". A friend of mine reading one of my pieces this year reminded me the best excitement of reading comes from stories which stand on the knife's edge. Move or stay still, you're gonna get cut either way. He quoted a turn of phrase from a Tennyson poem, "Red in tooth and claw." In context of the poem, it refers to Nature, but the tone of it sounds like a war cry for writing. Another standard for me to test my writing against.

3) Scare Yourself

You might think writing for "red in tooth and claw" would be scary enough, but I'm thinking about something slightly different. I'm talking about taking risks even for yourself. I've been working lately on the rough draft of a new play, and I had just finished a scene where two characters start to reveal vulnerability to each other. But I reached a certain point where it felt like the energy of the moment had been spent and something needed to happen. My first thought was to bring in a third character.

"But wait!" I thought. "If I bring a third character into this intimate, vulnerable scene then the two other characters will put their defense back up and the story will be back where it started." The safer choice would be to do something else. To protect these two characters.

But then I thought, "Why am I really hesitating about this?" and ultimately it wasn't because I thought it was best for the story, but because I didn't know how it was going to turn out. It was my fear of the unknown blocking me. Once I realized that, I decided to take a leap of faith. I thought that because the new idea scared me, that's exactly why I should do it. So I brought in the third character, but tried to keep the openness of the moment before. It's just a rough draft and who knows if that scene will make it into the final draft (or even the next draft), but I felt proud to take the risk. To plunge into the unknown precisely because it's unknown.

4) I Love Writing

I do miss being on stage. I love acting, and there's an instant gratification from the audience. Writing, by comparison, feels distant. Removed. But spending a year focused on it like never before has been like falling in love for the first time all over again. Not that it's easy - of course it's not easy. Love or writing. But like Tom Hanks says as Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own (story by Kim Wilson and Kelly Candaele, script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel)- "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard...is what makes it great."

So, thank you 2017 for teaching me. Here I come, 2018!