Read-through

Last Monday, my Writers' Group read the first draft of my stage play, The Eggs. It was nerve-wracking. I'd been trying to type up my handwritten first draft ever since I'd asked them to read it, three weeks earlier. I'm still not au fait with memory sticks or word processors.
I've still got an electric typewriter which my wife bought me, and which she couldn't really afford at the time. It was a touching gesture of faith in my abilities, and I've always felt guilty that I never used it that much. I was going through a prolonged writers' block, and simply didn't have anything to type. And now that I had something, I discovered that they no longer manufacture the ribbons for it.
I'd hald conceived this stage play as a way of winding up ny writers' group. They are a dry, dispassionate lot, mostly men, mostly into science fiction, mostly of a middle class outlook, and mostly atheist. They seem so bloodless and mechanical at times that I want to slap them ; but I must admit, they give good, fair advice on what is read to them.
But I wanted, with this play, to wake them up. Present them, in my two characters (Sue and Jackie) the world of two working-class women. I thought of it as an angry, Barrie Keeffe-type play, in the same vein as Gem or Gotcha. Instead, the two women reading the parts decided to send it up. Two working class women, after all, must be comic.
I couldn't stop my feet twitching under my chair as they read their lines. The bad lines became glaringly obvious, and I cringed at them. But there were times when it seemed to be working, when the two readers realized that I had been attempting real characters rather than stereotypes.
I felt at first that they were laughing at these women because, in the play, they had mourned Lady Diana Spencer. The group was laughing at them, and by extension laughing at me because I cared about them. I realized the play's shortcomings all too clearly.
Yet when they came to the end (or, rather, got to the bit where I'd run out of time to type any more) they seemed sympathetic. Could it be that the message of the play had actually got through?
I am determined to write a second draft. Determined. Because I don't want this play to die. I want it to be performed. I feel jubilant as I write this. In a way, I've fulfilled what this blog set out to do : to see me through to the end of a project. So now I'm moving the goalposts. My mission now is to work with this first draft, improve it, and see it brought to life on stage.

Sick Note

Since my last post, I have done virtually no work on anything. Not this new Twelfth Night project, not my stage play, not writing practice, not even morning pages. I was off work for three days with a cold. You would think that, with all the free time, I could spare an hour here or there. But no. It was as much as I could do to put on a couple of James Bond films, and I even nodded off during those.


I haven't been reading, either. There's a stack of books on my bedside cabinet, but whenever I've picked one up I just haven't had the energy to read it.


This scared me. It was only a bit of a cold, wasn't it? And yet I had no energy to do anything, even enjoy myself.


On my last day at work, I felt bad. It was baking hot inside the building - the radiators were on full blast, nobody would open a window even a crack - but freezing outdoors. There were other problems, too, things which made me grit my teeth, clench my fists, moments of intense stupidity, when you feel like you're the last sane person on the planet. It was all I could do to stay at my post until I'd finished my shift, and even then one of my colleagues, God bless him, let me go early. The trains home were packed and stifling. I kept trying to read Feel the fear and do it anyway, but couldn't concentrate. I felt like kissing the ground when I got home to my wife.


I calmed down, bathed, changed. My wife cooked me a lovely meal and then later we watched Naked Gun 33 and a third. The Naked Gun films are sort of milestones for us. Not only do we find them hysterically funny ( even when we know which jokes are coming up ) but we're sentimentally attached to them. We saw the first Naked Gun film when we were courting, and we've seen it so often since then that I even know some of the dialogue off by heart.


My wife is more cultured than I am. She has passions for Tudor history and the paintings of Van Gogh. And yet the films we choose to see to remind us of oour early days include The Untouchables, the Lethal Weapon series and Robin Hood : Prince Of Thieves.


Even as I sat there with a blanket wrapped around me, laughing at lines such as : "Like a midget at a urinal, I knew I was gonna have to keep on my toes" I knew that I wasn't going in tomorrow.


And so three days passed. Three days when I feel like one of the homesteaders in a western murmuring feverishly by a log fire whilst the town's doctor looks over me and says : "He ain't gonna make it." On Saturday, I went back to work and very nearly walked off again. It was only until one o'clock, so I made myself stay ; but the same chaos was in place, and I dreaded to think what the week ahead was going to bring.


But I got an odd surprise. My boss, who is new, and about whom we have mixed feelings, had left me an email with a Stress Assessment form. He had spotted how anxious I was and had made the connection. I hadn't really thought of this myself - and this after years of Stress Management courses. I felt strangely uplifted by this. I was exhausted at one o'clock, and I coughed all the way home, but something made me feel good. I also nipped into the public library and borrowed two books : the complete works of Shakespeare, and Freda Warrington's unofficial Dracula sequel, Dracula : the undead. I started reading them on the trains home, and found myself enjoying them.
I'm not going to feel guilty about the writing I haven't done. I normally write a little bit each day, and there are days when you just can't force it. Things have got to be bad when I fall asleep during a Bond film, because I love those films.
But reading Twelfth Night on the way home, and then again in bed before I went to sleep, reading for pleasure, rediscovering what fiction is, what it does, I began to feel my mojo coming back.