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I’m writing a novel. Shhh…
For months, I wasn’t sure if I could tell anyone. But then I started to feel like I should pass a note with a ‘Yes’ box and a ‘No’ box and on the top scrawled in block letters, “Is it okay for Mare to write a novel?” Ridiculous. First, I told one colleague and then a second. They didn’t exactly condemn the project with faint praise, but instead offered cautious inquiry. “Really? Hmm... well are you writing anything else?” I quickly regrouped, “Oh. Um. Yes. I’m writing a one-act companion play for this abstract piece I got from a guy up in Canada.” “Great! Did you bring pages?”
Checking the ‘No’ box.
The following week I met with a third playwright. “You can’t be a playwright and a novelist,” he proclaimed, soupspoon cutting through the air to emphasize his point. “You will only be good at one of them. Good luck with that.” He paid for lunch and added, “How’s the new play coming along?”
Is that true? Good at only one? It started as a play, does that count?
Sara’s story began with only two characters at a bus stop. As the piece grew, I realized I was going to need fluid timelines for moving backward and forward throughout the narrative. I asked several playwrights, worldwide thanks to Twitter, how to make time both expand and collapse to create three separate threads. Maybe four. On stage. (Of course forgetting everything we know about the string theory.)
Oh, and by this time the cast of characters had grown to more than two-dozen. Over and over, I received the gentle suggestion that perhaps I might consider a different vehicle for this particular story. Some days later I was exchanging email with another playwright and asked, “Hey, do you think it could be a novel?” He said, “Sounds about right to me.”
Great. A novel. I can’t write a novel.
 I don’t know how to write all that… flowery stuff. "I can’t remember the last time I used an adverb," she whined hopelessly. (Tee hee. And in a dialogue tag too. Perfect.)
As a playwright, I’m concerned with living breathing characters. I write for actors who can lift the expressed and implied, spoken and silent, easy and awkward off the page. I am both spoiled by, and at the mercy of, casting. How am I ever going to put that on the page? And only on the page?
I figured I only know one way to write. I had the beginnings. I took the lid off The Percolator Box and started a project notebook.
This is Sara. She’s at a bus stop. What does she want? |
