Writing

I am on writing journey right now. Trying to break through what has held me back. I have a BA in English Lit but reading and deconstructing is a different skill set than writing. Kind of like how you can be a passenger in a car without being able to drive or navigate.

I find it much easier to improve fiction that others have written, eg as editor, than to write my own. In my 20s I felt I had no trauma to base my fictions on but as another writer asserted "Each of us has experienced enough heartbreak by the age of 20 to write four novels." The trick remains translating that heartbreak. My excuse was that I did not want to expose my issues and life to the world. I am not Tennessee Williams.

But being nearer the end than the beginning of my life has brought urgency and honesty. The best reason to write anything is because you need to. Compulsion. Confession. Whatever the purpose, you seek answers through revisiting old stories with new eyes. Like the way a clam turns a painful grain of sand into a pearl, we polish our own suffering until it is good enough to potentially have value for others. (and 'value' doesn't mean money, unfortunately)

I'm writing a short film I intend to make: An estranged father covertly, even illegally, helps his adult daughter until she finds out its him and pushes back. I'm trying to get it down to a quick tight and extreme version of the experiences of parenthood and adolescence. We parent not to hear "thank you' but because we have to. We are compelled to. In many senses it is more for us than for our children. OTOH, it lowers people's self-esteem to be helped and in that sense it truly IS "better to give than to receive." As Pearson notes, we need space in our lives to know that we are making our own choices and not being controlled, even in rebellion, by the expectations, needs and desires of our parents or mentors. There is enough in that to explore to fill a feature film but I think it can play nicely as a short. My goals is not to give the audience answers but to leave them with good questions.

An early version of the story got angry reactions from women. I knew the daughter was under-written and the ending was convenient (eg she tentatively forgave the father). I found the intensity of the anger disproportionate but it let me know that story was going to be good if I could get it right. I rewrote the outline 3 different ways, starting with making the daughter the protagonist. That helped greatly. Then I stewed on where this story was really coming from in me. Got that answer. Now I have an outline that I think is the winner and will tweak and test and finish writing it but I still want to leave room for the actress to bring her emotional truths to that character.

As the saying goes "Growing old is mandatory -- Growing up is not". I'm last in the birth order, a "baby", and we stereotypically want two things: to entertain people, and to have everyone get along with each other. My maturity has lagged but I don't want to leave this life without a few more answers and writing has become a way to find some of them.