Prioritizing.
Contraption is the project of greatest import. Contraption is the show I need to have written by early fall, Contraption is the show for which there is a confirmed production run, confirmed budget, confirmed marketing effort underway. Contraption is the script that requires my greatest concentration and focus.
Contraption.
Contraption.
Contraption.
I’m finally out of my latest prize-fight with writer’s block, at least, so I again feel the impetus and competence to do the work and forgo the sleep I so desperately need.
And yet, my brain, in its continuing campaign to make me look and feel like a complete fool, has decided that instead of executing whatever combination of released chemicals and firing neurons that would lead to even the first few lines of Contraption, it will instead, in very clear detail, tell me how to rewrite both The Accident God and The Playwright’s Bullet so as to make them exponentially better plays than they were the last time I wrote them. It will instead obsess over a new ten-minute play entitled The Final Night of the First Intention. It will try to convince itself that Cratchit was really, truly, going to be a play about power and forgiveness, and not just a cheap gimmick that relied overly on an audience’s familiarity with A Christmas Carol. My brain will work on a dozen less pressing playwriting activities and then look back at me, confused, when I ask what it knows about Contraption.
“Con-trap-tion? Yo no se Con-trap-tion, senor.”
If I thought I could get the information out of my brain via Jack Bauer’s methodology, I’d be just a few inches away from strapping my brain to the board and beginning the deluge of water.
I worry that it wouldn’t work, however, because in fact my brain really doesn’t know anything about Contraption, and would rather die than tell me how to find the information in the first place.
In the meantime, The Accident God works much better if Andy breaks the fourth wall early and often; The Playwright’s Bullet is actually a love triangle set against the backdrop of a classical literary trope, and the first Intention made it about a mile to sea before meeting its fate.
Damn it all.
Creative Control 