Now showing: humility.

27 April 2003—In the short-fiction workshop I took in college, the professor praised the critiques I wrote of the other students’ stories, but as for my own stories, well, he suggested to me that I might be better suited toward essay-writing. He might as well have sentenced me to death.

Hyperbole? Sure, why not. I wanted to write fiction. Look, I like writing essays. Some of my best friends are essays. In college I even ran for columnist for the university’s paper (I lost). I’ve had a lot of fun writing for this journal. But I’ve always seen it as a way for me to develop myself as a writer; the essays in these pages have been a way for me to get experience writing for an audience, in a way that working alone on the novel simply couldn’t do.

The journal has also steadily kept me writing. With the novel, if I took six months off, only I noticed. With the journal, I’m grateful to have the dedicated readership that I have, and I’d like to keep y’all entertained, as much as I can, anyway. It’s a way to keep honing my skills, a sort of literary cross-training, perhaps.

It’s turned out, though, that I do seem to be more comfortable writing nonfiction than fiction, and I wish it weren’t so. I’ve poked and prodded the novel to its current state of 220 pages or so, and I’ve done smaller fictional pieces here and there. But for some reason I haven’t fully thrown myself into the pursuit, and rarely have I shown anyone my fiction.

I suppose it’s kind of like when you feel sick in a way that you know a simple remedy isn’t going to fix, so you keep quiet because otherwise you’ll find yourself at the hospital, where your worst fears will be confirmed.

What qualifies a person to be a writer? Is it an innate talent one is simply gifted with? Is it a thorough grounding in the form one wants to take on? Is it simply a deep love of the craft? Some combination of those, or something else?

For example, if I want to write novels, are there certain novels or a certain number of novels I must have taken apart and put back together in order to consider myself welcome to add my own work to the field? I’ve read a good number of novels, but not nearly as many as I would like to have read. And I don’t know that I understand or have significant insights about any sufficient to teach a college- or even high school–level English class.

Likewise, I’ve read many plays and seen far more, particularly in the last dozen years or so since I’ve been designing posters for them. But again, I don’t feel knowledgeable enough about any to hold my own in a lengthy discussion with someone.

That’s not self-deprecation for the sake of sympathy; that’s being honest with myself. I think that’s one of my better traits, actually, being honest with myself. I think many people aren’t, and it leads to a certain amount of hubris, which would be fine except that those people keep inflicting their hubris on innocent bystanders. I’ve been one of those bystanders too often — I certainly don’t want to be one of the perpetrators.

I’ve been designing posters and other graphics for Impact Theatre for two years. Though I’ve done posters for a lot of shows over the years, it’s only one of two theater companies I’ve actually felt a part of, and it’s the only one I’ve felt welcome in all areas of. (The only disagreement I really have with Impact is that it spells “theater” with an -re, whereas I spell it with an -er. One can’t have everything.)

A year and a half ago, the company was gearing up for its next program of short plays, and it invited submissions from anyone who cared to send one in. I was beginning to write an essay about slam poetry, in which I wanted to honor the form but take to task the practitioners who displayed the deadly habits the form seemed to reward.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that it would be better as a play, and a short one at that. I discarded the essay. The play almost wrote itself, a satire featuring the kinds of ridiculous poems that appear all too often, though also honoring the parts of slams that I think are worthwhile.

I sent it in anonymously. I didn’t want the company members to make any special allowances for me because they appreciated the graphic work I’d done. I felt a little scared that if they chose it and I told them the truth, they might feel as though I didn’t trust that they might accept or reject it on its own merits. But what I really wanted was that if they hated it, they would never know it had been my play, and our future relationship wouldn’t be awkward.

Fortunately, they chose it. Not only that, they chose it (and a few others) out of a pile of 300 submissions. When I revealed that I had written it, there were no hard feelings. The artistic director said she had been surprised when she read it, thinking it was odd to find a writer out there who had the same sense of humor as the company. That I had written it made more sense to her.

Though the play got cut here and there and had flaws that I wished I had time to address before the production, I was generally happy with the result. I felt a stronger bond with the company (I was still pretty much an associate then — I’m a core member now), and it was fun to be part of the production. The actors really nailed the characters, and the audience thought it was pretty funny.

Best of all, I no longer worried about whether anyone in the company would look askance at my wanting to write something else for Impact, maybe another short, maybe a full-length play.

And then recently, I saw my chance. It seemed that we had two spots (out of four) in the upcoming season that weren’t filled, and the prospects so far had been dim. I had an idea for a full-length play that I’d been working out since our retreat a couple of months earlier, and I was excited about it: it had what I thought was complex characters with difficult conflicts that I could more or less resolve.

The two slots would be filled in a couple of weeks, and I floated the idea I had for the play to Melissa, the artistic director. It was a long shot that I’d be able to write the whole thing in two weeks, and it was a very long shot that it would be in good enough shape to commit to for the upcoming season. Melissa encouraged me to try it out; even if it didn’t work for next season, at least we’d have something we could put through the workshop process with an eye toward perhaps producing it the following season.

I worked on it furiously for the next two weeks, though it became apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be able to finish even the first act by the meeting. No worries, she said, just bring what you have and we’ll read it and see what we think.

Despite being a couple of scenes short of a first draft, I really liked what I’d written, which was a big anomaly for me. Sarah liked it a lot as well; her feedback made it even better.

I brought it to the meeting. Melissa introduced it not as an idea for this coming season but as the workshop idea. That was fine, I thought; since it was unfinished and by an unproven playwright, that would have been more than any company in its right mind should commit to.

So we read it. I had written it with certain people in mind for the parts, as that was part of the fun of writing expressly for Impact. (The impetus for the play came from a lament from our main actress, who felt that the kind of role she played in our just-closed production, that of a strong and intelligent but somewhat fucked-up woman, came along far too rarely. I’d set out to fill the gap.) Not all the players I’d written for were at the meeting, but the main actress was, and that was what mattered to me.

I was amazed by the reading. A dozen years ago I wrote a one-act play, and after a few years and several rewrites, I had two staged readings with two different sets of director and actors. I coordinated the first, and in the initial run-throughs, it creeped me out to hear the words I had only heard in my head be spoken by other people. And spoken incorrectly.

This time, however, all the lines came out correctly. There were things here and there that sounded stale or pat, but by and large, I thought it sounded natural. When the reading was over, I was surprised by how well it had gone.

And then: silence.

For thirty seconds no one said anything.

Everything crashed in that silence.

It wasn’t much better once people began to talk. The gist of the comments was that what I had written wasn’t a stage play. I’d written the summarized preface to the play. Everything I’d written was static, expository. I’d told instead of showed. What I’d written was valuable, they said, for me as a writer to have a sense of who I thought the characters were. The opinion was practically unanimous. Only one person said something outright positive, that he thought the characters and dialogue were natural. Small comfort.

Melissa and others tried to reassure me that this was natural in the workshop process, that often the first draft of a play looks radically different from the final, staged version.

I was prepared for the play to need some work that I couldn’t identify. That’s the purpose of readings and workshops: to try a script out and see where the holes are. I wasn’t prepared for the idea that nothing I’d written was stageworthy. Had it been one person’s opinion and everyone else disagreed, I’d have been far less affected. But it was everyone in the room, and they basically all agreed.

How could I have been so wrong? How could I not see what they were seeing? Most of them had more experience in theater than I did, certainly more from the production aspect, but I thought that as a reader and viewer of theater I had gleaned what can work on stage, as well as what I thought didn’t work, so I had both things I wanted to achieve and things I wanted to avoid. I had some reservations about the script, but I thought parts of it were at least as good as what we had just put on stage. After the reading, I felt like I had wasted everyone’s time. It was exactly the feeling I had tried to avoid with the anonymous submission. No, worse: I had started from (at least a little) higher up than I had been before they’d ever read my work.

The best thing at that point would have been to let the criticism be solely about the play. But there was more. Showing vs. telling has always been my weak spot, or so I’ve been told. And to be honest, I’ve always basically written it off. What’s wrong with telling, if it’s told well? They don’t call them storytellers for nothing, I always quipped.

Now I’m worried. I really don’t know the difference between the two. When I look up examples of telling vs. showing, it’s always obvious. The examples of telling are straw men, easily knocked down:

The examples are always flowery bullshit like this one. Look: I probably wouldn’t have written either sentence. But in my own work I can’t tell where the telling lies. This essay is probably overrun with telling — I don’t know. I get corrections and comments on most of the essays I post here, but I haven’t received that particular critique yet. Maybe it’s not as much of a problem with essays. I have no idea. (Plus, I’m led to understand that sometimes telling is OK. When is it OK, and when is it not OK?)

I’m sure, however, that it’s as much of a problem when it comes to novel-writing. What if my novel, 220 pages and counting, is all telling and no showing?

The worst part was that I had no idea how inappropriate my script was. What if it’s the same with this novel I keep trying to finish? What if, all this time, I’ve had in my head a picture of what a novel is, and it’s what I’m writing, but when it’s done there isn’t a single soul besides me (and Sarah, bless her heart) who agrees?

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to finish the novel and let other people read it. I wanted to work on the movie I’ve been thinking about for a while, but first I need to prove to myself that I can pull off the novel. So the movie is put away for a bit, and I’m back on a schedule to complete a draft of the novel, with a bit more leeway than last time: ten pages a week for eighteen weeks or so. That ought to complete the draft and still allow me time to post things here and have fun in the rest of my life.

Once the draft is done, I’ll revisit the play and see whether something can be salvaged from it. I still think it’s a good idea, and maybe it will yet make a good play. The Impact members, for their part, don’t seem to think I’m one of those awful hubristic asses. At least I felt welcome at the most recent meeting.

I know every writer goes through something like this, or something similarly humbling. Some writers go through a lot of things like this. I dearly hope I’m not one of them, but if I am, I suppose I’ll have to continue writing anyway. That’s what writers do, right?