Mnemonic was 'Too Good' for Me…

Sunday, I went to see Quantum Theatre's production of "Mnemonic." I give a lot of credit to Quantum Theatre for taking a chance. Performing another company's work was risky, and it didn't quite work for me. This was a play devised by an entire production company, written by the actors and representing that original production company.

As a writer and audience member, my wife can attest that I like some "odd" things. I respect adventurous writing and innovative staging. I've seen plays in which the actors never take the stage, and some that were immersive media experiences. I've enjoyed plays that are in multiple languages, reminding me that good actors and staging transcend language barriers (but I still tried to translate what I could). I've written plays in which mime was essential, and some that are surely abstract.

But you must never forget that people need to feel engaged by a play. Writing shouldn't push the audience or readers away. I don't fall into the camp that "art must offend" nor do I believe that "challenging" the audience has no limits. You can overshoot the challenge, and then you're left with empty seats.

Reviews such as this are a problem for theatre: 

Based on a small random sample of audience response, I might say "Mnemonic" is too good for its audience, except that the Quantum audience is as good as it gets in Pittsburgh (adventurous, intelligent, willing).
— Stage review: Quantum traces memory, mysteries

When you consider a work "too good" for an educated, informed audience including professors from excellent universities, it might be the work that is the problem. The acting was solid enough and the staging was excellent, but the play didn't speak to me — and judging by others, it didn't speak to them, either. The play feels like it was meant for a specific place, time, and production company. It didn't make the move, and maybe that's an interesting question in itself.

I can't say it was a bad experience, watching "Mnemonic." I can't say it was wonderful, either. It was "okay" — which isn't going to expand the audience for theatre. I'm not suggesting theatre has to be pop to be a success, but it can't be "okay" and thrive.

When someone like me, a fan of the surrealists, modern art, and experimental music, is left wondering "What was the point?" that's not theatre that's "too good" for the audience. (And yes, absurdist theatre makes the point that there is no point… but "Mnemonic" wasn't an absurdist work.) 

Related articles

• 'Mnemonic' sure to give audiences food for thought
• Quantum's 'Mnemonic' is a thoughtful mystery

On Being 'The' (or 'A') Pittsburgh / Visalia Playwright

It was a brief discussion after a play with a director about to read one of my scripts.

Director: What is your goal, as a playwright?

Me: To be The Visalia playwright or even A San Joaquin Valley playwright. Maybe a dozen people will know my name! Or at least the name of one of my plays. Maybe.

Director: And then what?

Me: To be one of The Pittsburgh playwrights. That might be a bit harder….

Director: And then what?

Me: There's a "then what" after that? I hadn't thought about the next step. I'm still at the first step!

Director: This is Pittsburgh. Off-Broadway and Broadway aren't creatively far away. You need to think about that.

Me: I need to get something produced and fully staged in Pittsburgh before I worry about—

Director: Always think ahead. You never know who will be in an audience.

It was a good point. In Pittsburgh, you might have a Broadway actor, director, or playwright in an audience. I've met several, now, and worked with a couple of Broadway veterans. When I think about that, it gets a little overwhelming. It's also a reminder that every script has to be the best it can be.

I was only slightly joking about being one of The Pittsburgh playwrights. There are some towering historical figures and current dramatists in the Greater Pittsburgh region. By comparison, I cannot think of a major playwright — a major writer — from my native Visalia, California. That means I stand a better chance of being the best-known writer from Visalia. (I do know some amazing artists from Visalia, especially photographers and illustrators.)

Here's the list of Pittsburghers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_the_Pittsburgh_metropolitan_area

Recently, I wrote that writers have to be unrealistic. You need big dreams. Maybe I shouldn't joke about being among the Pittsburgh greats. Maybe that should be a goal. Seems unrealistic enough…

Finding Me

Through 1991, I had filled six journals with poetry and short prose. Then, it took me seven years to fill the seventh. The eighth journal has been less than half-filled since 1999 or so. This summer, 2013, I have vowed a return to the poetry journals just as I have returned to playwriting after too many years.

There is a box marked "Scott's Writing" in the basement. For years, it was a paper box, a Staples red box to be precise. Our first house in Pennsylvania flooded and I moved the writing to a clear plastic bin. While I know the bins can crack and leak, let me pretend that my writing is now a little safer.

Why not backup the writing to the cloud? Because much of the writing has never been digitized. The writing wasn't created on a computer. I still have poems and plays I wrote in fifth grade, Mr. B's class at Ivanhoe Elementary. I was a playwright and poet then... and I still am. I just got a bit lost along the way. "Books" bound with colored electrical tape and featuring crayon illustrations are meant to be what they are — physical artifacts of my youth.

It's hard to explain the gaps in my writing. There was a shift from poetry to scripts in 1999. Then, I stopped writing for several years. In 2004, I returned to graduate school and my creative writing was once again pushed aside. But why is that? Several of my classmates and a few professors managed to write creative and scholarly simultaneously.

Looking back, I wrote a lot of poetry and short stories while an undergraduate. I wrote hundreds of pages for myself, while writing academic papers, working on the school paper, and working 20 to 30 hours a week. What's my excuse for the lack of productivity in the last decade or so?

Writing well isn't about writing a lot — but the two aren't entirely separate. I'd like to be even a fraction as productive as I was years ago. You can always edit and revise once the ideas are on paper or stored away as bits of data.

As I have posted recently, I believe I was afraid of being "just a writer" instead of having a more secure career. An aspiring writer is like an aspiring actor: one works at Starbucks and the other waits tables, but they both have big dreams. Recently, I was asked if I'd consider acting in one of my stage plays. That would make me eligible for paying jobs as a barista and a waiter!

I wonder what coffee house poets are qualified to do?

The Conflict: Writing and 'Realism'

What follows is a long, meandering essay on why I haven't been doing what I should have been doing for the last 23 years. Not that I haven't been writing from time to time, but I would stop writing just as I started to hit a good stride. Between "realistic" pursuits, I would write a half-dozen plays, a hundred poems, or several decent short stories. Then, I'd feel like a failure, since I wasn't selling my works, and I'd slink back towards the "realism" that required putting creative writing aside.

Professional (and pro-ish) writers are, by nature, unrealistic. They have to be, since writing leads to a successful career about as often as portraiture, ballet, or professional sports. If you don't imagine yourself good enough to earn a living, you aren't going to keep writing — and writers write. You need a stubborn sense of pride and the hubris to imagine someone is going to recognize the value of your words.

You might not assume a financial value to your words, but you assign them some sort of value. Maybe you write to teach, to persuade, to entertain, or to "change the world" in a grand way.

When someone tells me that he or she writes for "the self" and some manner of (low-cost) personal therapy, I cringe. Really? You write just for yourself? Then it is a hobby and you are not a "writer" in the way I use the word. To me, a writer creates for an audience. Maybe it is only one other person, but there is an audience.

I used to tell my students that writers are engaged in conversations. Leave it to college students to point out that you can have a conversation with yourself (silently, ideally). Still, my point is that writing and all forms of communication are transactions between people. Writing is an interaction with some sort of goal. Maybe the goal is simply to reinforce traditions and good feelings (epideictic rhetoric), but there is always a goal when we communicate.

For professional writers, your words must attract not merely an audience… but an audience willing to pay for your works. Talk about an absurd dream: earning a living as a writer.

I've ended up meandering around writing, because I've constantly allowed myself to be "realistic" about the potential to earn a living as a writer. While some of my classmates never stopped writing, never accepted that they needed "real" careers to pay very real bills — including student loans — I kept trying to earn money, at the expense of being a writer. So, of course, I succeeded at failing and being unhappy. I would have been much happier being unrealistic. I couldn't have failed as a writer any more than I did in other pursuits. Realism drains creativity.

When I headed off to college, my goal was to be a journalist. But, as I watched newspapers and magazines close, I decided to make the ultimate mistake and shift entirely to teaching. After all, teaching seemed like a secure career path. That didn't end well, and I decided to embrace technology. When that didn't work, did I return to writing? Nope, I went back towards teaching. Only later did I briefly focus on returning to college for a graduate degree in journalism… but that didn't work out well, either.

My entrepreneurial efforts might be compared to being an unrealistic artist, but my attempts to "fit in" within corporate or educational settings were soul-sucking disasters. Not that failing as an entrepreneur is good, but it is better than other forms of misery and discontent. Still, writing would have been cheaper and easier than some of my attempts to achieve financial security.

In a cycle I have written about several times, I would start to pursue writing only to panic about financial security. I'd end up doing something that seemed realistic and potentially rewarding, chasing dreams of earning a living at the expense of writing.

Experiencing failure after failure (personal and financial) as I embraced "realism" over creative writing, guided me towards a doctorate degree. Only an artist could view a career in academia is more secure than doing what he or she loves. It turns out, there aren't anywhere near the job openings necessary to accommodate a fraction of terminal degree holders. Chasing writing would have at least avoided piles of student loan debt and years spent not writing the creative forms and genres I enjoy.

If you want to be a writer, write. I tell my students that, I tell my clients that, I tell seminars that, and yet it isn't what I was doing. I was busy being "realistic" while advising other people to embrace the absurd notion of writing for fun and profit. Why had I allowed this to happen? Why had realism won over my true nature as a writer? I spent six years in graduate school, not engaged in creative writing.

Yes, yes, I know that academic writing, all writing, is "creative" to some degree. But everyone knows what I mean when I describe myself as a creative writer trapped in the world of scholarly writing. Just try to submit an academic paper as an epic poem. Maybe a journal or two will accept it, but most are hung-up on APA and MLA formatting and that horrible language of "academese."

Forget realism. Assume your creative works are good enough. Assume they are whatever you imagine them to be — they just might be that good.

When I write, I know the work I produce isn't "great" compared to the works I admire. But, I also know, without any doubt, that my works are better than 90 percent (or more) of what I read, hear, and see. That's the balance an artist probably needs: the certainty that you're good, the humility to recognize greatness in others. You need a little realism, without being realistic.

Somehow, I need the faith in my works to not be sidetracked by other pursuits. Chasing money has probably cost me money and delayed my career as a writer. I'm not sure how I will avoid being sucked back into that bad cycle, either. How do you not worry about earning enough to pay bills? To take care of family? I need to be unrealistic and convince myself that writing is a career.

If I am going to do anything other than write, it should enable and extend my creative writing. This is going to be a scary transition, and too often I have been scared out of writing full-time. Why do some people pursue their long-shot dreams, while others surrender to realism? The artists must have insane self-confidence and a realization that they are not meant to do anything else.

I keep claiming to be a writer. I make this claim every few years, and then quickly abandon the path required to succeed as a writer. Time to embrace what I tell others and be unrealistic. I must write, write, and write some more, and not only blog posts about why I should be writing….

Dramatist Me

Deciding to be a full-time "dramatist" is not a decision to be taken lightly. Yet, that is the path I am choosing. This probably proves I'm unrealistic and unstable.

Playwrights and screenwriters seldom earn "the big bucks" as writers. Okay, few writers in any genres become wealthy. That's why so many of us split our time between writing and teaching writing to other aspiring scribblers. Consider the logic of struggling career writers encouraging other writers, but don't dwell on it too long.

There are some precautions to take, like preparing for a wagon-train across the frontier.

My wife and I are stocking up on food and water, buying what we can on sale and storing it in our basement. Canned food and pasta are the staples for starving artists, I've been told. Yes, we have our Ramen noodles, rise, and Campbell's condensed soups on the shelves. It isn't enough to stock for the lean months. No, we're mastering coupon clipping, too. Stock up on the cheap!

Next, you have to have good guides, unflinching men and women familiar with the terrain. I've met several such guides, and a few scouts, too. The scouts are great because they've suffered the slings and arrows of production company rejections. Ideally, I'll learn what not to do by listening closely.

Knowing that failure is the likeliest of outcomes, why in the world would I dedicate myself to this path? Because I've always admired dramatists.

I've lived in some great regions for the theatrically minded. I grew up in the Central Valley of California, a region captured by the works of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan. What playwright wouldn't want to be like Saroyan? A bicycling curmudgeon on the streets of Fresno, I can relate to that.

My wife and I moved to Minneapolis in 2006, where theatre and radio plays are at the heart of the region's creative community. I would look at the Guthrie Theater (despite how ugly I believe it is) and imagine one of my works on the main stage. Maybe the second stage, but still… it is THE Guthrie.

Today, we live in Western Pennsylvania. My plays are being read in the shadow of the August Wilson Center. (While he traveled East to West, we've gone the opposite direction.) Another great playwright, looming large in my imagination, reminding me how middling my works might be.

For every Wilson or Saroyan, there are hundreds of dramatists like me. How absurd is it to imagine I might have a play on stage in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Chicago… or even New York City? Short of self-production, a path restricted to the more financially secure (or insane) dramatists, the path ahead will be rocky.

Maybe you'll find me in coming months, standing outside the August Wilson Center passing out scripts to passersby in the hopes that one might know someone who knows an agent or producer.

Questions Writers Receive

The most common questions writers receive:

1. Where do your ideas come from?
2. How do you get your ideas published / produced?
3. I have this really great idea! Can you write it?

1. I steal the ideas by eavesdropping on conversations around me. People say some pretty amazing things, far better than I could create in my imagination.

2. Submit hundreds of works and query letters. One or two might be chosen. People won't know how much work it was to get a single work published or produced. Maintain the illusion it was easy, just to annoy other writers.

3. No, the idea isn't that great. No, I won't write it for you.

Finding the Answer

The answer is not 42. It is not 21, 7, or 1 million. The answer is 49.

It is the one of the best experiences in life. It might be the most addictive concoction on the planet. If there is a Heaven, this is what is served with the milk and honey.

The meaning of life is found on page 49 of the 1985 edition of Betty Crocker's Chocolate Cookbook under the heading "Fudgy Brownies." Don't bother with the newer versions of this recipe; they aren't the same. No, the only answer that matters is in that one special book. Technically, it is only a partial answer. The unwritten secret is an additional two cups of dark chocolate chunks, unmelted and added right before baking.

No matter how bad a day might be, brownies make everything okay. But the brownies on page 49? Wow. Simply… wow.