I'll Show You the Life of the Mind!

That line, and the image of John Goodman running down a hallway screaming, endures in my mind as one of the most evocative moments of "Barton Fink", a Coen Brothers movie that could be, painfully, reduced to a "surreal excursion into the life of a man with writer's block". The crazy images, I assume, are metaphors and though I flatter myself by comparing my challenges to those of the film's anti-hero, I too feel the wallpaper crumbling around me right now.

All I can think about, when I'm not nauseated about business school and what I have to do to earn it, is this play I'm trying to write. I want to write it, I like the idea behind it and I almost feel like the act of writing it would be therapeutic. But the characters still feel pretty distant (I couldn't even remember all of their names when talking about the play to a friend of mine) and the plot is still a bit of a mystery.

But, I did have a coup tonight. Talking to my friend, I forced myself to confront the details of my play and was helped immensely by the barrage of questions my friend threw my way. It was like he knew exactly where the blanks were, and I tried to answer the questions as quickly as I could, as though my characters had backstories that were robust and real:

Q:How long had the main characters dated?
A: Six to nine months

Q: Did the guy know about his girlfriend's affair with the professor?
A: Yes, but he didn't hold it against her until after the relationships ended.

Q: Did the girl's best friend have a crush on her?
A: No, I don't want to muddy the waters too much there.

The somewhat Socratic journey through the plot was really helpful and I ended up developing a major plot point, actually the turning point, through our conversation. I loved talking about the play, and got to a point where I was writing furiously on a napkin to keep up with the relationships between the characters, tweaking them, adding links, and then going through the critical point of the play to explore what the implications would be on the characters. That whole process felt amazing--I finally feel reinvigorated enough to really get into this and think I realize that, at least for me, I can't go through this process insularly, but need to bounce ideas off people and force myself to answer questions.

Also, side note, I proposed another play idea (one of the four I'm working on right now, and easily the most macabre) to my friend who actually really liked the idea. He seemed to think it had the most depth and was the most conceptually interesting, but he's also pretty dark so I don't know that the audience for what I want to do is really going to be anyone except him and anyone off their meds. But we'll see what happens. Maybe I am my harshest critic, though I should be so lucky.