I was shaving the other day around the latest outcropping of acne on my chin, cursing my life's good luck to get my mom's bad skin, when a phrase popped in my head like an aggrieved blood vessel. This is not unusual. Things bubble up all the time. My brain will cobble together some words into a phrase fraught with emotional resonance and, often, an abundance of assonance before lobbing it at the world like a spaghetti plate at a wall. This is what teachers call brainstorming.
From there, I try to concoct a vignette that might properly frame those words, imbuing them with the feelings and tensions I had in saying them. Some angst, some pain, and a month later, it's a first draft so ugly you consider keeping it in a burlap sack until you can find a bat or a stick or something with which to beat it to death. On the plus side, if you're lucky, it's an honest little thing, with no refinement or pretension to trip up its blaring declaration of THE TRUTH.
And then you must revise THE TRUTH, pushing it forever up until you abandon it or it crushes you, hopefully somewhere near where you started. This is where I often get stuck, sitting at mountain bottom on top of my boulder thinking how godawfully hard it'll be to begin. To get rid of all the parts that don't work and replace them with other things that are marginally better, intelligent design in metered lines, evolution in essay form.
For me, the problem is affect, that need to be bigger than the moment and say a little something to everyone; my symptom: sarcasm, a knowing eye roll of the tongue. The funny thing is observing how that same wrench gets in everywhere. The man who dances around his stiff spine like a church-approved maypole, biting at his lip as hardens his elbows into crooks? Afraid to simply shake his shit. The woman who tries to sing Houston when she should just loosen up and belt out some Jett? Scared of her own inherent power. You gotta let the audience find you, not the reverse, and I've a glut of projects that I need to clear out of my barn.
