Explores A Question

I started a playwriting course last Tuesday at UCLA taught by Leon Martell and the first assignment made me light headed with a kind of nerdy anticipatory fever!  Leon asked us to bring in three germs for a play: a situation, a title, an image.  He said a play begins with a question and gave as an example his award winning play, "Bea[u]tiful in the Extreme," which explores the question why Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) shot himself after he returned from his historic expedition.  

In my favorite book on how to write a novel, "The Art of the Novel," Milan Kundera ("Unbearable Lightness of Being") says exactly the same thing!  A novel explores a question.  In fact, Kundera says, the history of the novel is not the sum of what was written but the "sequence of discoveries" along the way:

"In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine 'what happens inside,' to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational into human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera."

How exciting!  Not only do we write with a question in mind, our questions form the history of the artform itself!  And it made me wonder.  What are the questions people are asking these days in the books and plays and videogames they are writing?  And where does mine fit in?

It made me think about the question behind my book.  There are many questions, actually, because over these 15 years I've used my book to learn many things.  But the question that is central to the main character is this: "What is the 'Thing' I am constantly searching for but never find?"  And the form of my book?  What if there were a form, the writing of which could create consciousness in the person writing it?  That is the form that I would pick!

So what is your question?

The Divine Child

I remember once complaining to my therapist that all the men in my life were puers, you know, the Peter Pan type that never wants to grow up, never wants to commit.  It was so funny.  Jessica just looked at me a little sorry and said, "Well You know, Diana, you're a little bit like that too."  I was shocked!  Wasn't I a responsible mother? hadn't I held down a difficult job? wasn't I the committed one?

Jessica pointed to my book, The Red Coat, which was the subject of many a session and still unfinished, and she said, "Being grown up is about making choices.  So is writing." 

I eventually graduated from therapy, but I have yet to finish the book.  Completing it will be a milestone for me, probably the hardest thing I'll have ever done.  Jessica said I succeeded because I was one of those clients that did all the homework, including the suggested reading.  She assigned me a book called "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus" by Jungian analyst Marie-Louise Von Franz and it changed my life.

I learned that resistance to the adult world (e.g., giving up one's infantile fantasies, committing to a plan, overcoming impatience, buckling down) is a common problem for creative people.  It is the dark side of the personality that otherwise possesses a tremendous capacity for play, for honesty, for spontaneity, for letting go and having fun. 

The problem, for the creative person, then, is how to pull yourself out of the fantasy life of the child without losing its value?  How to grow up without losing those feelings of totality and creativeness and being fully alive that propelled you in your youth?  According to Von Franz, the cure is the same for men or women: work. 

"The work which is the cure for the puer aeternus is where he has to kick himself out of bed on a dreary morning and again and again take up the boring job -- through sheer will power."

For me, it was an agony to have to work at the level of words, as absurd as that is but true.  After all, I was writing a book, right?  But for years, I resisted.  I imagined myself at the bottom of the ocean, stuck in sludge, enraged that even were I to kill myself down there I wouldn't get back up.  I could stay down in that hell forever, I realized, unless I learned.  Sooner or later, I'd have to write.  Even if it felt like senseless, useless writing, even if I'd have to throw all of it out, it would have to be done, letter by letter, word by word, until characters were created, actions and whole scenes. And I'd probably have to make them up.  Every one of them.  From nothing.

For my picture, I tried to imagine the single thing that saved me.  Where did I find the will?  At first I thought it was faith, but then I realized it was an actual force inside me.  It was my divine child, that irrepressible little wild one inside me.  The divine spark. 

What does your divine child look like?