The Choice You Make

In dramatic writing, you want to establish the basic need or object of desire in your main character and then set up obstacles for achieving it – the more obstacles the better! The formula they teach you in film school is the same: boy meets girl, boy gets girl (Act One), boy loses girl (Act Two), boy gets girl back (Act Three).  The key is to make things worse as the story progresses – not out of mean spiritedness but because how your character deals with problems reveals her character. 

You know.  When a person’s back is up against the wall that's when you find out who they really are.   

What’s the worst that could happen?  That’s the crisis in your play.  The forces of opposition can no longer avoid collision and the worst thing your main character could have imagined comes true – so what does she do? That’s the rest of your play!

My playwriting teacher said it was Oedipus’ character that made him gouge out his eyes when he realized that he had murdered his father and slept with his mother.  Other characters might have just skipped town.

I was thinking about this when I found myself in my own crisis.  I’d been working full guns for six months on the book, writing before work and for several hours each day on the weekends and trying to paint at nights, when it got busy again at work and I started to become exhausted and depressed.  The company was moving offices too, so I had to give up taking the bus, which is when I do all my reading, and swimming on my lunchbreaks, which is the thing I do to keep my energy and spirits up. 

I was getting pressed on all sides, and started to feel my dream slipping away... 

At first, I felt shame for all my failures.  Then panic as I went round and around my schedule and found no breaks.  Then I got sick.  Then, I blamed Jack for not rescuing me.  Then I remembered a strategy that our teacher had taught us in playwriting class.

You set a timer and for 5 minutes you write what happens from the crisis point to the end of your play.  Write whatever comes to mind in as much detail as you can.  Then you go back to the crisis point and somebody (say your main character) makes a different choice.  For 5 minutes write what happens from that choice to the end of your play.  Do that 5 times, so you have 5 different endings.  Then choose one – and that’s how your play ends!

Do that for your life and then, given all the different scenarios, ask yourself what is the choice you will make?

p.s. I chose 6:00am M-F at the Culver Plunge! 

Knight of Faith

Why is it in the spirit world anything is possible but in life we must pass the same old traces? 

Jack and I just finished watching Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and I asked him why it was one of his favorite films.  He said because it deals with the deepest questions facing human beings -- and still is very funny. 

I'm reading the screenplay to Fanny and Alexander, and notice that in both films, Bergman juxtaposes the choices people make between cruelty and kindness.  In Fanny and Alexander it is the choice that is made in a marriage and in The Seventh Seal it is the choice that one makes during a time of extreme crisis, in this case the period of profound social, economic and religious upheaval brought on in 14th Century Europe by the Plague.  The Knight, played by Max Von Sydow, and his Squire return from the Crusades to find the world turned upside down.  Reacting in terror to the Black Death that has taken nearly half the population, the townsfolk have gone out of their minds, torturing each other and flagellating themselves. 

Why do some people choose cruelty -- and others kindness? 


Why is it in the spirit world anything is possible but in life we must pass the same old traces?  

Jack and I pondered these questions.  Yes, I thought, I am afraid to die but why must it define me? When the Knight witnesses these displays of cruelty, feels his own fear, he replies, "My body is afraid, but I am not."   

I repeated that line to Jack.  "That is what I shall say."  "Then you have faith?" he relied.  I was surprised.  "I have been fooled before," I said with a sly smile.  "What do you mean?" he asked.  I told him how many years ago when I was pregnant I had thought the birth of my child would transform me, but the experience was something very different.  I forewent pain killers in order to be completely present but I had no idea how excruciating it would be.  The labor which lasted for 36 hours was unabated pain until at last, in exhaustion, I submitted to cesarean.  

And still.  I was transformed.  

"Perhaps it was because of the pain," I said to Jack.  It was for that reason, I told him, I wasn't sure I wanted to be sedated in the last moments before death.  Jack related what he'd read in a biography of Montaigne.  He'd had a nearly fatal fall from a horse and witnesses reported he was in agonizing pain, yet Montaigne's own recollection of the experience was very different.  He said it was peaceful.


I told Jack that was probably because Montaigne was in shock as the consciousness began to leave the body.  And then, all of a sudden, as we were discussing this, my mind made a leap.  My consciousness lighted on the possibility that things were not as they appeared at all.  I was staring at the bookcase, I remember.  The lamp was on and Jack was sitting there on the couch beside me.  "Perhaps all of this," I said waving my hands to indicate the world around us as we were sitting there experiencing it "...perhaps all of this is an illusion."  What if it didn't matter?  Or, more precisely, what if we weren't bound by it?  Then what was true?  I tried to focus my mind.  What if we bore, as Bergman has his hero in Fanny and Alexander say,  "chasms, heavens, eternities" within us? 

Though I seem small and insignificant in the face of this,
I bear chasms, heavens, eternities within me.
I carry my lantern in the darkness;
I make the movements;
And though my body may be afraid,
I am not.

If I could see this, remember this, what great things would I accomplish?   

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?

Through My Water Glass

I took an art therapy class ten years ago from an artist named Leah Matson, who was also a licensed therapist.  There were about seven of us women who sat together in a room for three hours on a Saturday afternoon and did art and talked about whatever came up.

Each week it was a different medium, watercolors, acrylics, oils, pastels.  Once we made masks.  I remember when Leah brought out the oil paints I cried.  The smell of the linseed oil brought back a flood of memories.  I used to paint with oils when I was a kid.  I painted the things I didn't know, like the giant panda bears that the United States received as gifts from China, Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing, straight out of the National Geographic, which is where I got most of my subject matter back then.

But now, at the table of the seven women, I painted from somewhere inside me a murky green landscape that looked like mud, and then I put a leaf on top and painted more mud over that.  I hated it.  I watched as one woman painted portraits in intense, chalky reds with bright blue auras, staring faces with other-worldly expressions that had an aboriginal feeling to them.  Another woman painted a soft and lovely landscape with a luminous figure in it and then suddenly etched across the surface of her drawing in yellow pastel the words "take dominion."  I was so enamored of her and her startling impulse, the action of marring a beautiful painting with force, that I asked her if I could have her painting.  Sometimes we see in others the latent qualities that we need to develop in ourselves.

Later, I began to see Leah on a one on one basis.  I had started my book but was too identified with my writing to allow myself to make mistakes with it.  To be identified with something in psychology means that you can't separate yourself from it.  You don't know where you end and the other begins.  During one of our sessions I remember Leah asking me if I was shy and my feeling very upset by that.  Shy was so far from who I knew I was but for some reason it was true.  Completely.  I felt desperate, as if I were at the bottom of a pool and couldn't make it to the surface.

The mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

"When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image out before her and enters into it."

My book The Red Coat is an image that my soul threw out that I stepped into, like a bubble rising to the top.    

Tonight, I went through my file from Leah's class (I have a file for everything!) looking for that murky green painting but couldn't find it.  I must have carried it around for years and then finally threw it out.  So I imagined a photograph I could take that would capture the feelings I had back then and I decided to snap a picture through the bottom of my water glass!

So tell me, what picture does your soul want you to enter?

Her Voice

Lots of women suffer from having, or feeling like they have, no voice.  I had no problem when I was young getting up in front of a crowd and telling stories, but when I was older and began to look more closely at myself I didn't like what I saw and my creativity froze.  I was terrified to speak up.  To make noise.

On the darkest part of my journey to be a writer, I worked with a personal coach named Breck Costin who assigned me the path of "voice."  He said whenever you are on your path it will bring up the worst feelings, but staying firm on the path will heal your life.  For me, the feelings were mostly feelings of worthlessness and fear of repercussions for things I said.  Breck taught me that having an awful feeling about something was no reason not to do it.  And what was even more remarkable was that it was not important to succeed at it.  The important thing was to bring up the terrifying feelings that you were pushing away.  That's all.  In fact, Breck often coached people to fail.  Play to Lose, he always said.   

I am a good student and did what I was told and tried my hand at failing all over the place.  One of the things I did to bring up my awful feelings was to take a voice acting class near the Warner Studios in Burbank with Bob Bergen the "voice" behind Porky the Pig.  In class we had to get behind the microphone in the recording booth and audition for parts in front of the others -- I was terrified but astonishingly adept at all the animal parts, I guess because I could sympathize with dumb scared animals.  Anyway, I got the voice of the dog in the class production.  It was humiliating to never get picked the female roles, but I tried not to show it. 

My willingness to fail, to feel the awful feelings that came up whenever I was on my path -- to play to lose -- finally opened up my creativity.  Focusing on the path rather than the results, it came as a complete surprise when my friend Cynthia Wylie asked me to narrate the audio books for her newly launched online game for kids.  You can hear my voice narration by registering to play and then going to the schoolhouse and clicking on one of the books at Bloomers! Island.

Incidentally, Cynthia is up for a 2011 Excellence Award from the Association of Virtual Worlds.  Please support her efforts at teaching children gardening concepts and vote for her by selecting her name at the top left of her profile... and then tell me...

...what is your path?

For my picture, I chose a picture of Wolfie, the wolf dog I rescued in the Venice Canals where I lived with my son.  Here he is hiding under my house.  He was undernourished, flea bitten and absolutely terrified of people, but for some reason he came to me.  I wanted to keep him but he kept jumping over my fence, so I found him a loving home in the Santa Monica mountains with an eccentric old lady.

I will always love and remember him.

Good Enough

We were at dinner party with friends last week and two of the women, one a therapist and the other, a mother of two who had just been told by her marriage counselor that she was a perfectionist, were discussing the ravaging effects of perfectionism on women's lives.  The therapist was saying that women unduly suffer from this compulsion much more so than men apparently, and was encouraging our other friend to accept "good enough" as a standard she could hold herself to, rather than the impossible expectations that were holding her back from accomplishing anything at all.

I thought of that conversation when I sat down tonight to write this week's post, which I admit is late.  The fact is, I'm not sure I can keep this up.  Something's got to give.  Although I'm still on track to finish my book by year's end, I'm getting pressure at every turn.  There's so much work to do at the office right now, this past week I've had to come in early every day and work straight through my lunches, which means I've had to swim at night, which means I've had less time to write in the morning and to paint at night.  Moreover, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the research piling up at work!

The only way I'm going to be able to get through this is to work much faster.  Which to me can only mean one thing: not good enough.

In "Addicted to Perfection," Marion Woodman describes the problem as personified by Lady Macbeth who is "glued to the sticking place of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life."  This archetype or pattern functions in modern women, petrifying their spirit and inhibiting their development as free and creative individuals and arises, Woodman argues, from the cultural one-sideness that favors productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence, spiritual perfection, etc. -- at the expense of listening, receptivity and relatedness traditionally recognized at the heart of the feminine.

I can just blaze through all of this and end up shocked and demoralized like the chalk lady I saw in the cement sidewalk on my way home from work on Thursday night, or I can try and imagine what "good enough" might look -- or feel -- like.

Can you?