Writer’s Block

Another month gone and my mind is still on holiday. Or maybe it’s just stuck half-way up the wall I went splat against when we got home from the Cal/Can trip. That’s how it feels, I guess, when up against one form or another of writer’s block. As if you are getting nowhere even though those little gray cells in one’s mind are probably working hard, be it for or against you and your fabulous concepts.

Have you any idea how different playwriting is from prose? Ain’t it strange?! I mean, all the characters go running around and telling you all about their history, on occasion revealing a bombshell around their sexuality or a preference for clams, not oysters. And yet they refuse to sit down and have a chat about what they are going to say to that character who is over in a corner rambling on about their having fallen on their head as a child and no one cared. 

So. What has to happen is there has to be conflict. Like getting bonked on the head has caused the character in the corner—who is really funny when you get him going—to loathe anyone who eats clams. A fact that the character who likes clams takes very personally. So there it is: conflict.

But what, may I ask, has that conflict got to do with the play’s Central Dramatic Question? And how does that Central Dramatic Question concern the deepest desire and the need (two different things) of the protagonist (who, by the way, sits around slurping clams most unattractively.)

And how does the Central Dramatic Question concern the fabulous idea that this writer came up with years ago? An idea that (somewhere along the line) jumped up and over the wall, to be lost in the quagmire of all my other ideas.

But in the midst of that muck it shines. I saw a glimmer of it today when my protagonist and his helpmeet finally had a conversation. It gives me hope that I might break down that wall yet.

And no, clams and bonks on the head aren’t in the play.