Catching My Conscience

You know you do your job too well when you’re excited that a delayed sporting event aired a week earlier than it was supposed to – and you race home to get the thing done.

Funny, that.  For all my whining this weekend about not being able to do what I love to do, my job is definitely not what I blame.  More, I blame myself and my constant writer’s block.

Thing is, I’m not that into the idea of being published on a wide scale.  Even if author notoriety isn’t exactly high on some people’s scales (though there are many devoted readers out there who focus on authors as opposed to celebrities), I wouldn’t want to give up my anonymity for the sake of a published work.  At least, work in terms of a novel, a short story, a book of poems (an area of writing at which nearly everyone fails, in my humblest of opinions – I am certainly no exception).

The one thing I’ve always wanted to do but was afraid of sharing with others and am finally – and shyly – admitting on this website?

I’d love to writing smashing plays.  I would love to be WordNerd, playwright extraordinaire.

I’d love to be on the level of Margaret Edson or Timothy Findley.  I’d love to take what I know – medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern literature and history – and create a catching story that people could act out on a stage.  There are so many possibilities with plays once you fall into the rhythm of the text that I find that playwriting would be a liberating form of expression.  I would write, and a director would take it a step forward to introduce his/her vision of my play to an audience; another director would do that, and then another, and then another.  A play is never the same once it leaps off the page into a performance; it is the transitory nature of the text in action that absolutely fascinates me.  That’s partly why I focused so much on playwrights during my years of study.

Scriptwriting could also bring this to me.  As singularly awful as Gwenyth Paltrow is, I did enjoy the fanciful nature of Shakespeare in Love.  Carnivale, my latest obsession in terms of television, manages to capture a time period and present to me its intricacies, both pleasant and unpleasant.  Were I to read the text of these scripts, I could probably find many things to do differently, and many of these many things would work in the context of the writing.  Of course, that also fails miserably sometimes.  I present to you The Lion in Winter from 1968 and The Lion in Winter from 2003.  Patrick Stewart, I love the hell out of you, and I’ve always wanted to see you play Prospero, but you are no Peter O’Toole (no one is – the man kicks all kinds of ass up and down the street; if you saw Troy, you saw him decimate Brad Pitt in the scene they shared).  Glenn Close – shall I even begin to express my disappointment at you taking on Katherine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine?  I guess the 2003 version’s biggest problem was that, in trying to distinguish itself from the 1968 powerhouse, it ended up being too similar.  That probably doesn’t make sense unless you’ve seen both of them.

Oh, throw in James Goldman as another playwright I would love to be like.

There, I’ve said it – I want there to one day be a college textbook published by Arden called The Complete Works of WordNerd WordNerdia.  I can honestly say that, had I been able to pursue a life of academic endeavors, I’d have wanted this and some acclaimed papers to my name.  Yup, that’s me.  I wanted academic notoriety.  It wouldn’t be worldwide, obviously, but I wanted the academic world to remember me.

I am left, however, school-less and blocked.

Now, however, back to the thing which brought me much joy this morn: Drag racing.