PROLOGUE

For the past… well, about as long as I’ve had my laptop, I’ve used a dual-screen setup that saw me twisting my body to reach my built-in keyboard while I rotate my neck to keep my eyes on my main monitor. Well, no more—I got myself a modest mechanical keyboard recently, and it’s reminded me how much fun typing is. I love the clack of the keys, the contoured hills and valleys of a set of sturdy keycaps, the tactile journey of my fingers flickering across the board and depressing arrays of cuboids and clunking each combination off with an affirmative thud of the spacebar.

Part of why I got the keyboard was to ease my posture, yes—that change will hopefully persist well beyond the honeymoon period with this new acquisition. The other part of why I got a keyboard was to re-engage my senses while I write, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s had me looking for every opportunity to just type. The experience has been a comforting one to me. As I clack away, I am reminded of my dad’s IBM Model M, gray chassis yellowed with age, our faces illuminated by his computer’s screen as I look over his shoulder, my gaze following my ear from vocal springs and plastic caps to his racing fingers. Yes, my whole body remembers things, I am reminded, my full self.

ART

Looking at Trash.

I have been immensely fortunate to have seen a number of shows at the Perelman Performing Arts Center the past couple years, a good fortune I attribute much of to my friend Madz—friend of the newsletter, as well! Thanks Madz. At risk of wearing their name out, if I mention I saw a show at the PAC, chances are it was thanks to them.

The PAC (/pack/), or 6 World Trade Center, is a brand new performance venue that had its opening in September of 2023. It looks the part—the building is a giant cube that seems to be wrought from shimmering marble. As if demanding the penance of physical exertion from the audiences who will be sitting around its interior all day, entering the building through the front demands a skip up an imposing flight of stairs that feels more like a devotional act than one of transit (though the space is dedicated to accessibility—there is an elevator).

Inside, the PAC is sleek and stylish. Its lobby looks less a liminal location and more a luxury lounge and living room, with an adjoining eatery serving fourteen-dollar fries. On the night I saw Trash, the artist CuCu Diamantes was singing swinging Latin fusion music on a small stage ringed by sofas, close enough to dance with.

Ah! I’m doing it again. I need to keep this newsletter efficient, for you and me both. If you’re ever in NYC and have the opportunity to visit the PAC, do so. It gets bonus points for sharing an acronym with the Performing Arts Center of my youth.

So, Trash. It was a super cool experience, a play centered around two co-tenants’ conflict regarding the titular chore. What distinguished the play was the fact that these co-tenants were both deaf, and both depicted by deaf actors—the play centered their experience in a way that wove itself with the audience’s in nifty ways.

Last month, I noted that I would be content to see a whole play in a different language as long as it was directed well, and I think this show serves to rest my case. The show featured bursts of spoken English to help keep the hearing audience in the loop, but the two lead actors themselves performed the entirety of the play in sign language.

It wasn’t the sort of highly-choreographed sign language of, say, a Deaf West production—instead it was American Sign Language as is used every day by those for whom it serves as a primary language. It wasn’t woven into song and dance or isolated to some bit part or prefaced as a device and then dropped; it was the language the characters used to argue over their rent split, cuss out their nosy neighbors, and describe their hookups. It was awesome.

I get that there’s a sense of privilege to me watching a performance in ASL and writing exaltantly about how novel it was. I want to highlight, as well, the impact I hope this play had on other people. I walking into that performance space to discover a room that, while full, was rather quiet; friends greeted each other in ASL, hugging and reconnecting, and I would follow a cry of excitement only to realize the body of the exchange was unfolding in sign. Substantial swathes of the play saw no convenient translation to the spoken word for the sake of the hearing; the actors wove jokes into the light that the ASL-speaking audience would chuckle at and the non-ASL-trained audience would wonder what those signs illuminated. At moments where the characters expressed their honest experiences as part of the deaf community, there were cheers. At the end of the play, a beaming audience waved their hands as a visual alternative to clapping.

It would be conceited of me to pretend I was entirely satisfied by the play purely on the merit of its audacity. I don’t think its script, what I understood of it, was perfect; I certainly had difficulty imagining two adults making quite the amount of fuss they did over emptying a trash can. The stretches of the play expressed entirely in ASL did not open any floodgates to enlightenment. It was a solid play by deaf people, for deaf people, performed on a major American stage in the country’s finest city for theatre—that’s what made it awesome.

This play will hopefully be the first of many more like it: a piece of theatre not written as a PSA, but rather illuminating and empowering the lived experiences of the people it speaks—or signs—to.

CRAFT

I hate/finished the latest draft

Some salty language in this one, as a disclaimer to those who are wary of it.

I’m going to hazard a guess to say there is most often a feeling of triumph when a writer finishes a draft of something, when the threads converge and their days or weeks or months of effort pay off and they finally punch that BLACKOUT into their word processor. “I did it!”

I just finished the fourth draft of my two-hander Aptitude and the primary feeling I felt was a sense of, I think it was frustration. I started this most recent draft on February 17 and punched in my END OF PLAY on March 20 after what qualifies for me as a marathon of writing. It was an odd, but exciting feeling—every time I put the script down for what I thought was to be the rest of the day, my mind wandered back to that blinking cursor. Just ten more pages. The same night, I wrote this in my Values Journal:

So there is some pride there. It’s complicated, though.

There’s a specific point, I realize, where I tend to hate a lot of my writing—at least, I’ve noticed the feeling on every single goddamn draft of this play. When I completed draft four, I felt relief at having gotten through the final slog, not quite triumph. The feeling quickly turned to anger and despair as I mulled over how I can’t seem to get this play right.

It’s the final third—maybe the final quarter or so. In each draft of this, and probably other works of mine, too, this final stretch is the moment I realize none of my plot points are coming together in a satisfying way, the stakes have never been high enough, it’s a stupid idea in the first place, and I’ll never be able to turn it into a worthwhile play. And I’m a terrible writer who should give up his dreams and make something else his profession, maybe telemarketing or car sales or watching paint dry.

I always seem to having trouble writing a full- or feature-length piece work, and I’m still triangulating why that is. I feel my enthusiasm flagging towards the end of such a piece, but is that due to a lack of psychological stamina, or a product of my dissatisfaction with my work as it begins to unravel? Indeed, each time I write something more sizeable, it feels as if I’m knitting a sweater with yarn that only frays more and more the longer I work it. I was listening to an episode of Scriptnotes recently and John August’s advice was to write the end of a screenplay first, while one’s excitement is still high. Maybe that’s in the cards for the next draft.

In the case of Aptitude, I think I know why it’s not coming together. I know the stakes aren’t high enough—I think. I know I need to actually read the thing back to myself to see how it actually fits together. I just don’t get why, after four drafts and at least as many editing passes in, I still can’t put together a play that I think is satisfying to read. Just last month, I was marvelling in the newsletter over how helpful I thought detailed outlining had been! The path seemed clear! I was so full of hope!

Like… I’ve read good plays. I’ve read a lot of them. I appreciate that taste comes before ability. I just still don’t get where my goddamn ability is. It felt awful looking looking at BLACKOUT. END OF PLAY. at the end of my fourth full rewrite of this script and not feeling like I’d earned it. 

I remember what it’s like to feel pride in my writing. The short I’m producing with Ryan, The Last True Fan, did well in competitions, and now it’s on track to be an actual short film; Lingua Ultimata, the animated pilot I feel so sure of that four no-placements in as many competitions won’t break my faith in it; Speak My Own Sins, the ten-minute play I produced at Ithaca that examines exactly the sort of themes I want to interrogate in my writing—I possess in my portfolio these artifacts that indicate to me I am actually capable of meeting my artistic ambitions. I can’t be precious with them, though. They’re history. The current need is to keep writing and writing and writing.

I have some full-length ideas I remain excited about. I’m eager, as well, to expand my knowledge at the Writers’ Workshop in June. It was just demoralizing finishing a full play only to feel like I’d dug a hole rather than built a building.

I would loooove to move on from Aptitude. I’ve taken longer breaks from it in the past. It just… always comes back to me, nagging me. It’s exactly the sort of thing I want to write about in a play: masculinity, education, role models, intelligence versus wisdom. Amidst my persistent attempts to identify my artistic identity, it feels like my play.

The deeper question for me to look into later is why it’s so important to me that I write something that’s at least ninety pages, if I feel like I’m capable of writing shorter works. That’s a Later question. For now, I don’t care about the why. I want to get better.

It strikes me that I might simply not be putting in enough time. I had a conversation with my coworker recently, a musician living in the city, where she told me she will practice her instrument for hours and hours every day, to the exclusion of everything else. She mentioned being told by her professor to put a show on in the background so she doesn’t forget about the outside world while she practices. That’s the sort of dedication I want to cultivate. She mentioned she’ll be playing her instrument—what was it—between four to seven hours a day? Seven to ten?

And so I come back to the point I always seem to come back to when writing about craft: Improvement will take time and consistency. Aaachh, but also—isn’t it lazy of me to say “it’ll just take time”? Surely the process must be effortful. It wouldn’t feel right to simply pluck out various projects and wait. I suppose I’ll be writing in the meantime, though. That’s something. I just feel like there must be a more effective set of practices that I haven’t yet adopted.

Either way, I prepare to edit this latest draft. Clear my mind so I can approach it fresh. “Writing is rewriting” and all that. Maybe this muddy clay I’ve smacked on my desk will actually yield a bowl that can hold something after I’ve worked it some more.

—

Michael