May Day
Ever notice how the phrase "May Day" is both a call to dance and to disaster?
There's a dilemma is the land of Cyrus Manning. Cyrus is the protagonist in the novel I'm working on, tentatively titled Hunting Grace. He and I are both trying to make major decisions concerning someone who has entered his life, a character insinuating herself into his deep imaginative life, and between the two of us, we are having trouble making sense of it. There is great delight in watching a world unfold, but frustration, too, when the answers get murky. Funny how that works in fiction just as it does in life. I find the same thing true in the play of mine currently in production at Taproot Theatre here in Seattle. Arthur: The Hunt creates a world in which swordplay is expected, and what you get instead is an attempt at psychology and family relations, which in turn creates questions for both actor and audience, questions I don't always have the answers to.
What am I blogging about?
I suppose what I'm battling just now is the courage to make certain kinds of artistic decisions, decisions based in risk-taking and breaking new ground (new ground for me, at least), decisions that are, in terms of my own life, high stakes. What can you do if you get it wrong? Tear it apart and start over, I suppose, but after two or three years of working on a thing, that particular labor becomes more and more difficult.
Funny that we should pray for writers. But when we pray for them, what we're fighting for is a quality of spirit, of thought-life, that it have integrity, courage, and that wondrous mix of level-headedness and passion. It's so easy to fall off the boat in any number of directions, and in a world where distraction is the intent of millions of dollars of media, spirit-deep concentration--that world of flow where wisdom and character insight reveal themselves--can be hard to cultivate, hard to hang on to.
If you know a writer, chances are they are facing imaginative high stakes decisions everyday. Why not pray for them, that they speak creative life just as God does.
God help us...
8:00:09 AM
