Another Month rolls in, March. Spring. Daylight Savings Time. Unrelenting ticking. We needn't rush or get over excited. Simply put some time on task daily, or most days, and we'll get to our finish line.
I've been reading Neil Simon's memoir Rewrites (through the death of his first wife in 1973.
Anyway, his first attempt Come Blow your Horn, is found to have promise when it opened out of town in Pennsylvania. His backers put up the minimum for the option to keep control of it, but it needed work. He drove back to Fire Island.
I awoke the next morning at 5:30 to do the thing I like best about writing. Rewriting. ... The catch is, you not only must be willing to rewrite, but you must be able to rewrite. Some writers freeze at the mention of a new sentence, word, or comma. They feel they have worked on a play or even a scene so often, there's nothing more they can say about it. This happened to me once on a play I was doing with Mike Nichols. I was stuck and stuck badly. Mike said, calmly, as usual, "Stop trying to fix what you have. Throw it out of your mind. It doens't exist anymore. Now go back and write it." When I did, I felt liberated from the obligation to fix something that wasn't working. Now I could create something that didn't have a negative history.
Much to unpack here on the attitude of looping through the work even while struggling with it is making one loopy.
Keep us in the loop and you write, rewrite, do and re-do,
Lynx
