creating a/broad, February 2, 2013

The Loneliness of the Long-Handed Writer
 by Cameryn Moore

“Wow, you write longhand?”

We had just finished the first part of what we had come to the café to do, an interview with me for a sex workers’ online magazine, about my experience translating my work into performance art and suggestions for other sex workers wanting to do the same thing. The second part of the evening was what I call “independent café work”. I arrange to meet up with other solo creative workers, and we just sit there at the same table, long-drained coffee cups at our sides, glaring at the screens of our laptops, every now and then interrupting each other with questions like “Oh my god, did you see this?” or “what is the best synonym for ‘seasoned’ or ‘experienced’?” 

I have a head full of feedback from last week’s workshop reading, so much that I don’t quite know what to do with it, so I sit with my hard-copy script and read it.  

Doing solo work is so fucking lonely, otherwise, and also easy to procrastinate on, especially when I’m in the early stages of working on a new project, and my angst and fear are much stronger than my motivation, and if I weren’t self-aware about them, could easily overpower me into Cheetos and Facebooking for hours at a time, especially if I’m working on my laptop. So I close it up and hauled the folded draft of my script out of my purse, smoothed the pages open, rummaged out a usable pen. That’s when she said it, “Wow, you write longhand?”

It’s hard not to be defensive, but sometimes, yes. When repeated free-writing sessions haven’t unearthed a damn thing, when I don’t have my laptop with me, but I have some ideas that need to be GOTTEN OUT OF MY HEAD. Yeah, I’ll use longhand.

I especially do it for the revisions. I have a head full of feedback from last week’s workshop reading, so much that I don’t quite know what to do with it, so I sit with my hard-copy script and read it. And read it. And read it again, until the bits in my head start getting shaken up and I see the empty spots, the unused openings, the hooks in the script, almost physical settings into which I can tie the new stuff, and that, my friends, is delicate work. 

It pushes me into a different stage of consciousness, makes me think more carefully about I want to add.

Making those revisions on a laptop is too, I don’t know… too brute-force. And while I know there are settings I could use in Microsoft Word to note what text is changed, it still doesn’t have the same psychological distinction as seeing the changes laid down in squeaky guttering ballpoint or soft lavender ink from an extra-fine felt-tip. That longhand is a cue to me, when I’m reading through for the fourth time, the fortieth time, that this is the new shit, this is a new phase, this bit of writing is something altogether different that I am bringing to the table on this pass. It pushes me into a different stage of consciousness, makes me think more carefully about I want to add.

Writing longhand slows me down, and even though I know I need to have this ready by the end of the weekend, the process right now needs to be slow. The questions they asked me at the workshop reading, the eight people who were there, not counting the excellent facilitator and two people from MainLine, those questions pushed me deeper, back into the murk of character development. I feel like I’m stepping through mud, picking my way through, looking for the actual places where there’s a foothold, and other places where I step in and I’m in up to my hip (when I didn’t want to be). I am trying to understand this terrain of character, so going slowly and thoughtfully is exactly what I need to be doing at this stage.

So, yes, I’m feeling tentative, if not actually afraid.

This, you have to understand, is a new thing for me. My new show is the first solo piece that I’ve written that is inhabited by fictional characters; all of my other pieces are just various actual versions of me. So, yes, I’m feeling tentative, if not actually afraid. Unlike when I write from my own truths—when I can just pour it out, say what I want, and have learned to trust that somehow it’s coming all from my own real core—the process of writing these people who don’t actually exist feels more deliberate. I have to translate what I know about myself into what I might know about someone else, find analogues for things that I believe versus things that other people believe, find the parallels and divergences between how I react and how other people might react. When I write about myself, I know all these things. When I write about other people, I have no fucking clue. So I am going slowly. 

Of course, going slow is nerve-wracking. I don’t know what I’m going to step in. I also think that I may have succumbed to a sort of popular myth about writing, that if it’s real and it’s ready, it’ll just sail out of you, pouring out of your fingertips like light made words. And sometimes that’s how it felt with my previous three plays. Occasionally, actually, now that I think about it, that’s how it feels with this one. A few of my monologues did seem to just write themselves. But at this stage, the revision stage, nothing is pouring out of anywhere. It’s all backed up in there, a kind of psychic sludge, and I am sifting through it with a fine-meshed pan like a gold miner desperate for some glittery truth-flakes. 

I’m digging, and going slow, and laying out what I do find in careful, precise arrangements, keeping the feedback in mind when I dig through, yes, I need this, I don’t need this, I’m looking for this other thing, is that it, shining through there, maybe, please? Going slow is what I need. And coffee. Call me, let’s make a work date sometime, eh?

camerynmoore.com

Indiegogo