Writing is normally a very lonely task. It normally means separation from your friends and family. After all, how do you sit behind the word processor and let your imagination run riot, form a new story and still involve your partner and children? After you’ve been writing for a while, normally, stops meaning ‘normally’. It gets perverted. It means always, compulsory, mandatory, essential… If you don’t have this ‘normal’ aspect of writing, are you really a writer?
My family have long since learnt what it means to live with a writer. I’m a very lucky man: they love me for who I am. And very large part of me is a writer. And somehow, they have found it within their hearts to leave me when I have to write; although the separation is often inconvenient, and in many cases for the children, painful.
I have yet to find a writers’ circle that works for me. I have tried to write several novels over the years, and have failed at each attempt. Plays work for me. Yet I have met so many that write that can never finish one stage play. A novel is about the prose, the descriptions, the imagery provoked from the written word. A play is about the dialogue. Dialogue in a novel represents up to one third of the content. In a stage play, it must represent over ninety percent. It is this disparity between the media that has meant that writers’ circles haven’t worked for me; having been the only playwright that has attended.
This aided in the perversion of the word ‘normal’. To write means solitude and separation.
Then the impossible happened.
I have to justify, or at least attempt to explain, my definition of the word ‘impossible’: Love at first sight doesn’t happen, does it? No one really meets their Prince Charming, do they? How many people do you know that have had all six numbers come up on the lottery? But these have so often become the basis for a story.
I’ve spoken to people telling me about how they met people on the internet thinking things would turn out like ‘You’ve Got Mail’… When the reality has turned out to be more like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’.
Entertainment is all about the ‘Willing Suspension of Disbelief’. They are stories – and only a fool would ever believe that they could come true.
Yet I’ve found myself developing online relationships with people since mooching around Writers.Net and The Play’s The Thing… But nothing would ever come of this… After all, I had no need of a romantic relationship, as what I have at home is what I have dreamt of having for the entire of my life. All I wanted was to meet people that write like me. People that write plays. People that have ambition. People that have drive. People that realise that to set a high goal doesn’t entail a fear of disappointment, but prevents a reality of un-fulfilment of achieving goal that was too was too easily accomplished. But these people I met online weren’t real. They we’re just made up names, virtually identities to cover who they are in reality.
But they gave me respite and somebody to share the illusion with.
But one name kept jumping back. They appeared to understand what I was saying. They appeared to know why I wrote the way I do.
I read their work, and developed a fear – this person was plagiarising my work before had the time to write it, or indeed develop the initial idea.
I made a couple of jokes, hoping that someone would see my reasoning behind throwing in that humour – only for this one person to instantly seize upon my intentions and share my excitement.
One of these jokes was to write a play by email.
I've mentioned that my muse had forced me to drop my current Work in Progress to follow another path. That path is the writing of this play by email.
At first I thought that this could never work, as two playwrights could not collaborate unless they truly understood who the other person was – and that can only be achieved by knowing each other for a significant time, and certainly not just by exchanging emails or posting occasionally witticisms on a discussion forum. But what was to be lost by giving it a go? As with all plays, the first ten minute’s dialogue will tell you if you’re on to a winner or not…
I wrote one scene, my internet ‘collaborator’ wrote the next. We exchanged scenes. I shuddered. I knew the style. I understood the characters. I saw the way the dialogue was developing and could instantly explain to anyone that asked why it was essential that it had to be that way. Why? Because it was my writing!
I hadn’t written it, but it was my writing.
My ‘collaborator’ informed me of a shiver they had felt – and I knew at once what they were talking about and knew that we were talking about a good thing.
The next scenes just fell out of us – and before we knew where we were, the first act was completed. But more than that, we both knew that the audience would be as desperate for the second act to come, as we were to write it.
I made another loaded joke. I pointed out that I was going to be in my collaborator’s area with my family in a few days. As has become the norm, they picked up on it and invited my family and I to stay with them and their family.
We had never met. We had never phoned each other. We had only seen tiny online photos of each other…
We set it up.
We’ve met.
I’ve met myself.
Our families have met. They met themselves.
To say that they meeting was productive in a writing sense may be inaccurate or deceptive. Writing to me, is all about feeding and motivating your muse.
My muse is now overweight and has developed a hankering for some very serious stimulants.
We are too similar. We spent our brief encounter joking about how similar we are. Our partners joked about the same thing – plus about how they had shared the same fear of meeting some online loonies that they would need to run away bravely from.
And our writing…? My writing is their writing, theirs is mine. My scene is their scene, their scene is mine.
I think we’re both proud to admit that our lives have become interconnected. We’re both even prouder that our play is our play and will soon be born.
After all, great minds think alike.
Or do fools seldom differ?
