http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/AnnaNalick/Breathe-2-AM--18656347
Occasionally (well perhaps rarely), a songwriter finds just the lyric that speaks not so much to your brain, or even your heart, but to your soul. Anna Nalick wrote a lyric like that for me in her song “Breathe (2AM).” She sings, “It’s 2AM and I’m still awake writing this song/If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside me/Threatening the life it belongs to.”
That is definitely the way that I feel about the play that I’ve been writing. It’s dark and violent and when I let it loose to work on it (or let loose the emotions needed to drive it), it scares me. It really “threaten[s] the life it belongs to.” I’m jealous of twenty something singer/songwriter Anna Nalick, who can stay awake writing a song at 2AM because she doesn’t go to work to support a child every morning (or maybe she does, but I don‘t know that she does). And who writes songs, rather than plays. This play is inside of me and I have to wall it off pretty seriously so I can go about going to bed at a reasonable time, getting up and going to work, taking care of my son on the weekends, and generally living the life of an ordinary person, and not the life of a writer. Even when I have the rare occasion when I can write, I can’t always tear down that wall between the play and the rest of my psyche in order to really do good work on it.
It took me four years to finish my first full length play. This one won’t take that long, because in finishing the first one, I gained the confidence that I can actually do it. But it will take a long time and all of that time it spends inside me, it “threaten[s] the life it belongs to.”
Occasionally (well perhaps rarely), a songwriter finds just the lyric that speaks not so much to your brain, or even your heart, but to your soul. Anna Nalick wrote a lyric like that for me in her song “Breathe (2AM).” She sings, “It’s 2AM and I’m still awake writing this song/If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside me/Threatening the life it belongs to.”
That is definitely the way that I feel about the play that I’ve been writing. It’s dark and violent and when I let it loose to work on it (or let loose the emotions needed to drive it), it scares me. It really “threaten[s] the life it belongs to.” I’m jealous of twenty something singer/songwriter Anna Nalick, who can stay awake writing a song at 2AM because she doesn’t go to work to support a child every morning (or maybe she does, but I don‘t know that she does). And who writes songs, rather than plays. This play is inside of me and I have to wall it off pretty seriously so I can go about going to bed at a reasonable time, getting up and going to work, taking care of my son on the weekends, and generally living the life of an ordinary person, and not the life of a writer. Even when I have the rare occasion when I can write, I can’t always tear down that wall between the play and the rest of my psyche in order to really do good work on it.
It took me four years to finish my first full length play. This one won’t take that long, because in finishing the first one, I gained the confidence that I can actually do it. But it will take a long time and all of that time it spends inside me, it “threaten[s] the life it belongs to.”
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