smartgrrrl's guide to stuff » writing

Cast your mind back to Fall 1991 . . .

Michelle Wiener — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:39:24 +0000

First of all: I am not going to spend the month of April going on and on and on about MY PLAY. I can’t promise I won’t spend the first week and a couple days thereafter discussing it in some part, because it is a brand new project and I am excited about it and I’m in the first week’s throes of passion for it, like I can’t wait to work on it every day. We’ll see how long that lasts, but for right now wheee! I’m writing something I’ve never tried writing before! It’s fun! And actually, this post isn’t so much about MY PLAY as it is about the research involved in writing it, which is where you come in, which is why I mention it at all.

Second of all: yes, this is a plea for your contributions, whether in comments or email, and one that I would greatly appreciate getting passed around. (Normally I’m not one for reblog/retweet/link back/Digg/etc. requests, but this is in the name of Research, which makes it OK according to my set of arbitrary rules.)

So. My Script Frenzy (screen?)play takes place during September-December 1991, against the backdrop of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and their immediate aftermath. It’s not the central issue of the story, but it’s pretty crucial. This story, though many key elements have changed, is largely autobiographical.

I was a junior in college. The public hearings took place in early October, just a few weeks after the beginning of fall quarter. I had yet to be comfortable calling myself a feminist — at the time, I was telling people I “believed in feminist tenets,” like equality and respect for all people, but I wasn’t strong enough to stand up under the severe stigma the label had at the time. The fact that it’s nearly 20 years later and this much has not significantly changed is in part what inspired me to write this particular story (I still can’t decide whether it’s for the stage or screen, even though I’m writing it as a screenplay and I just wrote a flashback scene — I may be in denial here). And no — spoiler? — what happened during these hearings didn’t spur me to any sort of internal revolution or revelation. In retrospect, it had to marinate for a while before I could fit it in with other experiences.

I remember the hearings in brief flashes. Most of what I clearly remember involves the crude jokes that the guys I knew (but wasn’t necessarily friends with) would tell in mixed company, often targeting one or two women in the process. And I remember feeling hopelessly trapped by that; on the one hand wanting to tell these guys off because they were being disrespectful on so many levels, not to mention reinforcing the inequities that these hearings exposed, but on the other hand not wanting them or anyone to think I didn’t have a sense of humor. Even though they weren’t being funny. But that wasn’t the issue at the time, you know? The point I would be trying to make would be lost amidst the “It was just a joke, JEEZ” dismissal I’d surely have gotten. And I don’t remember anyone else telling them off in public either, though if we were in a group of just women we’d have all sorts of rebuttals that we’d promise to use next time it happened — but then we’d all chicken out or something. There wasn’t any sort of clear communication between me and my female friends that we had each other’s back. I think we were all still struggling with our (socially conditioned, culturally reinforced) need for male approval.

(And again, this much also hasn’t changed significantly over the past 20 years, and the idea that one doesn’t have a sense of humor and therefore one’s argument is invalid is . . . pretty stupid. Never mind how it deflects attention away from the issue by immediately putting one on the defensive. “Of course I have a sense of humor! Let me tell you this horribly offensive joke to prove it!”)

ANYWAY.

There’s more, but that’s what I remember in a nutshell. I’ve tracked down a number of resources about the hearings (as well as partial transcripts), but I’m more interested in hearing first-hand recollections about the hearings. What do you remember? (If anything?) Were you more politically advanced than I was? Were these hearings more galvanizing for you? Did they have a different impact on you? Did they have no impact at all? Were you one of the jokesters? (No judgment!) (Honest!) Please tell me your story in the comments, or send an email to smartgrrrl [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks in advance! I’m off to write more pages.

No, this is the problem.

Michelle Wiener — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:14:41 +0000

The past two weeks or so I’ve felt like I was just spinning my wheels, like I was stuck in the mud and nothing was going to get me out of it, or at least nothing I had any real control over. (It always comes back to control, doesn’t it.) I have things I do when I get like this — this is usually when I start cleaning, reorganizing, purging unused/unneeded items from my shelves. Oh, that used to be so much harder to do. I come from a long line of I’m SURE That Will Come In Handy Someday-ers. And there are still things that I hold on to for a lot longer than necessary, and it is true that occasionally I will find a use for some of those things, and that seems to justify the piles of crap I keep around, but I have also learned how satisfying it can be to take something I’ve kept around for no good reason, something like, say, the biker jacket I used to wear that I couldn’t bear to part from even though I haven’t worn it in at least four years, but now look at and say, “I have no reason to keep this around. I shall donate it to X charity,” and put it in the Discard pile. Or to take an entire shelf of books left over from graduate school that I have not looked through since 2003 but have kept around anyway because you never know — and put them all in a box to take to the nearest used bookstore. I have two whole empty shelves now. That feels good.

And the control I exert over my belongings also feels good and there have been times (I think ultimately this is one of those times, but spoilers) when that’s been enough to clear my head so I can get on with the creative work I want to do, only . . . it wasn’t enough this time. Or this week. So earlier today I wrote something on the Tumblr wondering if the people who follow me have different tricks they use to get out of ruts and the people who responded (yay them!) said things like “Read! Go for a walk!” and I was all, “I did go for a walk! And all I do is read porn! Not helping!” — though really, it did help, because casting a line out in the ether and getting a bite ALWAYS HELPS. It really always does. Even a “like” on Facebook or Tumblr makes me happy because it means I am not alone. (All right, yeah, OK, I know I’m not alone. But the reminders help.)

And then I remembered a post I’d read a week or so ago — yes, on Gretchen Rubin’s blog, I think she’s fantastic and you need to read her book/blog/twitter/etc. — on Identifying The Problem. Her post involved something tangible, while mine — this rut! — was more nebulous, but I took a few quiet moments this afternoon to really think about what it is that’s keeping me from doing what I keep telling people I want to do (and, frankly, what I’m paying money to do). And here’s what I came up with, in a nutshell (except, of course, this is me, so you’re getting the long version. The cracked nut version):

I’m more concerned with doing something well than doing it at all. I have always had this issue. If I wasn’t good at something, like, immediately, then I didn’t want to do it. While I’ve gotten over that, at least to the point that I do give new things a solid effort before determining that I either don’t like them or it’s not for me, and I think I’ve gotten a lot better about try-try-againing, there is still a heavy soul-crushing, shame-making feeling that if I don’t think I’m going to do something supremely excellently like bowl you over WOW I can’t believe a mere mortal accomplished this etc etc etc, then why the hell bother. I know I’ve written about this before.

But there’s something more. There’s also this nagging feeling that if I don’t do something well — by which I mean up to my ridiculous standards (standards, I might add, that I don’t really hold anyone else to), then people aren’t going to like me. If I screw something up, even something small, people will laugh at me. And I still think one of the worst things you can do to someone (barring acts of hate/violence, of course) is maliciously, from a point of presumed superiority, laugh at them (this is, btw, one of the reasons why no matter how tempting it is, I am not going to go into any great detail about the sometimes, no, often, really bad genre fiction I read, because someone did take the time to write it and yeah, someone should have taken the time to edit it maybe, but, you know, feelings are good). It is very important for me to be liked. Respected, even. I can take criticism and I am generally OK with not being liked but there will always be a part of me that doesn’t understand why (I call this part of me my Inner Bubbe). In the past I would’ve gone out of my way to try to get that person to like me, but now (and again, I really think it’s the Internet responsible for my personal growth) I’m better equipped to just let it go. But it will still nag at me.

And so I will not do something at all because I am too afraid that it won’t go well enough and then people won’t like me. THAT IS MY PROBLEM. And I need to focus all of my attention on getting the HELL OVER IT.

Also, I need to watch this fantastic video by Ze Frank again:

And again and again and again, until I can’t get “where the fuck do ideas come from?” out of my head. Because this is ALSO a problem I have, that I don’t think I have any good ideas and I am desperately envious of people who seem to be able to pull fantastic ideas out of absolutely nothing, while I struggle to put two words together in a way that I kinda sorta like but think I could do better.

But first things first — I’m just going to check this over briefly for embarrassing typos and then send it off into the world, as the first step in my latest experiment: Don’t Think, Just Write.

Check it, I’m posting by phone

an old lesson

smartgrrrl — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:14:16 +0000

It’s been an interesting time in my head lately.

This morning I returned to my old standby, the Morning Pages, which I have been doing or the last six or so years, on and off. I don’t know why I leave off doing them, but I always do, and then I always come back to them, and the first page is always “Why do I stop writing the morning pages?” followed by, as it was this morning, a series of admonishments and punitive declarations about my lack of discipline and direction. (knock knock.)

But then I stopped. Not the writing, but the self-flagellation. Wondered (in writing) why it is that I think I have no discipline. How am I defining it? And I realized that by “discipline” I mean something very similar to mental boot camp, in which I repeatedly and forcefully beat myself up for not doing a good enough job at whatever it is I think I’m failing at (bang), threaten myself to do better or else (zoom), and make up a monumental list of commandments to follow henceforth (ka-pow!). I need to do X. I should make myself Z. If I don’t do Y, then I’m not really a D. And so on.

Setting myself up for failure, in other words.

(The previous sentence had a “more” in there but I took it out.)

I go through this every few months, it seems, and each time it’s like learning this one thing about me afresh. And there’s a part of me that’s all, “what is that about? why can’t you remember this one thing about yourself?” and, well, that would certainly illustrate my point, wouldn’t it.

But I think the reason I relearn this every few months is that it is an easy thing to forget, especially if I’m in a phase where I’m not being particularly productive — not a lot of writing or making things out of yarn.

This morning, writing it out, relearning it, sort of charged me up for the rest of the day. And not really in a good way. I felt on edge and staticky, as though anyone touching me would get the shock of a lifetime. The littlest things were setting me off, too.

“Is it ok if I…” “I WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD.”

It wasn’t until halfway through the day that I realized my mood was directly related to the writing I’d done. I stirred the pot and all the crap that had settled at the bottom was now bubbling at the surface.

As someone pointed out to me this afternoon, I’ve just been through two major life changes (“possibly three,” she said, in . . . awe? Let’s say “awe”), and that takes a while to process. And now just may be the time that things have settled, I have found the calm, and I can now take stock and start to move forward again.

SoÂ . . . that’ll be interesting.