Dancing in my box

Sure beats thrashing at a cage

Not long ago I read this interview with Sarah Snook about playing all 26 characters in a Broadway staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Snook said that her performance was so jam-packed, it allowed almost no room for improvisation, but she still found ways to play around:

If you put a box or a cage around something, you find a different way to dance inside it. There are three small characters, each with only one line, that I can change every night if I want to. There’s a character in the club scene, who only exists for that moment, and I ask myself, How high is he tonight? What’s he had? So you have to keep within the box. But, in order to keep yourself excited inside that box, you have to find new ways to stretch.

Welcome to my box

Take a look inside it’s my dick

Life has been a bit screwy of late. Everyone got sick with hand foot & mouth, then a stupid cold, and then maybe HFM again. Some of us started teething. Others tried and failed to wean. No one slept. In the spirit of Sarah Snook, I’ve tried to make the most of limitations and improvise where I could.

For instance, one morning our baby decided that the day should begin at 3:30am. I set aside what I thought the day would look like, took him on a morning walk, happened upon a home store that was closing, bought discounted bedding (wishful thinking, lol), and had a surprisingly kind of fun day.

It’s not a box it’s a poetic constraint

Snook, my screwy life—it all reminds me of poetic constraints (i.e. the rules that govern forms like the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina) and how they can actually nurture creativity. You might assume that rigid rules would make it harder to write, but in fact the way they narrow your options is helpful—think how overwhelming a blank page and the mandate to write anything sounds. Also, constraints force you to be inventive in order to stay within them, so sometimes you wind up generating ideas that are really fresh and, um, outside the box.

In this screwy season of life, I’ve been lucky to get 10 minutes to myself in the morning. How am I supposed to write? But also, how am I supposed to not write ? Writing is how I deal with screwiness.

Given the shortage of time, I’ve been writing short. The novel premise that’s been languishing in my notes for a few months will languish at least a few months more. I’m mostly working on flash and short stories and essays.

As it turns out, this doesn’t feel like a consolation prize. There’s a lot I love about short projects:

1. Each little piece is an object lesson on what makes a story work. Eventually, when I can focus on something longer, I’ll take new insights into it.

2. The compression of a short piece frees me up to write a little weirder, and I enjoy weirdness. (Not screwiness though.)

3. I can turn a short piece around more quickly, which is gratifying on its own, but also means I can submit it, and maybe get a publication or (more likely) a rejection, which I can then learn from.

So there you go, I’m dancing in my box and thereby refusing to let it become a cage.