dilemma
Hello from your friend the indecisive procrastinator... So I need a rough draft of my very first play by tomorrow and I still don't know what it is going to be about. I MUST START WRITING but I simply cannot think of anything I am interested enough in to spend the rest of the semester working on... My playwrighting text book has all this bullshit to say about the "UR play," the play that is lurking inside of you just waiting to burst out and how we need to write this play so that we will actually do well or something like that...urrrrrggGGG!!! How DUMB is that?!?! There is NO UR PLAY INSIDE OF ME!!! I'm sorry but there isn't. There is a story I want to tell, but sadly that story has no characters, no dialogue, really nothing of interest to anyone other than myself...
Hugo writes about the epic of human consciousness and I basically want that to be my story, but there are intrinsic problems with this challenge: #1. EPIC. The human conscience truly is the greatest epic, and I am completely incapable of touching that kind of greatness... Far greater writers than me have failed at this endeavor (DEAR GOD! I CAN'T EVEN SPELL ENDEAVOR WITHOUT SOMEONE'S HELP!) like Petrarch, Spenser, Sidney, Keats... Thus my first problem is my massive ambition looking straight into the grotesque face of reality. #2. HUMAN CONSCIENCE. OK. What the hell do I know about the human conscience? What exactly does that mean... I mean, when I first read it, I felt like I knew somewhere deep in me exactly what Hugo meant by, "the chaos of chimeras, lusts, and temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas that shame us...the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions." But what do I really know of life? From where do I draw my authority but from those mysterious urges, those seed-like instincts that drag my bucking ego to whatever faith I have managed to lay hold of? What do I have but the "line [that] has gone out through all the earth, and [the] utterances to the end of the world?" ...umm, see? I cannot describe it better than David... How can I dare to write anything?
Hugo writes about the epic of human consciousness and I basically want that to be my story, but there are intrinsic problems with this challenge: #1. EPIC. The human conscience truly is the greatest epic, and I am completely incapable of touching that kind of greatness... Far greater writers than me have failed at this endeavor (DEAR GOD! I CAN'T EVEN SPELL ENDEAVOR WITHOUT SOMEONE'S HELP!) like Petrarch, Spenser, Sidney, Keats... Thus my first problem is my massive ambition looking straight into the grotesque face of reality. #2. HUMAN CONSCIENCE. OK. What the hell do I know about the human conscience? What exactly does that mean... I mean, when I first read it, I felt like I knew somewhere deep in me exactly what Hugo meant by, "the chaos of chimeras, lusts, and temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas that shame us...the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions." But what do I really know of life? From where do I draw my authority but from those mysterious urges, those seed-like instincts that drag my bucking ego to whatever faith I have managed to lay hold of? What do I have but the "line [that] has gone out through all the earth, and [the] utterances to the end of the world?" ...umm, see? I cannot describe it better than David... How can I dare to write anything?