The Writer’s Upside Down

 Last season’s hit show “Stranger Things” introduced us to a dark, parallel world where things seem the same, but darker, drearier and, ultimately, negative.  The name for this world, the “Upside Down”, has been applied to everything from hipster cocktails to the current Presidential Administration.  At the moment, I find myself in what I realize is the writer’s version of the Upside Down – "Yes, you’re still a writer, yes, you still write every day (voici) but you’re not working on “the thing” anymore" – the current project.  The one that gets you out of bed, or used to.

Actors are well familiar with this kind of upside down, or in-between.  Even actors like John Lithgow and Liev Schreiber have been quoted in interviews saying that when a job ends, there is an insecure voice inside that tells them they’ll never get another one.  Actors have to cultivate other types of work, or even hobbies, to pass the time in between booking work.  During that time, their significant others, if they should be lucky enough to have such, can attest to the fact that they can be a bit hard to be around.

But how do writers react to their own upside down?  After all, we don’t really need anyone else’s permission to write.  It should be easy to just catapult ourselves from one project to the next with ease, right?  I don’t think so.  Not in my case, anyway.  Maybe other writers are better at it than I am, but for the most part, I follow the same pattern every time, no ease involved.

First, I get myself to the 2^nd or 3^rd draft of something and send it to a couple of trusted readers to get some notes back.  If you’re a writer and you’re thinking to yourself at this point “oh, what kind of lameass needs notes?” then you’re an amateur or a genius, you pick.  Orson Scott Card, the science fiction novelist, wrote about asking friends for notes in one of the forewards to his “Ender” series.  Writers of any kind of drama get notes whether they like it or not.  Better to solicit notes from someone whose opinion you respect and trust and preemptively strike at your own mediocrity.  Get better on purpose, rather than wait for a director to kick your ass should you be lucky to find one.

Once the piece is out for notes, then I become depressed.  As cheerful as I might have been working on that new piece, that’s how ornery I get once I’m no longer working on it.  Of course, when I get notes, then the real work starts, but there's a lull now.  A lag.  I look around at other half-finished work I might have laying around.  I cast an eye toward the novel I’ve been working on since 2011.  I sniff around the non-fiction book I’ve got going.  I look at some old plays that need to be fixed and try to figure out, perhaps, how to fix them.  But, for the most part, I eat too many carbs, watch Game of Thrones or something, and try to get the inner voice to stuck a sock in it, because the inner voice, in the upside down, keeps saying things like “you suck.”

Actors in the upside down are usually contacting their agents, auditioning for things, taking classes, and doing all of the things that remind them that they’re still actors even if they aren’t working a job.  While those things can be unpleasant, particularly auditioning, at least the actor has some agency in soliciting those things, trying to bring more work about.  For a writer, at least for me, there are a few things you can do to try and attain some sort of inspiration, but a real inspiration, the ideas that catch fire and keep you sustained, are a little like religious experiences – you can’t meditate them into existence, you can’t flagellate yourself until you bleed one, you just have to let your mind lay open to the ineffable for a while and go live your life, such as it may be.

Reading helps.  Grabbing random things off the shelves at a library or a B&N can sometimes spark something or other.  It certainly makes me grateful that such things as libraries and book stores still exist, although god knows how long that may be true. 

I take long walks, as well.  Viola Spolin discovered, in creating her theatre games, that busying the physical body can free the mind.  Eastern religious practitioners were doing that for thousands of years before that.  If I drag my fat ass down the West Side Highway or around the reservoir in Central Park, I usually end up writing some bad lyrics or poetry. 

Now that I’m not working the soul-sucking job at a place I’ll continue to call Conglomobank, because they love to sue people, I don’t fall into the kinds of deep depressions I used to.  But I will say that one of those deep depressions led to my writing a screenplay that stands as my best work to date.  Just the same, I wouldn’t cultivate that kind of depression again.  Untreated depression is extremely dangerous, and I’ve never bought into the myth that the crazier you are personally the more you can succeed artistically.  Art without discipline is valueless, and it’s difficult to adhere to a discipline when you’re suffering with untreated mental illness.  At the moment, the black dog is staying away from my door, but I wouldn’t tempt fate by thinking it will stay away forever.  The kind of depression I’m experiencing at the moment, in this upside down state, is mild so far.  I imagine it will kick into hyperdrive once my readers have returned some notes on my latest play and I start to appreciate just how far off the mark I am.

The heroine in “Stranger Things”, the character called “Eleven” played by Millie Bobby Brown, navigates the upside down with righteous anger and a lot of balls.  She finds the monsters and kills them.  This doesn’t help me either, because getting pissed at myself for not being brilliant isn’t going to turn out to be helpful.  In the writers upside down, you have to fight by not fighting, seek inspiration by not seeking.  There’s no match dot com that hooks writers up to their perfect ideas.  Theresa Rebeck told a story once about navigating away from a block writing a particular play by noodling around writing another play.  The punchline, of course, is that the “noodle” turned out to be Mauritius, and ran on Broadway in 2007.  I should be so lucky as to have such a noodle.

Having been an improv performer, I know that a creative person, actually any person, can have tons of ideas a day.  But a good percentage of them are bad ideas, and even the ones that aren’t so bad can be made bad with poor execution.  Been there.  Done that.  Will likely do it again, actually.

But in addition to a nice cobb salad and a leisurely morning writing this blog post, I do have the comfort in knowing that the upside down doesn’t exist without the right side up.  What I can do for myself, at this stage, to make myself feel better, is take the pressure off myself and off the future and remind myself that the next idea will come eventually.  And it might be good.  Or it might suck.  But it will come according to its own schedule, and when it does I’ll put my head down, right myself, and feel better than I do now.  It might be a play, a screenplay, a tv pilot, an essay, or a poster for the window of my friend’s crystal shop, but it will be something, and it will be its own something, and I’ll save the energy I might have used to try and force it to get through the upside down of waiting.