Is Facebook the New Form of Journal-Writing?

Two weeks ago, I attended (for free, yay) some master classes at a theatre school in Manhattan. One of the speakers was David Lindsay-Abaire, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who also did the screenplay for Rabbit Hole, which garnered Nicole Kidman and Oscar nomination a few years ago.

During the Q&A, one of the attendees asked David what role he thought journal-writing played in the creative writing process.

He thought about it for a moment and then announced that, for him, it didn’t play any role - his worry with journal-writing was that it would be too self-absorbed, and so would any creative writing that would grow out of it.

I thought about this quite a bit (so much so that I did a journal entry on it!) Journal writing, for me, has always been a big part of the creative writing process, not because any stories grow directly from it, but because it’s typically during journal writing that I stumble upon my best insights on life.

But I had to agree that there was something about David’s “self-absorbed” worry... and I can admit that I’ve written many a one-sided, upset journal entry in my day. (That’s what they’re good for, right? Getting all that angst out?)

But the plus side of a journal - to someone who takes it to that level, someone who’s honest with him or herself - is that after some venting, and some self-defending, it also gives you a space in which to write about where you may have gone wrong, things that are nagging you and making you feel guilty - and a space to brainstorm how to do better in the future.

In short, a chance to understand yourself - and, by extension, other people - better.

Everywhere I look nowadays, I see narcissism. Instead of being contained in private journals, though, it comes in the form of super-abbreviated tweets and Facebook status updates. (Not excluding my own posts.) These are the key ways in which people are keeping track of their emotions. And how deep into their emotions can they go in just a few sentences?

This is probably why people get the urge to post rambling, too-much-information updates. They need an outlet. But mostly they’ll just get a few friends reflecting their rage and indignation right back at them, justifying it - so there’s no chance of growth there and, though it might temporarily feel better, the problems still remain. 

I agree that when going into our lives and our issues, there’s a danger of being self-absorbed... But whether it’s through creative writing alone, or also journal writing, the act of writing itself offers an opportunity to explore ourselves on a deeper level, in a way that just talking with friends can’t always accomplish... and in a way that just a sentence or two - the fast food equivalent of writing - could never, ever hope to reach.

Adaptation

Last week marked the completion of my first-ever attempt at adapting someone else’s work.

I wasn’t adapting from a book or a play, but rather, from a collection of songs that had been performed off-Broadway a few years back. The songwriter was someone I had met through a writing gig I got last winter, writing up a sizzle reel for a prospective new TV drama.

The material I had to work with (talking about the adaptation again) was fantastic. The songs were powerful and thought-provoking, the ballads beautiful. However, this didn’t stop this from being the most challenging project I’ve worked on to date. 

I’d always thought Broadway plays like Mamma Mia and Movin’ Out had it so easy - just cobbling together a story from already hit songs. What I discovered, though, is that developing a story that can make sense within the context of certain songs, and which allows expression for a range of different characters, is a major challenge. 

Working the music in without having it be too abrupt was a major challenge. (We're keeping it a musical.)

Having four different “lead” characters, whose stories all had to have interlocking beginnings, middles, and ends, was a major challenge (and it was also the first time I worked on anything that could fall under the heading ‘ensemble.’)

But what’s hardest of all in doing an adaptation is taking into your hands and heart something that was originally created by someone else. You wind up needing to be a lot more precious about it than you would with your own creation, since you don’t know which aspects of the original work the original creator is going to value the most. And when you do make creative decisions, you worry that the original creator might take offense to them or just be outright horrified at the direction in which you took their baby.

Will he be devastated that I made this character such a monster? Will he feel like my overall theme and message are wrong? Will he think that my representation of this particular under-world, which I’ve researched but not had any personal experience with, is laughably inauthentic?

Which brings me to the most difficult part of doing an adaptation - waiting to hear from the original creator what he thinks about what I’ve written.