when you least expect it, you get what you want
As I've said before, I have been dry for several months in terms of coming up with an idea for a new play.
Today, on the way to pick up pizza for dinner, I got one.
Okay, it's not exactly a new idea. In fact, it's based on a play idea I had back in college. I got as far as writing two whole pages of it. It was a teenager's play, based on no real notions of how older people might think or act. I'd pretty much forgotten about it.
In the past week, I've had an idea for a character I'd like to put on stage. Vague outlines, but somebody who would be really solid if I got a handle on her. But I had no idea of a plot that would fit her.
In the car, she suddenly found a home -- in that 35 year-old plot.
I have no idea if this will develop. But it's the first new play idea I've had that's excited me in a year. And I think it plays to my strengths as a writer as I've come to recognize them.
Funny how the mind works, though:
* Galatea was a confluence of three separate elements that had all been rattling around in my brain independently -- a scene idea, a plot idea, and the desire to write a play about my grandparents.
* Thackeray's Ghost was a mature version of a story I started in high school, wedded to a theme that didn't become important to me until I was in my forties.
* The Aunts was based on five separate people I've known, yoked together into a single family, plus parts cannibalized from an unsuccessful one act I'd written.
Pastoral and Dylan's Dads were about the only full-length plays I've written that originated in the forms they ended up. And even they borrowed some older ideas.
I can't wait to see if and how this new idea develops! I'm really, really stoked now!