Rewrite

Last Thursday, I spent eight hours at my second office (a coffeeshop called House of Aromas) writing a rewrite of "Solamente Una Vez." It was an exhausting day as I spent very little time outside of the play. Most of the eight hours, I was in the middle of the text, rolling around, writing, adding, deleting. It was quite a harrowing experience. In the past, when I worked on a rewrite of a play, I would start at the front of the play, do some cleaning as I made my way through the text. With "Solamente," I kept hitting a snag around scene 5 or 6 and couldn't get past that point in the play. Everything would fall apart and I saw no was to continue the play to its end. At House of Aromas, having spent much too much time stuck at the "snag," I started with the final scene. I love that scene. The hopelessness, the awkwardness, the overall sense of ambiguity and frustration.

So, I started at the end of the play and worked my way backwards. Then, I hit another snag. This time, I noticed that it was perhaps due to the structure and placement of scenes. I spent a good hour trying to figure out how to structure the play. Final Draft has this thingie in which you can see your scenes as notecards and mess around with them, flip their placement in the script and whatnot. It was so frustrating to create that play in this way, but I feel that the play is so much stronger due to my work. However, there's this feeling in the pit of my stomach that I ruined something in the play. I don't know. I need to let it sit for a week or a month or whatever, and work on something else before I go back into the world and play some more...