A weird shift.

My writing has been odd lately. It's been about a year since I finished a full draft of a new play - everything since then has been revamps of older stuff and bits n' pieces n' outlines and whatnot - and I've been feeling like something is definitely changing in my style, or even the way I think about writing, but it's been hard to put my finger on.

I've been wondering if the problem is structure. I've always loved the process of assembling a piece in the outline/scene-by-scene phase, where I can basically do experiment after experiment on paper to see how I ought to pull the thing together. It's exciting - ideas attach themselves to other ideas, I work out chains of logic, things like that; generally, it's the part of the writing process during which I'm the happiest, because none of the thorny issues and problem-solving crop up. It kind of becomes this cool TV show that plays several seasons at once before eventually retconning itself into a kind of serene simplicity.

I haven't spent much time in that stage, recently. I've been doing a fair job of making scene sketches, sample dialogue, even some woozy outlines, but it's been tough to make anything feel solid enough to build on. However, I've produced many pages of rambling, anecdotal stuff that goes into the "might fit into something somewhere" category. In fact, I now have a file that I open just to jot down stuff that seems profound, random things from dreams, isolated dialogue - essentially, stuff that I'd like to make work in something sometime. Hey, I had a great time doing a Richard Foreman piece at Hampshire (alongside fellow Reactionary Meterer JP), so maybe I'll just jam lots of it together and make someone else sort it all out for me.

Okay, so that's not really what I'm aiming at. I've just been thinking that my brain may be trying to make me change my writing style, and has not communicated this well to the rest of, uh, itself. Maybe it's a reaction to the ultra-structured writing I do in my day job - it's all like, "screw this categorized, logical stuff - let's get weird, baby!" And who knows, maybe I will.