I'm a fast and efficient worker and can get more done in one day than most. This is not a brag, just a fact.
What enables me to accomplish so much is that I’m good at compartmentalizing my day into sections. When it’s time to paint, I focus on painting. I don’t start thinking about what I’m going to write in my blog or what I need to buy at the grocery store.
Not only am I able to focus completely on the thing in front of me, I’m also able to assign it a set amount of time and then stop. I’m not inflexible about the time, but I know roughly how many things I can do in one day and most often I get them all done.
Lately, however, one of my compartments has been leaking into the others. I am working on a play for a class in play-writing, and this play has been monopolizing my mind.
Whatever else I’m doing, including sleeping, the dialog and scenes for my play start popping into my head. Before you know it, I’m deep into the script and nowhere into sleeping, blogging, or practicing the piano.
My art is still kind of sacred—I don’t stop painting to work on the play. At least, I haven’t yet.
Maybe it’s the subject matter that’s gripped me, not the form of play writing. My play is autobiographical and I cry when I work on it. I wouldn’t advise anyone in my family to read it or to see it if it’s ever produced.
It’s a play about the end of Adrian’s life, and my life as his caregiver. I’ve written about bits and pieces of this subject before. But the play makes it come to life. It’s a living, breathing thing, and it’s inside me and it needs to come out.
I’ve tried giving the play it’s own little compartment of time in my busy week, but it is a wayward child.
So yesterday I gave up and just kept working on it. I added scenes to the first act and wrote all but the last scene of the second act. It’s a two-act play, so it’s almost finished. The first draft, at least.
The play is not a memoir (thankfully), so I’ve allowed myself to fictionalize reality wherever necessary to make it work. I’ve also created composite characters in order to protect the innocent and the guilty.
I don’t know if my play is believable because the truth is often not. But I will do my best to make the audience believe it and feel it.
Until I do, it’s going to keep leaking into all my other compartments and eventually you’ll find me walking like a zombie muttering to myself.
You see it’s even gotten into this blog.
