Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois*

I gave my two latest plays to my mentor and friend to read and he faithfully did so.

He really liked them, the ideas, the language, but said that they lacked emotion, putting his thumb on my major problem.

I have known that I struggle to get emotion into my plays.  They are often filled with ideas, but lack intensity.  That's why I often write comedies.  I have no problem writing jokes.  Emotions other than laughs, I find difficult to embody.

And it's not that I struggle with this in my personal life.  I have no trouble recognizing and talking about my emotions to others.  My wife recently remarked that I'm quite good at it.  She too wondered why I had so much difficulty getting my emotions into my work.

There are two issues here: 1) the way my brain works; 2) the subjects I choose to write about.

When I write, my brain is always looking for just the right word.  This is an intellectual process for me.  The part of my brain being used is disengaged from my feelings.  This is a good thing in that I write often lovely and well expressed thoughts... and a bad thing in that they are thoughts being expressed and not emotions.  I suspect that with work on my editing, I can overcome this problem.

The second, the subjects I choose to write about often come from my intellect and not from my core.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that I have no lack of ideas that I find interesting and that get me writing.  Negative in that instead of writing about what moves me, I almost always write about what interests me.  Even when I put a gun in a characters hand, I struggle to bring the violence inherent in the weapon to the stage.

And my solution... rationally, I know I have to write something emotional.

I have always been drawn to the emotional in other's art work.  I read about anti-rationalism, the Counter-Emlightenment, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, melodrama, etc.  I believe that the universe is a non-rational place.

And yet, I love mathematics and the physical sciences.  This is what I studied in college.  I still remember basic Calculus and it's been thirty years since I was in a classroom using this on a daily basis.

But if I am to become a "successful" artist, and isn't that what we all want, even if defining what success means is different for all of us, I have to tap into my emotions... somehow.


*Gustave Flaubert