90 in 90 - What I Learned

I did it!  90 short plays (3+ pages each) in 90 days.  I actually wrote 91.  On one day, I didn't like what I wrote, so I wrote a second.  Plus I began my first high school one act.  Oh, yea, I also wrote two one minute plays for the 2nd Annual One-Minute Play Festival.

Why did I do this?  I was stuck.  In the spring, I began a full-length play about some of my experiences being a foster parent. but after about 30 pages, I got bogged down.  I had an outline and character notes and lots of other notes, but I couldn't make any progress.

The experiences of foster parenting were still to fresh, raw.  We had only just made a decision in January to take a break until June.  We both thought that we might not continue, but we wanted to give ourselves some space to get some perspective.  The final month of 2014 had been particularly hard on us as foster parents.  We are both now in our 60's.  We had been doing this for nearly 10 years.  And the young teen aged women we took into our family had all suffered major (I cannot over-emphasis "major") trauma before they came to us.

My writing need some perspective.

The decision to do ScriptWorks 90 in 90 was actually rather spur of the moment.  We rented a house in Port Aransas for a month.  We worked and walked.  And grieved.  As the month neared it's conclusion, I decided I would do the 90 in 90.  I had done a ScriptWorks 30 in 30 in 2013 and had gotten some useful material.  I knew I was stuck.  I needed to write, but what I wanted to write about was not available to me, emotionally.

The day we drove back from Port Aransas, I got my first prompt.  I wrote a short piece thinking of one of my sisters.  It made me happy.

Certainly, I had doubts about my ability to write everyday for 90 days.  Stuff happens.  And I decided that if stuff happened, it happened.  I would be okay with that.

June 2nd, day 2.  I found myself writing about an experience I had foster parenting.

Day after day, I found the prompts prompted a memory I had foster parenting.

I didn't plan to write about these things, but I needed to write about these things.  I didn't respond to every prompt with a short play recalling some experience foster parenting, but many, many of them I did respond with a play about foster parenting.

There has been some healing. (Although, I am surprised at how emotional I feel just writing this.)  Some of what I wrote will go back into my full-length play.  Some will become 10-minute plays.  I already have one of these from the summer's work.

And stuff happened, and I wrote anyway.  Sometimes the stuff from the day before became the next day's play.

I think I wrote something over 300 pages.  That's the equivalent of 3 full-length plays.

I am finishing my one-act, three pages a day.  Then it's back to the full-length play.  I think I can finish it now.

Probably more crying, but that's a good thing.