I remember debating which was the lesser of two evils: playwriting or poetry.
Both seemed like foreign languages to me, dependent on one grammatical rule I simply didn’t want to follow: economical word usage.
It’s as if the poem and the play got together and made a pact against the prose writer.
“Don’t you dare splatter our clean white pages with any more of your crooked scribbles. Keep that mess to yourself. Don’t pick up the pen until you know what it is you want to write.”
Part of writing, for me, has always been figuring it out. The “it” that resides between crystal clear and awfully hazy. The “it” that keeps me awake at night and lulls me out of bed to tap-tap-tap away at a keyboard when everyone else in the house has long ago put head to pillow.
But last semester I chose poetry.
Sorry, Shakespeare, but I am just not cut out for the stage. I’d rather scribble a little mess on the page and let someone else find meaning in my line breaks.
[Read the rest of my guest post at Magic In The Backyard as part of Free Write Friday.]
Rewriting Life 