Dream & Backstory

[thisnewday]

Scott Fitzgerald used to compulsively and minutely chart his writing projects and I've begun to wonder if doing a bit of that might help me as well. I think I'd do it in somewhat the way that my daughter wrote her backstories for the acting classes she took years ago when she moved to the West Coast and did the whole headshots, workshops, tryouts routine that so many of them go through on the way to a payday or two before the three kids, the yard with the white picket fence and artistic oblivion. (She did meet Travolta, once, and said he was nice.)

For the would-be actor, the backstory is a way of finding life beneath the flatness of the scripted page or, in my case, of mapping the elusive DNA of a dream that I sometimes whisper about to myself but have had considerable trouble commiting to paper. In trying to be honest about all this, I've sometimes wondered if I really prefer the dream because dreams are easy and the work of writing is, well, work. But, still being honest, I've also found myself working pretty hard on the dream, reconciling the illogical turns which internal fantasies negotiate with impunity but which are bound to disrupt even the most determined "suspension of disbelief."

At the center of this dream are a man and a woman, both young, both beginning something new having recently lost something not very old. And because of this trauma, so recently visited on their respective lives, it takes them a while to discover that they've discovered each other. Which, I suppose, as such things go, is not much to go on at all. But that's the way I want to keep it, at least for a while. At least until they've each told me what they need for themselves and what they might hope to find in each other...

LPK
LiveJournal
10.9.2010