Reading Between the Lines

I’ve been having a blast working with Socratic Theatre Collective on my play The Dark Room, which opens this Thursday in Toronto at Unit 102 (COME SEE IT! More information here). It’s been amazing working with friends old and new to develop the script, helping with some backstage aspects of production, and just generally having a good time with awesome people. There’s nothing quite like seeing characters I care about get brought to life by artists whose work I love and respect.

But maybe the most exciting experience I have as a writer is when someone else’s reaction to my work makes me realize what it really means.

It’s difficult to pinpoint this feeling, because on the surface, it sounds ridiculous. How can someone else tell me what I “really mean”? When I pull out a script or MS, every word on that page comes from me. There’s nothing there that I didn’t carefully consider and revise. The idea that there could be hidden themes — not just unconscious biases I accidentally slipped in, but things I really meant to include that I just didn’t know about — seems as preposterous as the idea that someone could accidentally draw a Magic Eye image (remember those?) while trying to do nothing more than create a pretty pattern of colours.

Maybe I can best explain my experience by using an example. The Dark Room is made up of eight shorter scenes, each telling the story of a different set of characters. In one of the scenes I consider to be the most personal, an elderly woman tries to figure out why her dead best friend haunts her in the form of a ghostly small girl.

During the workshop sessions, the director (Liz) and the cast told me they understood what the girl wanted, but they couldn’t understand why she chose to appear as a seven-year-old to haunt her friend. Did I know? I thought so. Could I answer the question for them? I sputtered. Somewhere beyond my grasp was the reason — the innocence of childhood, its supposed emotional freedom, its trust and faith. I quoted everything from New Testament verses to fanfiction to try to explain. It helped, but none of it fully answered the question. Then I finally got to see one of the first runthroughs of the show, and bam! Just like that, I knew.

The explanations I’d been trying to give were nebulous, abstract — you know, like, because that’s what children mean to her. This new explanation was concrete: because when the girl pictures a reciprocal loving relationship, her best model is that of parent to child.

How did I realize this? By watching the final image Liz had set up for the scene. It shouldn’t have been a surprising image; it or something like it was strongly implied by stage directions I’d written myself. And yet, seeing it there, through the lens of several other artists, performed by actors, in costume… was like getting to read my script as though it had been written by someone else.

It’s like the difference between the way you think of a dream when you’re dreaming it and the way you think of a dream when you’re awake and reflecting on it. While you’re in the dream, everything seems the way it is because, well, because that’s the way things are! They couldn’t possibly be any other way! When I dream about getting ridiculous rejection letters from literary magazines or getting towed under at the beach, I take it at face value during the dream. Of course this makes sense. It’s happening, isn’t it? But when I wake up, I realize what the dream was “really” about: wow, I guess I’m kind of insecure about that part of my story; or, hmmm, I guess I’m feeling swamped by all the work I have to do.

I don’t mean that all fiction has a Sigmund-Freud aspect to it; I don’t think that either dreams or stories always have a special hidden meaning that the creator has to work to access, or that the most intelligent parts of anyone’s mind are the sub- or unconscious ones. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and most of the time, my stories contain the ideas I want because I work very hard to put them there.

But sometimes, no matter how much I improve my writing skills, I make choices based on assumptions that are hidden to me, ideas that are so obvious that I don’t even know I hold them. When that happens, it takes some outside influence to show me exactly what I’m thinking.

For instance, I didn’t really get what my novel Our Man Tom was “about” until getting some key critiques last spring. And, hey, maybe it wasn’t actually “about” that until I made the decision; maybe I changed what it meant because things have changed for me since I wrote it. I know part of my new vision came from the experience and ideas I’ve gained studying as an historian. But I also know that when I sat down to see how the story reacted to this new focus, everything fell into place as though it had been slotted there all along.

Sometimes it’s big things like themes or the reason the main character is motivated to pursue the story goal. Sometimes it’s little things like, oh yeah, that’s why that character said or did that little thing that I knew was right for him or her even if I didn’t know why.

Sometimes it comes from someone else sort of seeing the thing too and laying it out all nice and pretty in front of my eyes. Sometimes it comes from someone else saying, “Hey, is this why you made that happened?” and me getting surprised to find some part of myself rear up and howl, “No! That’s not why at all! It’s because…” And sometimes it just comes from someone else asking the questions I don’t think to ask myself.

If it makes me narcissistic that I sometimes could think about my own writing for days, well, I guess I’m a narcissist. But often I feel like writer-me of the past is a different person that me of the present is finally getting to know.  And just like it works in real life, often the best insights I get into her character are from mutual friends who’ve met us both.