It has been two or three months now since I've written a genius play, and I think I'm getting a little bit ... the opposite of dry. I am wet with drama, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately, inspiration hasn't really struck. Some writers will tell you that you can't just wait for inspiration; you have to work for it, and if it doesn't happen, it's your own fault. I will tell you now that this is a lie. "Grapes in the Snow," for instance, wasn't the product of weeks or months of hard work and revision. Obviously not. No, Grapes in the Snow was pounded, fully formed, into my head when I crashed my bicycle on the street nearly a year ago today. (To be exact, it was a year plus four days.)
I won't pretend that I woke up in the hospital thinking about orphans and Dickensian factories and shit. No, I woke up in the hospital wondering if I was about to get arrested. But the idea, even just the shadow of the idea, was already in my head, each detail filling with color as I regained consciousness, like a photo negative getting developed. By the time I was released, I wasn't even wondering anymore if the nurse had touched my penis when I went to the bathroom when I was still amnesic. I was wondering which aspect of Grapes in the Snow would reveal itself to me next.
That was awesome in the most literal sense of the word.
But that's not the case right now. I mean, I've got the words inside me, but it's all like Jello without a mold. Give me a mold, Dandy, give me a mold!
I'll try, Dandy, I'll try. Ok ... here. I'm just going to throw ideas onto the page. No editing, no second-guessing. Let's kill this shit and think about it all later.
BOOM
-The extinction of the dinosaurs
-The inception of Facebook
-Two indian tribes go to war
-More than two indian tribes go to war
-The invention of electricity
-Heirs struggle over the control of their ancestral distillery
-Two cats learn to talk shortly before hearing about Jesus
-What's a blog?!
-A man has a pet snake. They rob banks.
-A baker accidentally blinds himself
-Life in a jug
-Pointy ears
-A woman and her husband live in a gully which is slowly filling up with trash
-Three schoolchildren eat bugs off the street, until one of them gets superpowers/poisoned
-My favorite blanket
-A dog finds a hat that takes away his powers of speech
-Santa Claus' funeral
-Santa Claus' funeral—nobody attends
-A man accidentally builds a house
-After inventing the perfect poison, a man cannot bake a cake that will not poison his dinner guests
-A king has sex with his mother, which practically kills his father
-A man bites through his mouth guard while asleep, awakes to discover a mouth full of plastic
Ooooh-kay! Let's have some drama!
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