The Birth of a New Idea

So you take a piece of writing you've been working on for, oh say seven or eight months. Rewriting and rewriting. Let's say you're on 24th draft. And then, at around 2:30 this afternoon you get an email from your professor saying she needs a bunch of questions answered about your work class tomorrow (10:30 a.m.), and oh, yeah, this too:

Rewrite the first utterance/action of the play (one word, one line, one brief exchange or one image) so that it sums up what the play is about. Use sleight of hand, use magic, use trickery to tell us everything and draw us into the story in an instant. Be subtle, be obvious, be direct; be crafty; be brave. I want to know WHO it's about, WHAT KIND OF PLAY this is, and SOMETHING IMPORTANT ABOUT THE WORLD.

And when you think the play is just where you want it, because that's what we're talking about here--a play--at least the first half, which includes the "first utterance" because you slaved and slaved over it and rethought it and rethought it again and again last semester, what do you do when you get this message. Do your freak out? Or do you rethink it again?

Survey says: rethink it. And before even being in the class I don't even know where I came up with what I came up with, but I like it. And it is going to affect the rest of the play, how I visualize it, how I'd write the staging.

I only worked on Highland Center, Indiana on a couple of days during the break, and that was only on the second half, cleaning it up, moving things around. So, I hadn't even thought about the opening since maybe the end of November when I last worked on it in class.

Our minds are incredible, how they work, how they work without us even knowing what they're working on. When this happens, doesn't it almost prove that the universe and other worlds exist simply because there's no proof that they do? Our conscious minds are so limited, knowledge is like the dark matter of the universe: ninety-nine percent of it we can't see. This is why a person can believe that anything is possible, because a new idea is just there, just out of reach, just out of eyesight, waiting.