It’s only a few days since I hit send. After more than three years of reworking, submitting, gaining feedback and yes, nearly giving up, I have at last added the final edits and sent it to the director.

Writing is easy, you just meet who you really are. Writing is like scotch, it gives you warmth and lets you float awhile. Writing can be your truest love, it never leaves your side. It’s also your biggest torment.

There’s this image of writers working alone, forlorn and lonely. What I can say is writing a play requires collaboration. Although less so during the initial stages. I’d found my inspiration in Paris, noticing the heat and turbulence of activism and marches. For a long time the idea only sat in my mind. Merely a beginning, barely even there, like a picture with only a couple of brush strokes. I remember the exhilaration and also the anxiety of committing to this work, and the first hopeful paragraphs forming. Little did I know how much of that would be scrapped, changed or even put aside for a different work on another day. Writing a play was sometimes almost a dose of adrenaline, such as when I wrote paragraph after paragraph while on a flight. Then the other times of grinding away, each line as difficult as extracting a splinter.

The DNA of a number of people is in this play. Friends, writers, dramaturg, producer, director, actors, rescue greyhounds who rescued me as I despaired and more. Recently there was this day of a table read. The producer, director, all three actors and myself attended. The director knew the work as well as I did, as if he had written it. I was honoured. And the actors asked about what emotion might lie behind a particular line. What happens during a specific pause? Should scene 16 go before scene 14? Then the director thought out loud about how the lightning might be used, how the actors could move. I was seeing my own script in a completely different way. While also astounded how much others had invested themselves in what I wrote.

My part is finished now. Rehearsals continue. I wonder, even in dreams, which project is next. Finish the novel? Another play? A television series I’ve had a nibble at? I need two lifetimes to do all this. Oh, and the play? It’s called ‘Who I’m Doing This For.’

Tickets and details here;  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/metropolis-monologues-who-im-doing-this-for-tickets-1981059439111