{"id":807,"date":"2012-07-23T09:30:45","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T14:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/?p=807"},"modified":"2012-07-23T09:30:45","modified_gmt":"2012-07-23T14:30:45","slug":"commitment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/commitment\/","title":{"rendered":"Commitment!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h3>\n

In theory and some practice, I am pro-commitment.\u00a0 Take relationships, for example.\u00a0 Just the other day, I was saying that the decision to get married had actually strengthened a relationship that had already lasted for years.\u00a0 Before my sweetheart and I got married, I would come away from bad disagreements thinking, \u201cThat\u2019s it! We\u2019re not meant to be together. We should break up.\u201d\u00a0 After we got engaged, however, I approached our disagreements\u00a0differently.\u00a0 \u201cWe want to be in this for the long haul,\u201d I\u2019d think, \u201cso the focus is not as much on winning.\u00a0 It\u2019s on creating long-term strategies for us to avoid these issues in the future.\u201d\u00a0 Though I may have just wanted to get married for vague reasons, I see now that committing has brought its own benefits.\u00a0 I think we\u2019re a better team now than we were before.<\/p>\n

I like commitment in theatre, too (I mean, who doesn\u2019t?)\u00a0 It brings\"\" to\u00a0mind\u00a0John Adams during the second-act crisis number of \u201c1776,\u201d when\u00a0he belts out, \u201cCommitment!\u201d\u00a0 (I am not even going to bother inserting the YouTube link here, because if you haven\u2019t seen this late-60s show, I doubt I\u2019m going to move you to do so.\u00a0 If you have already seen it, you know it\u2019s awesome and you know what moment I\u2019m talking about.)\u00a0 This past year, I met a Master Teaching Artist in the field of educational theatre who used to watch my students rehearse and say, \u201cCommit,\u201d doing the Sign-Language sign for it under her chin (I don\u2019t remember exactly how it looked, but it looked very cool.)<\/p>\n

So, commitment: yes!\u00a0 I didn\u2019t think I had much trouble with it in writing.\u00a0 (Don\u2019t worry, this laughable assertion will soon get debunked.)\u00a0 But it was on my mind during a recent work and letter exchange with another writer, my excellent grad school roommate, Rachel Wilson (her novel, DON\u2019T TOUCH, will be published by HarperChildren\u2019s in the summer of 2014.\u00a0 Yeah!)\u00a0 She is starting a new project, like I am, and she was pushing herself to write a synopsis for me by a certain deadline, since she says that the hardest thing for her in writing is committing to one path or idea.\u00a0 At the time of our exchange, I thought, \u201cHunh, that\u2019s interesting.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never thought about that.\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s not a problem I have as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ha.\u00a0 Ha.\u00a0 HA.<\/p>\n

My memory must be making me delusional.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t started a new project in a while, since the thing I just finished was a revival of something I\u2019d let lie.\u00a0 Now, though, I am starting a new project, and while I\u2019ve been able to push myself into a certain amount of plotting by reading some plotting books, zoiks, I\u2019m reaching a scaredy moment!<\/p>\n

It has to do with character.\u00a0 The piece I\u2019m planning is full of action, much more plot-driven than what I usually write.\u00a0 I\u2019ll shape the characters to serve the plot, rather than the other way around.\u00a0 At this juncture, I know a lot of what I basically want to happen, but zeroing in on the people who carry out those actions is scary!\u00a0 What if I get it wrong?\u00a0 What if the unarticulated ferment pit of my brain has all these great ideas, but in committing to getting them down, I leave out one slimy strand and the whole thing crashes to pieces?\u00a0 So much better to just let it malinger in the brain, right??<\/p>\n

\"\"

Not my brain. Actually The Bog of Eternal Stench, from Labyrinth<\/p><\/div>\n

Well.\u00a0 Probably not.\u00a0 For one thing, I\u2019d just have to start something new and face the whole process all over again.\u00a0 For two, I should probably give in to my suspicions that if I can\u2019t articulate some of my thoughts for my characters, they\u2019re probably just ghosts and feelings in the first place.\u00a0 Sometimes, when I\u2019m stuck in a scene, particularly in rewrites, I go back to my notes, hoping I\u2019ll have included some guidance for myself.\u00a0 Where I\u2019ll hope to see some brilliant mechanism for getting Zoe and Jackie back into each others\u2019 good graces, I\u2019m most likely to find something like, \u201cThen Zoe and Jackie will find something mutual to laugh at, and the ice will melt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Something mutual to laugh at\u2019?\u00a0 Wow, self, that was helpful!\u00a0 So glad I took those elaborate notes.<\/p>\n

So I suspect it\u2019s similar ghosts and haze up here with the characters of the current piece, and that when I commit to articulating something about their hopes and fears, I won\u2019t be killing off sad, better versions of the characters.\u00a0 Rather, I\u2019ll be killing off my own fears that I can\u2019t bring them to life in a perfect manner and embracing the chance to move forward. \u00a0Now, if only I can get myself to believe it. \u00a0It’s painfully unshocking how the fear of committing today was so hard that I updated this blog, something I haven’t done for real in over a year.<\/p>\n

To further inspire myself, in lieu of visiting the YouTube, I\u2019ll post this picture of John Adams (okay, an actor playing John Adams. The real John Adams didn\u2019t have any photos taken, and the portraits are less than stirring.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cCommitment!\u201d<\/p>\n

To quote Campbell\u2019s Soup (at least, I think it\u2019s Campbell\u2019s Soup), how can you argue with that face?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In theory and some practice, I am pro-commitment.\u00a0 Take relationships, for example.\u00a0 Just the other day, I was saying that the decision to get married had actually strengthened a relationship that had already lasted for years.\u00a0 Before my sweetheart and I got married, I would come away from bad disagreements thinking, \u201cThat\u2019s it! We\u2019re not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}