Hacking together Mrs. Hawking part 6

So work on the next Mrs. Hawking play, our SIXTH installment, is well and truly underway.

How's it going? Uh... hard to say.

Every time, it feels like these get harder to write. The story, having gone on for five years now, has gotten very complicated. We have a lot of characters, a lot of journeys to develop and explore. And since they're capers, the plots require a lot of careful construction in order to make sense and be engaging. And since we've consistently heard we've gotten better every year, the bar gets higher and higher.

So at least every first draft FEELS like it's harder to write. I know I have said that literally every year since part three. I've also said that every installment's first draft feels like it comes out WORSE than the first draft of the previous installment. Bernie seems to think it's a case of you can never really remember what pain felt like before, so the current pain seems like the worst pain ever. Especially since I do think every script has, by the final draft, ended up better than the last.

Could that even be possible? That the first version of every script is worse than the last's first version, and the final version of every script is better than the last's final version? Or is that I feel that way a sign of how much the process makes me lose perspective?

I don't know. I just know I need to keep going.

Frankly it feels like a mess. It doesn't even have a real title yet. And I like to completely outline a script or any other writing project before I write it— I need to know where I'm going, what I'm shooting for, before I try to execute it, particularly if the plot is complex or important. But while I wanted to have the outline settled by the end of June, there were a few things that Bernie and I STILL haven't quite ironed out in our very challenging caper. So, in order to not get too far behind, I've started drafting parts we have settled on. That's risky, as these things can be a house of cards and once we figure out the one or two remaining gaps it may wreck things we thought were established. But I need to feel like I'm making progress.

The drafting also feels bad. REALLY bad. Worse than it did for the initial pass of Mrs. Frost— which seemed pretty frickin' lousy itself. And I clawed together one scene for that while literally crying to myself under a table in a classroom at Lesley. I imagine there will be more than one similar occasion for part 6.

The one thing that's keeping me from getting too upset over it is that I've recently begun editing my novel in a serious way as well, and I'm actually making progress. The first draft of the novel was BAD. Seriously, embarrassingly bad, at least in some places. Like the beginning. But I polished up the prologue and the first three chapters so I could send them to my gracious mentor Mark, and I was no longer ashamed for another human being to see them. I was really nervous about my ability to improve that work, since I don't have a backlog of prose projects that turned out after editing. But if I could actually dig something meaningful out of that hot mess... well, I can probably trust my ability to handle a process I've completed to increasing success literally five times before.

Just have to trust the process. When you're going through hell— KEEP GOING.