I finished a play. At least I think I finished a play. It's hard to know exactly. It's not like in the films where the writer types "The End" and punches the hair and dances around their immaculate home and drinks whisky in dark dive bars with Hemingway. It's more a lot of false endings, doubt, despair, readings, more despair and then, sometimes, a moment where it seems that it exists, and it might not be perfect but it's there. It can go out in the world.
I used to drink champagne when I finished things. Now I think "oh good, now I can clean my flat". So there was that. And I love taking all the index cards off the pinboard, preferably while singing along to Sleeper and Liz Phair. And then I like recycling my printouts of old drafts—I preferred burning them on an open fire, like I did at the MacDowell Colony, but you can't have everything. I like going for long walks, by myself, not with my characters. I like remembering I have a social life that isn't entirely composed of imaginary friends. I don't like waiting for people to read it, and the terror that I'll be wrong about it being right. But I like—no, love—the sensation of being about to start something new.
Congratulations. Your piece was also an assertion that unlike literary genres like poetry, a play is inherently social..
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