Writers On-the-air Final Thoughts

Reading Day was long, but a terrific success! We are so fortunate to have sucha talented group of actors willling to give their time and skills to bring the writers' words to life for the first time. After the full day of readings yesterday, the writers gathered one last time this morning for a debrief. We were all a little bleary, but once again the conversation flowed fruitfully. We talked about discoveries, surprises and reactions from the readings. For some of us, the flaws and holes in our scripts came into focus. Others reveled in finding the script sounded just as they hoped it would. We tossed around our reactions to audience feedback and our reactions to each others' scripts. Some of us will be working on revisions, others will put their pieces aside and others will tweak here and there but are basically satisfied with where things stand. I announced my plans for a monthly writers critique group born of WOW and collected some evaluations of the workshop process. Bigger space & more time to share what we write were among the requests for the future.

This blog is such a woefully inadequate encapsulation of the WOW experience. I come to it feeling lazy and spent and inadequate to the task of re-creating the workshop experience. Perhaps that's as it should be. The writing workshop experience is so much a function of the interaction among participants. I repeat again, find a community of writers with whom to share and discuss your work. It is motivating and exhilarating at its best, and it can save you from the vortex that solitude can create. It is the great paradox of writing - you must have chunks of solitary time in which to create, but you must have chunks of communal time to feed that solitude and counteract it and interact with it.

So, we close another year of Writers On-the-air. But the Writers' Wavelength blog continues sporadically all year. As should the writing itself.