Process

My professor expounds for a while on the playwriting process. "You don't write a play," he says. "You rewrite it."

This is true, I think, of life, too.

You start out your day with on plan in mind, and things come up and compromises need to be made. You are out of milk, so no cereal for breakfast. A three-car accident jams up your commute. An unexpected project at work plays havoc with your schedule. Our days rarely go the way we think they will as we doze for nine minutes between snooze alarms.

I have a playlist of love songs on my iPod that I have been avoiding lately. I fired it up on the way home last night and it struck me how many of the songs were about the things in my life that I am currently rewriting. Ten Year Night is right out, much less Forty-Five Years.

When you are with someone, when you are in love, you spend some time imagining the future. At least I do. When it all comes to an end, I find I have quite a lot of material to . . . rewrite. And like any bit of editing, I find it kind of painful. I'm drawing stark red lines through turns of phrase I thought particularly clever. Events I had been looking forward to. What had been previously notebooks full of possibility have become vast empty pages. I need to fill them with something else.

And I am, slowly. Going out with friends, and doing homework, and working on lines. Knitting, writing. Tweaking plot and theme. Passing one character's duties around to others now that he's bowed offstage. It's not fun--rewrites almost never are--but it's necessary.

A rewrite is about smoothing the rough patches. Fixing the mistakes. It's a part of the process, unavoidable and everyday.

Because you don't write a life. You rewrite it.