Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Importance of Stepping Back

The Importance of Stepping Back

In the past I have given the Percy Goodfellow take on how the human mind works. My friend Freud agrees with me and his muse often stops by for clarification on some of the subtle nuances of the psyche. Anyway he knows I’m writing this Playwriting course and really got in the face of my dreaming last night, offering all manner of advice and comments.

His biggest and most emphatic piece of advice was to “Give it a Break!“ What he was referring to is that the conscious and unconscious levels of our bio processor work at different speeds and layers. In our awareness it uses a short term program and in our imaginative back screen, it chunks more slowly with a long term view to the issues under consideration. One program hogs the computer space while we are awake and the other comes aboard with the night shift. Yes, yes….I know there is some overlap but for the most part that is the way the human CPU operates.

Now how does this apply to my playwriting course, begs the question….The answer is that about mid way through the course I need to take a break. I need to tell the writer….”Writer” or in this case the roll-playing student, now that you have a “Straw Man,” finished..., now that the thread of a first draft is completed, take the darn thing and put it in a desk drawer for the next week. Don’t even think about the Drama….give it a rest.

The reason that Sigmund is so emphatic about this is because he had this theory his publisher missplaced, that postulated that when a writer writes something they need to let it cool off. How many times have you fired off an E-mail or posted a contest entry only to discover it would have been better had you not been so eager….if you had let the dog sleep before insisting it was time to go for a walk. Well this is the reason for stepping back….It gives the unconscious an opportunity to catch up with the conscious. Allows for a little reconciliation of reality. The larger and more unfamiliar the territory the longer the tango takes….duh! Everybody knows that….Everybody but authors who try and cram a hundred pounds of wet fish into a ten pound croaker sack.

So I'm going to build a pause into my eight week course….tell the playwright to take their significant other out to dinner and the movies….maybe the kids to the zoo. It will be therapeutic, professionally enhancing, yield unexpected dividends and maybe even lead to an offer... the aspiring dramatist can’t refuse.