Puppies

"We talked about literature and I was in heaven--also in a sweat from the spotlight he was giving me to bask in. Every book new to me I was sure he must have annotated with his reading pen long ago, yet his interest was pointedly in hearing my thoughts, not his own... Then there were the great novelists, whose spellbinding names I chanted as I laid my cross-cultural comparisons and brand-new eclectic enthusiasms at his feet--Zuckerman, with Lonoff, discussing Kafka: I couldn't quite get it, let alone get over it."

-- Philip Roth, in The Ghost Writer

--

I killed a lot of puppies today.

UrbanDictionary.com says the phrase, "killing puppies," either refers to smoking marijuana, or to asking a stupid question or giving a repetitive/stupid answer.

What I mean by the phrase is this: in writing, to get rid of something that you think is really good. That's not to say that the process of editing and cutting your own work down is a bad thing; in most cases, it's good. If it hurts you to highlight a section and hit delete, chances are the piece is now better than it was when it had accrued the extra baggage. What many writers consider their own genius, others consider extraneous, dull, and a form of literary masturbation.

A professor or high-school teacher of mine used the phrase, and I thought it was perfect. And I've continued to use it up to the present, when I say to you in the least flowery terms I can muster:

"I killed a lot of puppies today."

--

How?

Well, the play I wrote for ArtReach was running long. I hadn't budgeted enough time for the long songs and dance numbers, and when we timed it last week, it ran 1:06, an hour and six minutes. ArtReach guarantees a one-hour show and Q&A, and in general, that means a fifty-minute play.

Sixteen minutes (0:16) had to go.

And so, down the drain went the puppies. "Away!" I cried, with fingers flying over the keys. "Away with the joke about 'forgetting the forest and seeing the trees'! Away with thin comedic bits! Away with the heartwarming final scene where the moustachioed villain gives back the bags of money! Away, away, and away you go!"

(Or something like that.)

In a creative process of any kind, and especially in theatre, I believe you have to have at least one other person telling you which ideas are full-grown, healthy, Pedigree dogs, and which are diseased, runtish, awkward puppies. Children's stories like Charlotte's Web tell you to save the runts, but with the abstract goal of creating an ideal product, the runts have to die.

(Die, die, DIE! Away and away!)

And in many rehearsals, I think, the person with the most puppies is the director. With no one but a stage manager to kill them, these puppies continue to grow until, like a rash or boil, they are too large to be ignored. In this particular case, it's the opposite. I'm the playwright. I have loaded down my play with written-in puppies. The director is the one who has been asking me if it's okay to kill them.

All of these puppies have met their Maker, who has condemned them to oblivion. Adios, perros. So be it.

--

After all the cuts, we are down to fifty-two minutes. We did it. All's fair in love, war, and the massacre of small, metaphorical mammals.

And now, it's lunchtime.