Funny how God uses my own weaknesses to speak to me. So here I was, feeling inspired to write but still afraid of it and dithering back and forth (I dither a lot). It was also 1:40 a.m. and I knew that if I sat down to write I'd take forever, and at that hour, I really couldn't afford to do that. So I put on Roseanne reruns and tried to get into bed and wind down. And of course, what episode do they just happen to be on but the series finale, where Roseanne spends part of the episode sitting in the dark contemplating her life as a writer and the choices she's made. She even made a comment at the very end that sounded hauntingly like the messages I've gotten from God since I was five: this dream of mine isn't going to come true without a lot of hard work. This happens to me often--I decide I'm going to rest and ignore God and then he comes up right in the middle of the distraction I've used to get away from him. I'm constantly amazed by this.

So I turned off my light (I prefer writing in the dark) and sat on the edge of the bed with an old notebook that was unclaimed semesters ago by a former student and took out a pen and wrote. It wasn't much at all--this time only a few notes--but this is the second night in a row I've been driven to do this. These past few days I've been so swamped with the inevitable madness of the end of the semester I haven't been able to do anything with the notes that I've taken and the half of a scene I wrote last night, but I believe the floodgates are beginning to open. And what's emerging is a brutally, painfully honest account of different aspects of my relationship with God. I'm personifying and fictionalizing them of course; it would be way too naked otherwise and probably not as interesting, but that's what is finally coming out. I remember my friend Alan in Cincinnati once told me that he thought I'd eventually mature into the kind of writer who deals, Blake-like, with the conflict of matter and spirit. I don't know what's going to come of the stuff I've been starting to write, but I suspect he's right.

The bad thing is that all my ideas are coming in the form of a play--actually in the form of a major rewrite of my playwriting thesis from Cincy--rather than fiction. That may be just because I'm teaching a playwriting class right now and not fiction writing, or it may be, that as Edward Albee says, I am really a playwright. I have mixed feelings about this: (1) playwrights generally make no money--even less than writers of short fiction, and there are exponentially fewer stories of marketable success; (2) there's a very narrow audience for live drama, as opposed to audiences for film and novels; and (3) I have spent the last ten years of my life doing very little playwriting, so I feel woefully behind the movement of the genre. And yet, when I took my self-designed comprehensive in American Drama, I had the sense that my best stuff would actually hold up; I've never had that sense in fiction. So now I'm really psyched to work on plays again, but I have this fictional work that I have to write for my dissertation, since my PhD is in fiction. But at least I am writing again, in fits and starts, in strange shorthand notes about the lives of characters I'm reacquainting myself with, and in closeted tearful bursts.

And that's far better than not writing at all.