My System Against Writing
I always knew I could write. So I did everything else
When we wrote descriptive essays in elementary school, mine were philosophical. When we had a narrative writing exam in high school, I wrote an erotic poem and almost got kicked out of school.
The interviews I wrote for the school paper contained long, essay-like questions and took up more than 10 pages, accompanied by a long photo shoot in my direction.
Sticking to the format is still the hardest part of writing for me.
The first play I wrote and produced was a choreography with symbolic archetypal characters that I staged in the library during classes.
I was a straight-A student and used that as an excuse to do all kinds of creative activities during class. And I got other students to join in. I would go to their class and ask their teacher to let them participate in a school project with me.
By chance, I found a compliant framework to stay in class as little as possible.
Sometimes we would lie and ride the motorcycle along the coastal road (a 5780-foot mountain rising from the crystal blue Adriatic Sea).
We won a regional theater competition with that symbolic choreography.
But I had to advocate in front of the entire teaching staff for our invitation to the state theater competition.
The school didn’t want us to participate because they felt that “Maya” was too much of a musical dance video and not enough of a school play. That was true, as was the fact that we were the only performance with lighting design at the state level.
Writing is directing, but directing is as close to writing as buying flowers is to planting flowers.
To me, nothing so much as writing requires an open, vulnerable heart, accompanied by a confident, disciplined, and free spirit, driven by a logical, quick, and alert mind (I get overwhelmed just by breaking it down).
After three hours of talking out all sorts of misunderstandings with my 17-year-old untamed artistic mind, I finally got the green light to represent our school at the state competition, and our group of 13 students from all grade levels was allowed to perform for three days at the big theater festival.
I was beside myself with excitement, and by the time we got back home, no one spoke to me anymore because I did and said things that I didn’t remember later.
So I spent my senior year in the back row, reading plays chronologically from Eshilus to Samuel Beckett. To get into the director’s program at the Academy of Drama Arts, only two students were accepted.
While studying in the library for the final round of the entrance exam, I watched 9/11 live on TV and figured there would be no stage for my performances.
But I made the final selection and spent the next year hanging around the Academy and volunteering as an assistant director at state and city theaters.
I didn’t write anything.
The next year I was not accepted into the director’s program. On the same day, my father died after a long illness that began when I was six.
My short story about him won a publishing contest, and it’s still on my Google page.
That summer, I had just started working at the gym when my mother’s friend told me that there was a playwriting program at the same academy and that I would probably have a good chance since they were accepting six writers.
And I have already read all the art poetics and authors. All I have to do is dramatize a novel and write a theatre essay.
Nothing easier than that. I have been accepted.
Great, I will write again and develop my writing skills. That’s also important (for saving the world with art).
Already in the third year, I wrote an intertextual postmodernist monodrama with the first thousand digits of the number pI and 15 pages repeating the line “Watching, not-talking, standing, thinking” that was in the stage direction too.
At that time, I read somewhere that you should be involved in things you have no idea about because if you invest in things you are good at, you remain the same person and never develop.
The new has always been very important to me, along with the unknown and unfamiliar.
So I took this thought out of context — now I don’t remember the context at all— and wrote it on my soul as a guide for my bright future looking at my complex developed identity.
Because I value brain function so much, the analytical theory was my second major.
I passionately wrote academic essays of 5000 words and more on post-dramatic performance politics, strategies, and procedures (yes, there is a difference) that were published on the obscure National Radio Third Program.
But I didn’t write a story or a play.
I wrote thousands of project proposals, many of which were my original ideas. Then I started writing about film and doing radio performances.
To question the aspect of spectatorship in theater, I directed a radio broadcast of my theater performance. With the number pI.
I also wrote 33 cultural podcasts and at least 10 manifestos in a month.
Non-fiction podcasts were framed as fiction, while fiction served to introduce documentary potential.
Press releases for all these projects were my main form of expression for a long time. I didn’t realize it then, but I wrote very personal and motivational announcements.
At the same time, I got rid of the novel that had been weighing me down for years by turning it into a screenplay for a feature film and my final exam. It was accepted by a producer, but not by film subsidies.
Nothing happened.
I also stopped writing plays for my performances and instead curated stand-up elements, forum monologs, and long improvisations.
The solitary part was the second hardest part of writing for me. It’s the same with storytelling.
Freedom and creativity come easily to me with the structure, layers, and transitions, but the story needs a soul that feeds off the feelings. To do that to myself, I’d have to be poor and unhappy.
And so I was.
I moved from theater to dance and then to performance art, site-specific performances, public space interventions, and experimental performance videos, all the time developing more complex improvisational mechanisms that spontaneously create a performance, a meaning, and a narrative, requiring nothing from me as a writer.
I had a vague idea to do a performance where I write directly on the projection. Too difficult. Too personal. Never happened.
It was only when life pressed me so hard, or I pressed life, that I lost all my resources and entered the lockdown as a single mother of an infant in a rented house with a cat.
On the second day of the lockdown, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake occurred in my town, and the news simultaneously advised people to leave their homes, avoid aftershocks, and stay indoors to keep their distance. But that’s another story.
A single mother who’s unemployed and receives no support is a powerful force. I was cornered and returned to my first skill, writing.
Solitude wasn’t as difficult for me now, as I’d wandered and traveled in solitude for years.
Rules, formats, and guidelines no longer seemed to constrain me; on the contrary, they became different forms that I wanted to conquer with my brain.
But I wrote just enough to stay afloat and keep my son, cats, and garden with me.
I write long sentences because my native Slavic language is structured that way. And because it is very much appreciated in our literature.
I like the speed, terminology, and accuracy of English. Croatian is anything but that. Croatian is multilayered, intertextual, complicated, and a matter of national identity.
Every language reveals the mentality of its speakers.
I still cannot write in my own language. Although it was my first inspiration and shaped my thought pattern. Though I direct it as I write it, and I think as I write.
For still any editor will rewrite my most complex sentences and not understand that it is a performative statement, a logical trick expressed in syntax.
I do manage eventually not to have my texts edited by proofreaders, but I always have to fight for it.
And then there is a part of me that is offended by so many rejections and misunderstandings that I feel I have to prove myself every time I start writing.
And from that position, it’s impossible to write.
So now I plan and write in English, allowing it to shape my truths and ideas. Slightly frustrated that I am back to square one.
But at least I have ended one struggle and proved that you can not replace a writer with a director.
And that a director cannot direct without a writer. If you know what I mean. Because I didn’t define which writer. A clue — any writer.
