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A slow Sunday after a weekend camping with great friends and our dogs. What a gift it is to spend time in nature with people and animals you love. I bought (and brought) entirely too much food, and basically everything else. At least we didn’t have to hike a mile uphill in the sun with carts or anything like that.

I spent the day listening to Sea Wall performed by Tom Sturridge in New York. There’s something so fucking great about that play. Performed by one person. No music, natural lighting, written in just three weeks. Three bloody weeks! The published playscript is slightly different to the New York one, so I transcribed it. I practiced it over and over because, well… I’m not sure, actually. I suppose I just wanted to, and that’s reason enough.

Without other responsibilities I think I’d just write things to perform and perform those things. I could do that now, of course, but it’s easier to imagine that you’d do it if only you had more time, or more energy, or more insert-excuse-here. I’m writing that down here because I want to acknowledge that it’s partly an excuse, and I want to figure out how to stop using that excuse.

What’s the shortest play I could write? What’s the smallest audience that would make me feel like I performed, and crucially (for me) with the chance that the person might not like it and might actually tell me that (i.e. they’re a critic or a stranger)? I’m sure a handful of words and a resident of the World Wide Web would do, but I’m almost certain I could do better than that.

I watched the one-woman stage show Fleabag today by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I’ve tried watching a few film recordings of stage shows, and they often don’t really land for me because the usually-imposing stage feels too cramped, but a one-woman show with Phoebe sat on a stool the whole time works great. It almost works without video at all, but it’s much better with it.

I loved the TV show when I watched it, but the stage show is a masterpiece. It’s such a funny, moving, comforting piece of writing. A masterful performance. The smallest of facial expressions that can carry 30 seconds of complete silence and somehow make you laugh more than any of the space that’s filled with sound. Part of it is the familiar use of language that I miss, I’m sure.

I’d love to perform something like this someday. I’d love to write something this good. This weird mix of words that works on the page and works on the stage. Part novel, part poem, part screenplay. I’ve got Max Porter’s Shy on the coffee table in front of me, and I’ve been opening it all day to read a part aloud. It’s got those same qualities. I’m similarly inspired, and envious.

Do you ever feel like you’ve got a performer trapped in you? That everyone has, maybe? I really want to see everyone perform something. It could be something loud or quiet; fast or slow. I’ve had conversations with people that I wish had been caught on tape. Seen movement that should live forever on film. Occasionally, I’ll even write something myself that feels that way.

I’ve spent the evening doing chores, walking the dog, running. Throughout much of it I was listening to people reading things in ways that make you soften a little, or take a deep breath. There’s something about a perfect reading that just makes my whole brain light up. Something about a quiet, gentle anguish, or the vocal tremor of subdued anger. It does something to me.

This is the kind of work that I can never get off my mind. That, left to my own devices, I think I’d make over and over again until I’d landed on something perfect; some perfect things. It all starts with writing, as almost anything should, but finding the right voice—literally—for what you write is a whole separate, wonderful thing. Finding the right pitch and tone and cadence for it.

Writing something to speak aloud is so much harder than it sounds though. Writing poetry to be performed. Writing something for screen, or stage, or whatever. The only way you can do it is by actually performing the thing in some way, over and over again until you nudge it into the right place, which might mean rewriting it and it might not. You can perform the same thing many ways.