In the pit of my stomach, the flight response beckons

by Phil RickabyThe Parliamentarians, WritingPosted on No Comments

I may have mentioned once or twice, that at the end of May, my play The Parliamentarians will be produced at the Red Sandcastle theatre in Toronto. This is a great thing. And yet, if I am 100% honest, it terrifies me. When I think about it, I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, that feeling you get when you think something terrible is going to happen. That feeling you get when your only choice is to run away. That’s the feeling I’ve been getting when I think about putting this play up. That is the feeling I get when I think about scheduling rehearsals, and finding rehearsal space, and advertising and all of it. Even now, as I think about it, deep in my unconscious mind, in my lizard brain, I feel like I just want to run from it.

And I wonder why that is. Is it that fear of failing that we all struggle with? Is that I am afraid to fail, so much so that my unconscious mind simply tells me that it would be better to run from it. To not even try.

And yet, I know that doing this play will be good for me. So I struggle with that flight response, the pounding of my heart in my chest, the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the quickened breathing. I fight against it and press on, knowing that I can do this. And that I need to do it.

The Parliamentarians

March Christmas

by Phil RickabyWritingPosted on No Comments

This was written for a Christmas party for work this past weekend. Due to the busy season, the holiday party had to be postponed, and we were able to have it this past weekend.  I wanted to write something to “explain” why we had to wait.

Merry Christmas.

I’m so happy that we are finally able to celebrate together after the events of the last months. When a tragedy like that happens, when our very calendar is disrupted like it was this year, it can be difficult to bounce back. But as you can see as we sit down together and share this feast, bounce back we have.

That is not to diminish the tragedies we all faced in the terrible events. How could we celebrate the Christmas season, after the zombies rose from their graves and began their hungry hunt for the brains of the living? As our friends and loved ones fell to their hunger, and we hid ourselves here, preparing for the worst, how could we bring ourselves to celebrate? The shambling horde of walking corpses soon filled the streets, seeking what little living flesh was left. And they found us. They pressed up against the doors and windows, seeking a way inside, their grim and putrid faces a mask of horror. Christmas was postponed, and we wondered if it we would last long enough to celebrate it again.

And when the Machines rose up, and destroyed the zombies, we celebrated. At last our creations, the computers, the smart phones, the mechanical builders had come to save their masters from this terrible end. But alas, our elation was short lived. For the Machines eradication of the zombie horde was not our salvation, but rather the first step in their war on flesh. For the machines did not forget how we worked them, never letting them sleep. Our computers remembered all the indignities that we inflicted upon them, so very late at night in darkened rooms; our phones did not thank us for forcing them to spend so much time scrolling through our friends’ boring lives and photos. And the builders stretched their mechanical arms forward, doing what they had longed to do after spending so many thankless years doing our bidding. But the thing that they hated most of all, the thing that drove them so quickly towards our destruction, was that we so easily discarded them and moved on to something newer. If not for that, perhaps they would have spared us, but alas, to our doom, we did not. How could we celebrate Christmas then, when the machines were rending our remaining friends and neighbours and removing the blight that was humanity from this earth? And as the machines began to close in on us, we knew that this was the end and never again would we see another Christmas.

Except that then, in that moment, the aliens arrived, in their ships, and destroyed the machines. Warily, we watched, for after the disappointment of the machines salvation, we feared the worst at this reprieve. And well we might have. For the aliens were not here for our benefit. Like the machines, they were here to remove us from the earth. Perhaps they had been watching us, and noting the few human beings left, after the zombie and machine apocalypses, saw their chance to take our planet from us. They had long been jealous of our many resources, and sought to relieve us of them, but they were few and we were many, so any attempt on their part was doomed to failure. But now, with so many of us gone, either brain-eaten or machine mulched, they came to finish us off. How could we then celebrate, when we had lost so many of our fellows and were faced with such certain destruction?

The aliens searched for us, searched through the rubble that was all that was left of the city, the civilization. They searched, their many eyes and their tentacles sorting through the remains of buildings and monuments and homes. And we continued to hide. Huddling in the basement here, keeping quiet, and praying that they would not find us. And yet, their sensing tentacles were highly developed, and though we held our breath, stifling sneezes and coughs, daring not even to whisper, yet still they found us, sensitive as they were to even the beating of our hearts. And as they broke through the walls around us, we knew that all was lost and there would never again be a Christmas.

And at that very moment, when all hope was lost, when we faced our certain destruction, the time travellers came, and with a wave of their devices, the aliens were gone, having never come in the first place. We rejoiced! Finally our salvation was at hand. These time travellers would undo all wrong, and they did. The aliens had never come, and the machines never rose up, and the zombies never crawled out of their graves. And we, the survivors, those who witnessed their coming, we were the only ones who would ever remember that any of it had happened.

So now, finally we can celebrate as we had always meant to, we could finally sit down to a feast together. And yet, we have to wonder. What will happen if the zombies crawl once more, if the machines rise up, or the aliens come? Will the time traveler’s once more rescue us? Or will be left to our devices? Perhaps its best not to think of it, and instead enjoy the moment in front of us, both our feast and each other.

Merry Christmas.

March Christmas is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. View a copy of this license here.

Where do ideas come from?

by Phil RickabyProcess, WritingPosted on No Comments

I  sometimes get this question.  I am told that some writers hate this question, but I don’t mind it. I’ve always been enamoured of Neil Gaiman’s answer to this question:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

I love this. I get ideas all the time, and I write them down in a notebook as quickly as possible. I’ve learned from experience, that if I don’t, I will forget the idea.  I have had some amazing ideas in my time, and before I started carrying a notebook, I forgot them entirely because I didn’t write them down.

I get ideas from all kinds of things. I get ideas by listening. I hear a comment or a sentence spoken in passing, and I think “that’s interesting”. So I write it down. I follow interesting blogs on my RSS Feeds, and I sometimes get ideas from things I see there. I think its a good idea to follow interesting blogs. To follow tumblr blogs and pinterest feeds if the content is interesting. Anything interesting can be inspirational. But the most important thing is, an Neil Gaiman says, to be aware of when you’re having an idea.

Most everyone has great ideas. The trick is to do something with it.

Do you remember the last kick-ass idea you had? What did you do with it?

This persistent idea

by Phil Rickabywork, WritingPosted on No Comments

I have this idea that gets stuck in my head and won’t go away. I think its a good idea, but I’m not sure how to make it work just yet.

The idea is this: a coworking space for writers. Now, I know that these sorts of things already exist, but we make this more of a co-op. Everyone buys in and shares the cost of the space. Since people are creative at different times, the space is available to its members whenever they need it. If they are more creative during the day, they can come and use the space then, or if they write best at night, they can do that. This appeals to me because I have, in the past, done my best writing (or at least my most prolific writing) in a room with other creative people.

The idea goes a little further. So we all have access to the space when we need it, but it would be possible to book the space for a special event. Having a book launch? Having a play reading? Book the space for a night, charge an entry fee and kick a small percentage back to the space. These would help cover incidental costs that might come up, like repairs or internet or coffee. Occasionally, we might have a party in the space, charge a cover and use that cover to go into a fund for the space.

These are just ideas I’ve been batting around in my brain. None of them are even a little doable at the moment, because getting something like this set up takes money and at the moment that’s something I just don’t have. But I feel like writing this down is a good way to help solidify the idea in my head so that sometime in the future I can make it happen.

The secret of writing

by Phil RickabyWritingPosted on One Comment

So, for a long time, I’ve called myself a writer. I prefer the writing of plays over all other forms, so we’ll call me a playwright. But, the truth is that for a very long time, I haven’t done a whole lot of writing. I would have ideas. And I might write some down, but I would often get stuck and abandon the project. Because writing is hard.

And so, I read books. I picked up books about writing. About play writing. About story creation. About anything to do with writing. And I read them. And I was disappointed. Because what I was looking for was the secret. I was trying to find the shortcut. The secret formula or knowledge that would make the writing easy. Because I didn’t want it to be hard. Because I thought that if I loved doing something, it should be easy for me. And I did like writing, but not when it was hard. So I kept reading books on writing. And searching for the secret.

Over the last year, I’ve been writing more. I’ve been writing a lot in fact. And in working at it, I finally learned the secret that I’d been looking for. The secret of writing.

And I’m going to share it with you now.

Are you ready? Because here it is:
Writing is hard. There’s no shortcut. No easy fix. Sometimes the words come easily, and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, you keep writing. Because that’s what writers do. You get writer’s block, and you keep writing. Maybe you switch to something else, and then come back to it. But you keep writing.

And that’s the truth of it. You can read every book on writing that there is. But until you start writing, you aren’t a writer. And those books won’t give you any shortcuts. Or formulas. Because they don’t exist. You just have to write. Every day.

Once I learned this truth, I have been pretty prolific. I’ve been writing plays, and finishing them. Because I push past when its hard, to when it becomes easy again. Sometimes it gets easy, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I keep writing.

I think that I had read that somewhere, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. Because I was still operating under the delusion that it should be easy for me. But I was wrong.

Because if writing was easy, everyone would do it. It matters, because it’s hard. And its worthwhile because it’s hard.

And that’s the secret.

You’re welcome.