What am I writing for Script Frenzy? Script #1: The Enterprise Play

I promised to tell you what I was writing for Screnzy before the month began and then said nothing about it for many days. Sorry about that! But, at long last, I fulfill my promise.

I decided to write two scripts for Script Frenzy this year. Let’s talk about the first one.

Script #1: The Enterprise Play

One evening when my husband was coming home late (either he was working late or was at a game with a friend, I don’t remember) I hit that point when I was much too tired to do work of any quality so I decided to do some housework to keep myself awake until he got home. I did the laundry.

I tell this story with some hesitation because when I refer to this evening to myself, it is always with the statement “I have never been more insane.” I was folding laundry, like a normal person, when I started to sob, like an abnormal person. I had this story in my head, this totally random, never thought about it before in my life story and the whole thing just started playing out in my head like a movie. Now, I should add, this story is not even that sad. I don’t know what my deal was with all the crying.

It was also a story about no topic I have ever been interested before. A story about bad fathers, loose women, and people who die in fires all of which I have no experience with or particularly cared about until this random story came to me. It was, very literally, out of the blue.

So after crying like a maniac for a while, the rational part of my brain says to me, “This must be that muse people are always talking about. You should go write this down!” So I ran into the office and grabbed an pad of paper that said Enterprise Rent-A-Car on the top. (Note: I owned this pad long before my brother worked for Enterprise. I have no idea where it came from but when he later worked for them, it was funny I had it.) I didn’t turn my computer on because I was only going to jot down some notes and it was going to only take a minute.

Like the least sane person that ever lived, I proceeded to sit there at my desk for several hours and sob and write out, by hand, a good 10 pages of notes on this story. My husband came home and thought someone had died and I had to explain to him that everything was fine, I was just out of my ever loving mind. Like I said, craziest I have ever been.

The notes I wrote down told this story in play form and it was untitled so I called it, for many years, The Enterprise Play. I shuffled those handwritten notes all over the place but never did anything with them. I tried re-reading them but they were  in places illegible and mostly I was a bit embarrassed that I had written them in such an insane state. Also, I didn’t think the story was very good. But I didn’t want to throw them out because I still feel like there had to be something to that story or I wouldn’t have been such an insane person when I wrote those notes.

So enter Script Frenzy 2010. I decided to, no matter how cringe-worthy the process may be, force myself to finally write the script those notes detailed all those years ago. When the play was written in completion, it was 11 pages from 10 pages of notes which is funny because I both cut and added a good deal.

After writing it out, I will freely admit that, in its current form, it is terrible but it is not without hope. A little editing, a little clean-up and maybe there is a 1 Act competition out there with its name on it. If nothing else, at least I have the story down in a more permanent form than random scrawled notes.

But I wanted to get that out of the way and I figured Screnzy was a good time to force myself to do it. So, the first 11 pages of my 100 were this little gem.

But what are the other 89 pages about? Stay tuned! 😉