Disclaimer: I get a little more personal in this entry, but since it’s about my own life, I give myself permission to reveal those certain aspects of my privacy in order to convey the accuracy of my own experiences against society’s knowledge of these topics. 

I went to the document to edit the first scene to see if I could take Lindsay out of it and it’s as if, out of habit, I’ve started writing the direction in theatre speak. I wrote, “lights are all black except for a spotlight at centerstage”, but I fixed it. I can’t believe I forgot that playwrights shorten stuff like that to just “spotlight at CS”. That’s literally it. I think I should read more plays first so I can relearn the theatre language. That could help me sound a lot less redundant. I mean, the last time I read a play was at school. (Although, if I were truly honest with you, I would always start, but never completely finish the reading. I’m not advocating that you don’t do your homework, kids. I’m just saying I only managed my decent GPA by getting a sense of the plays rather than actually knowing what was going on.)

During my daily walk, I thought about Sarah and the night she gets pregnant. I don’t have any personal experience when it comes to actually having sex (although I’ve been so drunk before that I puked, just never got to the point where I passed out and forgot what happened). Well, I guess this has less to do with the sex and is more focused on her inebriation.

Here’s an anecdote: as I said before, the worst I’ve ever been drunk is when I drank an entire bottle of wine a little too quickly. I started feeling sick about halfway through the bottle, but I figured it’ll pass. I downed the second half of it a little quicker than the first (I’m pretty sure it was my drunkenness already that impaired my judgment on that). After some time, my eyes were closed and I think I fell asleep, but then I suddenly hurled. Awesome, right? My point is, that was the most drunk I’ve ever been and I remember every detail. Probably because I look back on it once in a while, mortified because my poor roommate witnessed everything so I didn’t blame her for wanting to be anywhere else but there, as I tried to regain my sobriety.

Anyway, what I’m sort of stuck on is, should I have Sarah so drunk that she doesn’t remember what happened, or is it enough to have her not object over Scott’s immediate taking advantage of her? If I go with the first option, I’m worried it just seems too much like the consent episode of Switched at Birth. One of the main characters was so drunk that the only thing she remembers from that night is waking up next to her ex, without any clothes on.

And also, should I bring Scott in after all? When he was in the musical, for a while, I had him come back while Sarah was still in mourning over the stillbirth, but that might be a little too much to handle for her. In fact, Charlie is the one who reaches out to him and invites him over because he knows that she has to confront Scott over what happened. Looking back, Charlie knows better than that. After all, he’s a doctor, so he should be trained to be more careful toward other people’s feelings.

Well, what Scott did before I took him out was go over to Charlie’s and apologize to Sarah for being such a jerk, not because he had sex with her without a proper yes, but for not knowing about the pregnancy. (The reason why she never told him was because he already had a full-ride football scholarship to his #1 college and she didn’t want the pregnancy–something she felt was her fault–to get in the way of his dream.)

If I were to put him back into the show, should I portray him as this villain who was too selfish to not see that he hurt Sarah? Or does something happen to him that humanizes his actions? I don’t want to defend him on what he did, but maybe if there was some sort of reason to his logic. That might be difficult to do, considering the circumstances, but it’s not impossible to find his motivation for what happened that night. Why he went ahead and slept with her. What was on his mind as it was happening? Was there a part of him that felt like he was doing something wrong? And if so, what made him go ahead and hook up with her?

These are the questions I should probably answer by getting more into his backstory and then how his journey merges with Sarah’s. Obviously, I won’t get too into it in the play, but I learned throughout my playwriting experience that it’s beneficial to at least write out the background information so it makes sense for the creator. There’s a playwriting exercise, which really helps other types of creative writers, too: writing a scene between two people who don’t have to actually meet in the play, just to experiment. The author already has an idea of who those two people are and, by putting them in the same room, having the same conversation, might teach the creator a little more about her two characters.

I think I’ll write an experimental scene between Sarah and Scott having an honest conversation about what happened that night. The thing is, if he’s going to realize that he did a bad thing the night that they got pregnant, it has to be at that particular moment because he probably hadn’t been thinking about it too much in college. If he did, then it was either how good it felt and/or how guilty he feels because they were related by law and he was supposed to be an older brother to her. Of course, this would depend on how I decide to portray Scott. That was an issue that my playwriting professor kept going back to. I remember he kept saying, “I still feel like Scott could be even less of a villain.” It was a really good note because the people who do this, they’re still human and just because they did this one bad thing one time doesn’t make them evil. They just made a very unwise and unfair choice. Scott is human and he acted on a humanly impulse and made the wrong decision, which is honestly the must humanly thing to do. Making bad decisions in general, at least.

Writing out the actual dialogue that leads up to the sex though, I know I should definitely do. I want to portray Scott as a regular person who gets just as vulnerable as everyone else, and acts on his insecurities, leading up to his first kiss with Sarah. That way, we get his side of what happened too.

My eyes are going a little droopy so I think I’ll head to bed. I’m doing so well with actually writing this thing. So many notes and journal entries yet, barely any progress on the actual script.