It's that time of year again.

I'm back at Blank, doing lots of writing, laughing way too much, and chilling with amazing, talented people. What am I going to do with myself next year when I'm too old for this?

Oh. Be an adult. Oops.

I'm going to talk about revisions, because for the amount of time I spend bitching about them, I actually really love revisions. I love doing them. I love doing them well. I love being given the chance to fix things that I didn't get right the first time and looking at things in new ways.

I feel like revisions are actually a really important part of the writing process. A play is an organic medium - if you finish your first draft and never touch it again, you're missing out on something. Your play is immature. I mean, I guess to each his own, but I love taking a play apart and putting it back together - I always find stuff new in the process. I also think that the actual ability to do that - to break it down and then reconnect the pieces - is a really important skill to have.

I'm working on Like a Dog in Space at Blank this year, and it's going really nicely, but I'm in a sort of funny place with the play. The version they're producing is by no means the final draft - I'm fully intent on expanding it back out to a full length at some point in the future - but the process of cutting it down to its barest pieces has changed the play. It's given me really excellent insights into the characters and their relationships, and I feel like I've learned and grown a lot as a writer through the revision process.

This is my swan song year at Blank, so I do feel some pressure to impress people and show them how much I've changed since the time that I was that awkward child who didn't really know what she was doing there or understand the importance of the revision process. Some plays require less revision simply because there's less to revise, but just because your idea and execution doesn't change from the time you write your opening stage direction to the time you write "end of play" doesn't mean that you've crafted a perfect Pulitzer winner.

But I wouldn't revise the last four years of my life. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of myself and what I've learned and what I've accomplished. I'm still reluctant to call myself talented, but if enough people keep saying so I guess I'll have to believe it. At any rate, I've stopped trying to prove to myself the first play wasn't a fluke, wasn't beginner's luck, because it wasn't. I've worked to get where I am today. And I'll have to keep working, to get to where I'll be tomorrow, in five years, in ten-

But I wouldn't go back and change anything. That's the funny thing about revisions - they're in the future tense. The old draft is still there, tucked away in a folder. It's in the play's DNA. You can only do the revision because you wrote the previous draft. So it's not like you're really going back and changing things - you're still moving forward. Every new draft takes you deeper into the world of the play, taking you towards some plutonic perfect form of it. I'm not sure that you ever reach that perfect point. But it's fun to try.

Also my cast is amazing and I'll get a picture on saturday when we've finally got everyone together because oh my god oh my god life is awesome.