I just finished reading Harvey Fierstein’s autobiography I Was Better Last Night.
Like most people my age, I first knew Fierstein from Mrs. Doubtfire, then Hairspray, and finally as one of the creators of the Kinky Boots musical. More recently I learned about Torch Song Trilogy, a play based on his own life, through hearing about Estelle Getty’s involvement in Matt Baume’s book Hi Honey, I’m Homo (excellent book, highly recommend).
While reading the book, I learned that he wrote the book for Kinky Boots at the same time as writing the book for Newsies while also sometimes starring as Tevye in a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and researching a play that would become Casa Valentina.
Oh, and he’s won four of the seven Tonys he’s been nominated for, and his shows have won further awards.
As someone who has been wanting to figure out how to learn how to write the book of a musical for the past several years, this offends me.
Some of us are out here thinking about how we should be writing, and this guy is writing two Tony-nominated musicals at once. The absolute nerve.
And I saw Kinky Boots on New Year’s Eve a few years ago and it is joyous.
For a little while I had a bit of a writing practice — 10 minutes, every day. I did #NaNoWriMo for a few years and won a few times. The last couple of times I’ve tried, I have fallen off the daily writing cliff. This year I got something of a story out of the 25,000 I did write, and I know there’s something there, but god help me if I could actually sit down and focus in on it.
I think about writing, I want to write, but the actual writing part isn’t happening. Except here, and in my journal, neither of which are fiction. And at work, which is a whole different kind of writing. I’m also doing some Beta reading, which is really fun and interesting and I’m looking to get into editing, because I love being awash in words.
But it’s not my own writing.
That, I’m just sitting on, and thinking about, and wishing I were.
(Originally published on Medium)