Its hard to come up with stuff...

You know, thinking back on previous homeworks, I'm finding that brainstorming is a lot harder than actually writing. This is quite strange to me. The previous writing I had done was slam poetry, and here I found that writing it was far more difficult. I would have a million ideas, but no way to put it into words. With playwriting its find the ideas that is presenting a challenge. Once I have an idea, I just run with it and see where it takes me.
Why is that?
Well, here's one guess: with slam poetry I would struggle and write and rewrite to find the "perfect" sentence, so to speak. How could I express myself in the most creative way in the least amount of words? Where does one go when they "take their metaphors for a joyride?" It was always about looking for a better way to say something. And obviously I thought that there were better ways than what I had come up with, I just couldn't think of them. With playwriting I feel like there isn't that pressure to find the "perfect" way to say something. Maybe its the restrictions of slam poetry. One only has 3 minutes to present a whole idea or story where as here I have a whole play, however long that may be.
Also with slam poetry, its a competition. So not only does it have to be good, but it has to be better than the other guys'. Now obviously life, publishing, getting your work put on, etc, is a competition, but it doesn't feel that immediate. And I'm not really writing to please anyone except myself. I'm not writing for points. And although I don't necessarily do that in my poetry, its still in the back of my mind. I guess the trick would be to focus on the writing and whether I'm happy with it rather than whether it scores good.
The problem is when I read something that I wrote and I know I can write better, but I don't know how. I have a big problem with editing because, the way I see it, I wrote something one way because that was how I thought of it. How am I going to change what I thought? (I don't think that makes sense) I just find it difficult to see something in a different way than how I've already perceived it. What I feel I need is another set of eyes and brains. They will probably see something differently than me, suggest it, and that'll get my mind running on a different track.
Since we haven't really gotten into much editing in this class I guess we'll just have to wait and see how I respond to it.