Sometimes you just have to act on an idea because it refuses to go away.  For a few years now, I’ve toyed with the idea of making my story Torn Coupons into a musical.  It’s crazy, of course, because I don’t know anything about musicals, except that I’ve seen a few and enjoyed some of them.

But the idea won’t go away.

And neither will the story, for that matter.  I first came up with the idea of the story 18 years ago.  I wrote it as a short story and revised it many times, and it has had incarnations as a film script and a play.  But I have never been completely satisfied with any version of the story.  It just never “feels” right.  And I keep coming back to the musical concept because the characters have a lot of monologues that would be well suited for songs.   And yet, I’m not musical and I don’t really know much about musicals.   So why won’t this idea leave me alone?

Sometimes we’re given ideas for a reason.  And sometimes we just have to have faith to act on them.  My play Laund-o-Mat at the End of the World nagged at me for over twenty years before I actually wrote it out.  So, for the month of November, I’m going to play around and work on Torn Coupons.  The musical.

One of the great things about not knowing too much about musicals is that I don’t have any preconceptions.  I don’t know what can or can’t be done or what is the “right” way to do things.  Ignorance is bliss.   Maybe I’ll discover something brilliant in my stumbling, bumbling efforts.

Or maybe nothing will come of it, but I will have at least tried to do something with an idea that refuses to be ignored.