Right Story, Wrong Genre?

Yesterday I met with a writing buddy. We tend to talk about a lot of other things and then discuss writing for like 10 minutes. But that isn't the point of this...

When we finally touched on my writing, he spoke up, "I have to say...a lot of my favorite lines..."

I smiled at him, "...are the stage directions..."

"Exactly!"

Yes, I knew this. I knew this because most of my favorite lines in the play are the stage directions. My favorite part of writing the play was...writing the stage directions. I've been wondering what that means and I revealed this to my friend.

"It makes me wonder if I would be better suited writing fiction, like novels," I said.

My friend cracked a smile. He had had a similar thought. The audience would see my stage directions come alive, but they wouldn't be reading the actual lines. He wondered if I thought about writing the play, taking the story in the play, and writing a novel. I hadn't thought about that. He suggested I look at a book, which someone else had recommended when I was in college and I bought but never read. I left the meeting feeling ambivalent: I was happy that I wasn't completely off in my personal assessment of self, but I still didn't know what it meant.

Of course, by the late evening, I took that to mean I should just give up writing, but then I remembered a conversation with a friend of mine getting her PhD. She discussed how her research doesn't fit nicely into one subject area and this causes her, and others like her, difficulty. I discussed how I suffered the same problem when in my women's studies program. So not fitting into one subject area, or one genre, may just be the new status quo. I don't know what that means for this story, play, I am working on. In the shower this morning (keep your minds out of the gutter, friends), I started playing with the idea of the play becoming a novel with poetic tendencies. How did I play with that idea? I imagined a scene, said/acted out dialogue, wrote description in my head as best I could...in the shower. Performance, poetry, and novel writing all in the shower. Perhaps that is the future.

Still not sure what that means for my play. Stay tuned.