I just wrote my first fight scene, the climax to the screenplay I have been working on for these many months. I have been agonizing over it for a week (longer), and reading directions online: "How To Write a Fight". I haven't re-read it yet. The adrenalin is still pumping. I am still breathing hard.

I can't think about it tomorrow. I have to think about it this afternoon. I'm on a deadline.

I am not a violent person.

I have just been in Stratford for a couple of days. Among other things, I saw The Virgin Trial, the second play of a trilogy Canadian playwright Kate Hennig has written, is writing, about the last of the Tudors: The Last Wife, about Kate Parr, the last wife of Henry VII; Elizabeth, the daughter of Ann Boleyn, the Virgin Queen; and I don't know the name of the third play being written (completed?). My point here is that the play I saw this weekend had scenes of torture and I had trouble, real trouble with them.

I can't bear violence. How can I write It? How can I pretend to be a writer if I can't? How can I write strongly about strength? Moral , not physical. And make it convincing?

Writing doesn't get any easier. Neither does living.