How Much Me

I started yet another script today, and this is the one I'll be presenting on Friday. This one is a little more grounded, and I feel comfortable going on with it. What I realized today was that my writing has a style. And when I noticed it, I realized that that is what I wanted, a style. Patterns in my writing are proof that I exist! If I have my own style, I can be okay with making things that are not replicas of my influences. This is often the temptation when you like someone else's art very much. Just try to do exactly what that artist did, and then you'll be good. But if I have my own style, I don't have to worry, because I'll show up in it no matter what. I am not free of worry about this script though. I might know my issues a little too well, and they may get in there a little too literally. In fact, this script is a literal-metaphorical depiction of my life at this moment. What a narcissist I am! I need to pay attention to story before meaning. I think this is going to be the main idea behind my editing, but I'll see what my community has to say. I also need to work on my characters. It's easy to write myself as a character, it's not so easy to write other people in. I know what works for me- I need to have a clear vision of my people. I don't need to know that a character eats oatmeal for breakfast and played tennis as a kid, I just need to get some image of her in my head. Or else she's going to come out as me, the default image. Hope to get something good out of this!

Not A Good Day

Writing the beginning of this play is scaring me out of writing the end of it. I have started two separate plays, and so far neither of them are good. They're not well written, and I would fix the writing if I thought the ideas were worth continuing with. On both plays, I got the idea, thought it was pretty good, started writing, and realized it wasn't. And then had no motivation to continue. But what I noticed is that they are bad for the same reason. They are both rooted in something unreal, and I'm getting lost in the details I need to justify it. For example (I'm embarrassed to even say this idea), one of them had to do with a person calling her past self on the phone once the technology for this has been created. What was I thinking? Then I had to wonder, in this world, is this technology available to everyone? So is everyone in the past world getting called from people in the future? And then there's the issue that it wouldn't technically be her past self because she never got a call from her own future self. And how far back in time do the calls go? By the time this is all explained, won't the listener be bored? But if it's not explained, will it make any sense? I might be thinking too far into this but my script wanted me to answer these questions and I didn't know how. Then I didn't even like the idea anymore, so why bother? I don't feel like a good writer anymore. I don't have any ideas, and I don't have any discipline. I know that I need to just keep doing it and doing it, but I'm holding myself to too high a standard and it's making it hard for me to live up to myself. I've been approaching art the same way I've been approaching everything else in my life, negatively and with minimal effort. How can I call myself a writer when I'm hardly writing anything? I want to be going faster and getting more done on this, but I keep starting over or gonig back to research. I just want an idea now that is rooted in reality so that I don't have to worry about those silly explanations that make things hard for me.

First Draft

Whenever we watch moves in Stac, I walk out feeling differently. Watching Andy Warhol today was an exercise for my brain. I knew that it was going to be. I mentioned my four envy in my last post. It's the part of my enneagram that I've been finding most helpful to my self awareness. Fours have the habit of believing that everybody else has something we don't. We are extremely envious. I related a lot to an interview with a four who said that he went to an artist's studio and saw all his work and was deeply touched by it but rather than being able to appreciate it in the moment, he envied the artist and wished he could do the same. That's how I felt watching Warhol today. Not that I was especially in love with his art, but I was extremely envious of his work ethic. He seemed to always be working and he always enjoy working. I was also envious of his ambition. He wanted fame, and he got fame. I want to know what I want so that I can get it. But I'm trying to turn my envy into something productive. And after watching Andy Warhol today, I was inspired to make art. I'm biased, but it seemed to me that Andy was a four. He had the extreme envy and the extreme self doubt. But he worked past it, so I can too. I've been struggling to decide on a college. After watching the documentary today, I wanted to go to Oberlin. When I was at home on Facebook, I wanted to go to Binghamton. So I typed a bunch of random letters into a word doc, copied and pasted them into the "New Password" box, printed the word doc, ripped off the little corner with the password on it, and slipped it in a box of my grandma's hats on the top shelf of my closet. I have got to pick a side of me. Closest to my ideal. By the time it's too hard or not right, I'll have a new ideal. I want to get used to not sticking to one place or one kind of place. I need to keep in motion. So when I came home from track, I took a shower and then my parents wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate my college decision. I was antsy to get started writing, but I said yes because I wanted them to feel good. When I got home, I knew I had to get started. And I did! I started writing, and the first few things I wrote were not good but I eventually got an idea I liked enough to roll with. I don't think it's going to be the final concept, but I want to see where it takes me. Frankly, I'm proud of myself for even starting something. I've been so... fearful lately that I haven't been able to start a single thing. This project is going to mean a lot to me. If I do a good job on it, I'll have the courage to keep starting new things. I want to always be making something.

Browsing Radio Shows

I'm thinking about from which direction to approach my project. The first things I know are the form and the "aboutness". But I'm wondering now how to justify the form that I chose. Why a radio play and not a movie? What must the story and the style be so that I am justified in doing it this way? But I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I can use my need for sound as inspiration, but I should not use it to throw away ideas. As the line between life and art is thin, I'm finding what I hope this project will do for me. I need to work on confidence and plowing through. I am not confident in my ideas. When I have ideas, they are not concrete, they are abstract. They often go back to "aboutness" rather than pure content. So starting this project will be key. I need to get something concrete, so I will have to approach it in a different way. I've been writing poems to get a flow, and to get something concrete to look at, but I will have to move faster. I spent today listening to several radio episodes, most notably Radiolab. Radiolab uses sound differently from the episode I was originally inspired by. It is audibly interesting. A story is told by multiple voices, and I enjoyed the way the voices interacted. There was a mixture of conversational and narrative speaking. I could hear that each reaction "hmm" and "ah, yes" was considered, and played a role in setting the tone. Music and sound effects were also utilized. So this tells me that it doesn't matter how I use sound or if sound is the center of the story. Rather, I can come up with my story and then bring in sound and use the need for sound as inspiration and a tool for changing it around. So I can stop trying to think of how to incorporate answering machines and voice recorders. Aside from the way Radiolab used sound, I was also gripped by the story itself. It was about a scientist who learned from his mentor to be objective when trying to make sense out of his subjects, crickets, and their actions. When that mentor was shot and killed in a senseless act by a man who was never caught, the scientist could not find a way to look at the case objectively. He couldn't understand how someone could harm another human being that way. The most understanding that came was when a Vietnam veteran explained that he and the woman who'd been with his mentor could never understand. It was a beautiful story beautifully done. My 4 envy came out when I heard it! Hopefully I can use it as motivation and not a reason to quit.

Radio Project Begins

I was inspired by the NPR podcast about the blind date and the answering machine to write my own script and record it. I'm having some trouble deciding what I would like it to be about. I always start with what it is I'm thinking about right now. So that brought me to the idea of my relationship with the future and my future self. I'm also thinking about idealism, which is easily a part of the future theme. So it will circle somehow around this. I'm doing this because I'm interested in sound and music as well as writing, and I've never gotten to consider these things very much with writing. I'm unsure whether to start with the story or with the sound. I've got a bit of a case of the "I can't do any better than the first thing I heard and loved" syndrome, but I'm pushing through it! Today in class I was reading Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood is a play written for voices, and although there was no conventional storyline, I was completely drawn in because the language and imagery were so beautiful. Because it's a play of sounds, it's important that the imagery is very rich. The sounds of the words are also important because they have an effect on the mood and the style. So these are some things I'll have to consider when I write it. Unlike the Facebook project last year, I'm anxious to get out of the research stage and get started, so I'd say that's a good sign that I'm feeling enthusiastic about this one.

Individual

The playwriting intensive worked progressively in the sense that it was first about raw technique with little attention to creativity and ended with loose instructions allowing us to pull together our improved technique with creativity. This is not to say that no creativity was involved in the earlier workshops, but the need for it was minimized so that we could focus on the specific aspect of playwriting we were working to improve on. I found the intensive to be successful for this reason. The sense of jetting through in the earlier workshops followed through to the later ones that required more of a thought process.
The assignment for the first intensive illustrates this minimization of thought process. We were to think up the last argument we’d had and write it as a six page play. Knowing my own weakness in making decisions, I picked the first long fight I could remember and chose to write that one. I didn’t try to make it the best script it could be, but rather I turned on autopilot and wrote it just as it came to mind. The challenge came when we then had to cut down the six page script to a three page script. To do this, I examined what was at the core of the six page script. The script I was writing was a fight between a girl and her mother over beer found in the girl’s closet. When refining the script, I strived to maintain the essence of the first script rather than something more superfluous like its details or structure. Some details and structure elements were used to maintain the essence, but they were not the thing to keep in mind. At the core of my characters was the mother’s desire to keep her daughter young and the daughter’s need for freedom, so this was what I tried to keep in the three page script and then again when refining it down to a one page script.
The next assignment followed naturally. It again required an ability to find the essence of the script and of the characters’ motives. We were to write two different versions of an apology. The first would be direct, and the second would be indirect, meaning rather than a straightforward apology, the apology would be more implied. This approach would most likely yield a more realistic scene. However, because the original scene had been written about a real fight that I’d had and that was never fully resolved, I couldn’t get myself to write an apology. So the art entered the intensive very early for me, and this workshop taught me more of a lesson of separation. Had I been able to separate myself from the script, I would have been able to write an apology. In art, there is not a thick line between the personal and the universal, and this day of the workshop reminded me of this. It is okay for work to be personal, as long as you can keep some separation from it.
That day turned from a product day to a research day, and I read Clifford Odets’ Rocket to the Moon. Odets seems to be the master of characters. I was surprised at how much I understood about his characters that was only implied. This gave me a little more confidence that I could say more with less. I found his writing to be both believable and poetic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Odets

Slowly, the workshops became looser and allowed for some more creativity. The next thing we did was write three scenes from the life of an object, and this was written in the form of a screenplay. This exercised two areas. First, as a screenplay, I was forced to consider visuals. Although this is perhaps more important in a screenplay than in a stage play, I found that even my dialogue improved when writing in this form. Because I wrote it by seeing it in my head rather than thinking up appropriate dialogue, it came off more realistic and simply better. In this workshop, I was also drawing on what I’d done previously. I looked for the essence of each scene before writing it and then was able to construct interesting dialogue that got across interesting relationships between complex characters.
The art really came into the intensive with the assignment to write a play based on song lyrics which we were given. The only other limitations were on the number of characters and the length of the play. With fewer limitations, it is always more difficult to begin, and I needed a little push to get started. Here I encountered the lesson that it has been my goal to keep in my head, which is that inspiration can and should be taken from anywhere, and it does not matter if the final outcome of a piece of work matches the inspiration. It will match no matter what. In comes the idea of the universal. I didn’t especially like the script I wrote for this part of the intensive. It started with a hole that I never figured out how to close. It began with a girl hiding in a closet and a boy curious why she was there, and that question was never answered. What I did like about it was its poetic feel. I was trying to mimic Odets in this sense. I think that I as a writer appeared in this script stylistically more than I did in the others. In this way, this script came at an appropriate time. After learning to write interesting dialogue in an effective manner, I suppose the next step would be to establish a style.
Another playwright we studied was Harold Pinter, and we focused on adopting his use of pauses and silences for points of tension. I found this exercise to be very difficult to write with, but very useful when directing. After the intensive, I directed one of the scenes I had written and I found it was easier to employ the pauses when I was able to see the scene happening before me and sense where they belonged. This shows me that directing scenes will also help me improve my writing. Hopefully I will learn to get the feel for the pauses and silences enough so that I can see it in my head and write them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/arts/dance/10pint.html?pagewanted=all
The challenge of writing these scenes grew steadily as I had to take the techniques I’d learned in the early workshops and use them all together, but it felt like it happened naturally and that the techniques were somewhat engrained in my head because I had already used them. I am pleased with how much writing got done throughout the intensive, and what I took away from it was that it is not enough to know but you must use what you know in order to improve.

Writing Intensive 1

The process of cutting down the scripts made a lot of sense. It was difficult to extend it to six pages in the first place, and so I think I started to get repetitive with the issues I was talking about. This did actually happen in the fight I wrote about as fights do tend to go around in circles. In the second script, I had to lose this round effect in order to get all the issues in, but I think if I were to try to recreate this scene in a play, I might try to get the endlessness aspect to come out a little bit more. When writing the second script, I looked at the first one and outlined what the main ideas were.

They were:
-lack of trust
-comparison between me and my brother
-strongmindedness
-seeing only the bad and not the good
-freedom

So in the second script, I tried to include each of these things. In the last, one page script, I took the one idea that I felt showed the motivation behind the whole fight. The fight was about my desire to have more freedom conflicting with my mother's desire to keep me under her control. The other things all fell under this category anyway. Lack of trust was her way of justifying taking away my freedom. The comparison between me and my brother was my way of expressing angst about my individuality. I took her criticism of me very personally. And my strongmindedness was what she feared because it represented my maturity and even my confidence in forces that she did not believe in.
It would be interesting to see the way my mother would have diluded my original script because my interpretation is definitely in my favor.