Seven plays in seven days
This morning I came up with an idea for an exercise I’m going to do soon: write seven plays in seven days. Short plays, of course. :) The primary constraint will be that on the first day, that play will have only one character, the second play will have two, the third will have three, and so on, all the way up to seven. I may add other constraints as well, to cook up some more creativity; we’ll see.
In another vein, a year ago I started writing War in Heaven, my novel about, well, the war in heaven. :) I got about three scenes in and then put it on the back burner since it wasn’t going where I wanted it to. And so it languished for the last I don’t know how many months. But today I felt it kicking around, begging for some attention. And so instead of revising Out of Time, I’m going to focus on War in Heaven instead. (Mainly because I still don’t know how I would revise Out of Time. :))
The existing three scenes/chapters were a good start, but they really took place halfway through the novel, and so I’m going to try returning to the beginning (where Lucifer’s still good) and starting from scratch. We’ll see how it goes.




On how to revise Out of Time, the wise words of Samuel Johnson come to mind:
“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
It’s true. Or maybe it’s just that Johnson, as a pioneering lexicographer, holds particular sway with me. I particularly love that in his 1755 dictionary, he defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”
Well, I don’t know if I quite agree with Johnson :P, but you really do have to be willing to strike out any passage that stops contributing to the work as a whole. In revising my plays I’ve had to cut out favorite sections all the time. At first it was hard, but I’ve gotten used to it — besides, I can always use those sections again later in some other work. And it actually feels rather cathartic to cut out all the fat and get straight to the meat.