Over the past month, I’ve been revising Tree of Blood a lot. (Ten or eleven times, to be exact.) After several revisions I realized that I’d written myself into several plot knots, primarily because I’d been adding in all sorts of backstory without stepping out to make sure it still made sense as a whole. And so I stopped myself. I wrote an outline for the whole play, then went back and rewrote it from scratch, and after a few tweaks here and there, it’s noticeably better. Still creepy, but without all the confusing holes in the plot. :) We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment and will be performing in a mere two weeks. Egads!

And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life :P), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. :) And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me. :)

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

This morning I found out that Tree of Blood did indeed get accepted. :) It’ll be produced as part of New Play Project’s Long Ago and Far Away show (seven short plays) on July 25–26, 28, August 1–2, 4. Times will most likely be 7:30 pm with 2:30 pm matinees on the Saturdays, but I’ll have more solid details later. Auditions are tentatively scheduled for June 24–25 on BYU campus (and anyone can try out). More on that later as well.

Oh, and I’m going to be assistant directing again. I’d thought about passing on that, since it is a bit of a time commitment, but I need my theatre fix. :P And it’s a lot of fun to be more involved with the show — playwrights do participate, but not nearly as much as directors.

I’m going to try really hard to start writing plays for the next show (Fire and Rain, religious plays) in advance, so that I can submit six or seven. Why? Mainly the OCD. :P No, really, I have tons of ideas for plays — a flood of them — and the more I write, the better I’ll get. And deadlines make me write. It’s not the submitting that matters so much to me (though it feels good to send in a flurry of scripts), it’s the writing. And the getting better bit. :)

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

There were enough good submissions to the New Play Project Long Ago and Far Away set that they’ve added an extra round of finals, and my play Tree of Blood is one of the nine finalists. Phew. :) We have till Tuesday night to revise our plays and make them the best that they can be; Wednesday night the script selection committee will choose the final scripts.

Revision is easier when you have third-party perspectives — a fresh eye and all — and so I’m looking for people who’d like to read the script and give me feedback. (It doesn’t have to be detailed, really — just what you liked and what you didn’t like.) If any of you are interested, email me (ben dot crowder at gmail) and I’ll send you the script.

I submitted three plays to this next New Play Project set, Long Ago and Far Away. (The plays are Tree of Blood, Rhymetime, and Do Not Pass Go, in case you were wondering. Which you probably weren’t. :)) And I’ve also cast my lot in to assistant direct something again. Part of me is wondering why on earth I did that — do I really have time for it? — but I couldn’t help myself. I need my theatre fix. :)

I also need to start going to bed earlier. I meant to write seven plays way in advance for this set, but that didn’t happen. In fact, I really didn’t even get around to most of the work until today. (I rewrote Tree of Blood from scratch both this morning and this afternoon, got the idea for Rhymetime four hours ago and started writing it then, and revised Do Not Pass Go in about an hour. Barely made the deadline (sort of).)

From the 37signals post Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details:

Good advice for anyone who wants to be more efficient: When you’re sweating for hours over a tiny detail, stop and ask yourself, “Is this really worth the amount of time I’m spending on it?” If not, declare “good enough” and move on.

The perfectionist in me initially cried out, “No! You can’t just skim over the details like that!” But he’s right. It’s not a call for mediocrity. It’s a reality check.

I’ve been thinking about this in regard to my playwriting, for example. Say I write a play. I could revise it ad infinitum, and ostensibly it should get better over time, yes. (Though too much tinkering can be a hazard.) But is it worth it to keep revising? Some revision, yes. But there’s a point at which it no longer becomes worth the time I’m putting into it, and then it’s best to move on and write something new. You learn not only from polishing your current bit of work, but also from starting the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

This’ll be quick because it’s late and I’m tired. I’ve been helping out with ushering and the box office/concessions booth for New Play Project’s production of Swallow the Sun. You know, box office is a lot of fun. And I didn’t even expect to like it as much as I do. :)

During the show I man both the box office and concession booth, which basically means two hours of dead time because everyone’s up watching the show. And so I’ve been working on some plays to submit to the next New Play Project festival, “Long Ago and Far Away.” As I’m wont to do, in fact, I’ve gone a bit overboard and have seven plays that I plan to finish and submit by the deadline (June 3). Yeah, I should probably just focus on three or so and make them really good, but almost all of the seven ideas are compelling and I really want to see them come to life. So we’ll see. Time constraints will end up affecting how many actually get written, of course. :)

And finally, I’ve been slowly working on redesigning the New Play Project website using MODx, but I realized tonight that I really ought to just switch over to WordPress. I’ve got far more experience with WordPress, it’s a more popular platform, and it’s focused on blogging which is just what we need. (With MODx I would have had to write my own blogging system. Reinventing the wheel. Pointless.) I need to get approval on switching to WP 2.5, but I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem.

In other news, I’m juggling a handful of small freelance design projects (book covers and brochures and such), reading the first book of the Bartimaeus trilogy (loving it, too), and consistently getting to bed later than I’d like. :)

I haven’t done a very good job of keeping up with this blog lately, have I. :) As it happens, I got a little, um, distracted, but I’m happy to report that the distraction has left as abruptly as it came, and life is now back to normal again.

It isn’t just blogging that I’ve been slacking off on these past two weeks — it’s pretty much everything. So I’ve written next to nothing, hardly even been myself. I’ve got to figure out how to prevent this in the future…

Anyway, today I decided that I need to consolidate my writing projects, because there are too many of them — twelve or so plays, seven or eight novels, a handful of stories that want to be novellas, etc. — and without focusing on one at a time, I’ll never get anywhere. So, I’ve decided to give myself a few blanket categories to work within, and inside each category I’ll only work on one thing at a time. Here are the categories (for now):

1. Short fiction. This’ll be short stories, basically. I thought about taking one of the stories I’ve started and finishing it, but I feel like I want to start afresh — particularly because most of my stories to date have been fantasy of one sort or another, and I’d like to write something realistic. And religious.

2. Long fiction. I’ll try to alternate projects between fantasy and realistic, but that may or may not work. Anyway, the novel I’ll be working on for the time being is Rupert’s Umbrella Adventures. (It’s YA fantasy.)

3. Short play. This is my New Play Project category. :) My first project is to finish revising Alchemy so I can get it out for more feedback and see if I’ve fixed the problems that cropped up in the current draft. Then I’ll start writing a play to submit to the next NPP show, “Long Ago and Far Away.” (I have till June 3, and I want to submit three or four different plays, but so far all of my ideas have been for the other sets this year. Grr.)

4. Long play. I started writing a play tentatively called The Color of Love for Script Frenzy at the beginning of the month, but it pretty much went nowhere. (I have two or three pages of dialogue and that’s it.) The milieu of the play — a BYU student ward — is one I know quite well, and it should be a fun play to write. (And no, it won’t be like Singles Ward. If I’m lucky I might even be able to redeem the genre. :P)

5. Nonfiction. This’ll be my book/essay category. For now, the book I think I want to write is one on how to write a grammar text, particularly for dead languages. In other words, how do you teach a language through a book, without being boring and monotonous? So I’ll be researching pedagogical methods of language instruction, particularly focused on doing it through a book and not through a class or audio or anything else. But I’m free to change the focus if my research shows that my current idea is too restrictive or something. :)

6. Music. The oddball category, I’ll admit. It’s pretty much here purely to get me writing music more often. I’m going to start out by trying to write an arrangement of “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go” for the violin and piano.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure that dividing things up this way will work, but it seems to be the way my brain organizes them, so we’ll see. I’m also going to set goals for these projects, both long-term and weekly, so that I don’t let lots of time slip by without getting anything done.

I reserve the right to change any and all of this. :P

We had our closing performance of the show — Lost and Found — tonight. The house was more full than it had been for any of the other five performances, and the audience was great — very receptive, they laughed a lot, and overall it was just an amazing way to end the show.

And we even had a lot of questions and comments about my play Safe and Sound during the talkback session. :) (Usually there aren’t that many.) And to my surprise, we won third place again! (It had been looking like one of the other plays was pretty solidly in third.) Not to mention that the play I assistant directed, Prodigal Son, won first place. It was a very good night. :)

Anyway, on my walk back home from the theater, I realized that I already miss it. And it had only been five minutes! (Well, plus cleaning up the building afterwards.) The cast and crew are great, the project is great, the audiences are great, and the plays are great. I love New Play Project so much. Seriously. It’s like my new extended family. And I already know that I’m going to be going through withdrawals within a few days. Time to write some more plays… :) (Yeah, I kind of haven’t done much of anything on my Script Frenzy piece.)

Oh, and thanks to all of you who came! I really appreciated it. And to the rest of you, well, there’ll be plenty more to come. :)

Great post on Segullah by Chris Bigelow entitled Mormon Literature: Carving Out a Middle Niche?

Piddling around with Mormon niche markets is okay, as far as it goes (which isn’t far). But for me, the real holy grail of Mormon literature would be for a Mormon author to break through nationally with authentic Mormon content. We need a Mormon Saul Bellow, John Updike, etc. If and when that ever happens, I think that’s what will crack open the Mormon culture for some real literary treatment. I haven’t seen anyone come anywhere near to pulling this off yet, though.

Good post. And in the comments, Angela Hallstrom (who wrote Bound on Earth) said this, which really resonated with me:

I think we just need to write things true, you know? Without an agenda. Without a, “I’m so spiritual, look at me,” OR a, “I’m so edgy and provocative, look at me” undertone ruining the honesty that makes good writing work.

Exactly! Honesty, not self-conscious pretention — in either direction. That’s one of the things I love about New Play Project. I don’t know how it happens so consistently, but the plays we produce really don’t have agendas. They’re not preachy or saccharine, yet they deal with hard issues without going “edgy” and chasing the Spirit away. They’re not afraid to question things, but it’s all within a context of faithfulness, all on a solid gospel foundation. They’re honest. They’re true. They’re awesome. :)

And the more we see of that in all the artistic disciplines, the better. I feel like we’re teetering on the cusp of a full-blown Mormon renaissance. Yes, we’ll always have sappy stuff, and we’ll always have edgy stuff, but now we’re finally starting to see the well-rounded and healthy works in the middle — the middle niche Chris talks about in his post. Ah, it’s a great time to be involved in Mormon arts. :)

We survived opening night! The show is the reason I’ve hardly blogged on here lately, and it’ll probably be that way for the next few days. In the meantime, though, here are some quick thoughts I’ve had on my playwriting.

Thus far, my dialogue tends to be mostly “It’s this way,” “No it isn’t,” “Yes it is,” “No it isn’t.” Which is repetitive and quickly monotonous. I’m not entirely sure why I write that way, but I’m trying to grow out of it. :) (I’m not always like that, of course, but it’s noticeable. Very noticeable.)

My plays also seem to be more focused on the entertainment end of things — getting laughs, mainly — which is good and quite important, but I’m yearning to write something that’s great. Great in the noble, larger than life sense of the word, something that stretches people’s souls. Part of me wonders if the emotional shallowness of my plays is because I haven’t really experienced any of the poles — I’ve never had somebody really close to me die, and I’ve never been soaringly in love. Which isn’t to say that those things are necessary to being a good writer, but I can’t help but feel that there’s something lacking.

Eventually both will happen, of course. And we’ll see if I become a better writer for it. In the meantime, though, I’ll see if there’s a way to fake it. :P

Zooming out a bit, I’m getting completely flooded with ideas for plays now. Almost every day something that happens or something someone says sticks out at me as a good prompt for a play. More than I know what to do with.

But sadly I’ve hardly been writing at all these past couple of weeks. (I blame it on getting ready for Lost and Found, but I’m sure I could have made time to write. It’s just laziness.) And we’re already a third of the way through the month and I haven’t started writing a single word of my Script Frenzy play. ~sigh~ What I need to do, seriously, is just set aside that thirty minutes a day (or even an hour) and write, write, write. No matter what. That’s the only way I’m going to write all these plays I’m dying to write. (Which reminds me, the other reason I’m still very much a beginning playwright is that I’ve hardly read any plays. And so I’m reading Wit right now and have a long list of other plays to read.)

And now it’s bedtime because lack of sleep is the other thing that seems to be hampering me. :)