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. :)

Great post by Robert Starling (via Gideon Burton) on Mormon Renaissance yesterday, called High Expectations for Mormon Filmmakers. This part was particularly inspiring:

In a “behind the scenes” portion Dr. Woodbury was recorded saying something that has guided my creative life. He had gathered his cast and crew who were bone-tired from endless rehearsals and he was exhorting them to dig down into whatever reserves they had and give their very best. He said, “My brothers and sisters, we are in the very last of the Last Days. The time is too short to waste our talents in producing “small” plays and giving “small” efforts (and producing “small” movies?). Everything we do must be something that has eternal significance if it is to have any real value.”

And the Capra story has just crawled into a secure place in my heart. Sure, I don’t think that creating fluff is necessarily a sin (though at the same time I can see how it might be), but “the talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your own. God gave you those talents; they are His gifts to you, to use for His purpose.” Beautiful.

Script Frenzy has begun. One hundred pages in thirty days. Here we go. :)

You know, I actually completely forgot about it until this morning, when I realized it was April 1 and thus the beginning of the frenzied scriptwriting. I almost decided not to do it, because I’ve got a few other writing projects going on. But I seem to be able to write around five pages of script per hour, which means I shouldn’t have any problem pumping out a hundred pages by the end of the month — in theory it would only take ten days at two hours a day. Piece of cake. In theory. :)

An hour ago I sat myself down to come up with an idea for it, and I think it’s going to revolve around a BYU student ward, particularly two apartments (four guys and four girls, with one central character from each). I’ve drafted out the basic plot arc, but I need to do a lot more plotting and character development before I start writing. No title yet.

This’ll be my first full-length play, though. Part of me wonders if I can do it. Luckily the other part of me is doing a very good job at silencing the first part. Heck, I’d never written a novel before November, but I did it. And I do have playwriting experience. It’ll be a fun adventure. (I’ve wanted to start writing longer plays anyway. I’ll keep writing short ones, of course, but I don’t want to limit myself to that.)

So now I’m working on this play, my Encyclopedia play, and those seven plays in seven days that I haven’t started yet. And a few stories and my War in Heaven novel. It’s good to keep busy. :P

In commenting on David Hulet’s post on the recent BYU writing salon, I realized the topic was something I wanted to write about some more.

How do I write? Spurts (squeezed out by deadlines) have been most common for me, but I agree with David that a regular, set time each day is far more productive. And prolific. Sure, it’s hard, but once you get started it does get easier (the power of momentum). And geysers doth not a writer make. :)

On a smaller scale, whether I outline, freewrite, or just start typing (or all three) really varies from piece to piece. Usually I freewrite to snag the idea, then write down the flanking idealets that trail it down, and for the rest of the piece I alternate between outlining and writing, switching whenever I get stuck.

Case in point: for the play I’m currently working on, Encyclopedia, I got the core idea a couple weeks ago while reading in Mosiah. Just a seed, really. Then this afternoon I sat down with the intention of writing out a scene, to get some raw material out there that I could begin to work with, and also to see if I would get any direction on the plot (since at that point all I had was a single concept). As I wrote the first three sentences of the initial scene description, though, a flood of ideas came crashing in, and a page of notes later — to my surprise — I had the complete skeletal outline for the play. All before writing a single word of dialogue.

But I still don’t know why one of the characters is getting himself involved in the play’s events, or what he’s trying to accomplish. I’ve thought about it and yet nothing’s coming. So the next step will be writing out that first scene and bringing him on stage to see what he says, because it’s often in that first draft that I’ll find some glimmer of a motive that I can then dig out.

I do find that the more I know in advance — who my characters are, what makes them tick, the plot arc, etc. — the easier the play is. And yet there’s something to be said for just sitting down and writing, too, cutting out a slab of clay and throwing it on the table to see what’s inside it. I like going back and forth between the two — outlining and writing — so I get a nice mixture of structure and organic, solid and liquid, order and chaos. :)

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.

Here I am writing plays, but do I actually read any? I realized today that if I don’t see what else is out there — and see it in script form, not just on stage — then I’m going to get into a rut where I’m effectively writing the same play over and over again. I can already sort of feel it happening, in fact. My four plays so far have widely different subject matter, but — to me, at least — they feel uncannily similar.

It’s not just playwriting, of course; in any creative area, you have to provide grist for the mill. Life gives you plenty of ideas for the content, but to study the craft, you really have to look at what else is out there. This morning I was reading Patrick Kavanaugh’s book Spiritual Lives of Great Composers and came across this quote about J.S. Bach:

Bach’s brother owned a set of compositions, which he forbade the younger Bach to use. Perhaps because it was placed off-limits, that musical manuscript grew irresistibly attractive to the young musician.

And so for weeks, Bach stole the precious pages and hid them in his room, where he stayed up late night after night copying the musical scores by moonlight. When his brother discovered the copied pages, he angrily confiscated them. But Bach had already gleaned valuable lessons in composition, as well as discipline and devotion to music, from the clandestine exercise.

I bought a book of staff paper today and checked out some Beethoven and Mozart pieces so I can start copying scores. :) You see, it’s been so long since I’ve done any composition that I feel like I’ve almost completely lost touch with that world. I’ve been forgetting the language of music notation. And the structure and theory behind music? Merely a memory.

I’m not saying all that is necessary to write music. It’s not. But for me, without it I feel like I’m churning out the same thing over and over again, never growing or expanding, never deepening beyond the shallow waters in which I start. To get past that, I need to study the works of the great musicians. (That’s more important, in my opinion, than studying the theory. But I happen to be rather fond of music theory, too. :))

And I need to start reading plays. And poetry, if I ever want to break out of the mold I’ve been in for years. (I rarely read poetry, so it’s no surprise that my own poems sound like carbon copies. In fact, I think they’re almost all in one of two or three different meters. It’s sad.) Particularly poetry that isn’t like the poetry I write. And the more plays I read, the more my understanding of the guts of theatre will expand, and I’ll produce better work. It’s exciting. :)

(One of these days I do intend to start painting again, by the way…)

Earlier today Katherine posted “Toward a Mormon Renaissance” over at Mormon Renaissance (how fitting :)). It’s an essay by James Goldberg, one he read at the beginning of New Play Project’s “Thorns and Thistles” set of plays (which happened to be when my first play was performed, incidentally) (and I’m not just blogging about it because he mentions me in the essay, either :P). The essay — and the idea behind it — gives me goosebumps:

What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s time for us to help change the world again. Look, I know it sounds arrogant to say that. I’m 24 years old, and the only times I can focus on theatre full-time are when I’ve saved up enough money to quit my day job for a few months. I mean, I don’t even have insurance — who am I to change the world? Who’s Katherine Gee or Ben Crowder? Who are any of the actors you’re going to see tonight? You know, most of them aren’t even trained actors. They’re just nice people who wanted to help us put on these plays.

Who are we? Well, we’re Latter-day Saints. We’re people who have wrestled with some of life’s big and little issues and have been lucky enough to have help. We’re people who think and act a little differently than most of the country does. We’re people who know a little about God and a little about life. And we’re people who believe that’s enough to say something big.

Are we going to make a difference? I hope so. And I take hope in history.

Beautiful. And let me just say again that I love New Play Project. It has the right feel to it (”right” being my own very subjective perspective, of course :)), and it’s just a really wonderful, beautiful, awesome thing. And it is changing the world. It’s not often that I find causes I really feel I can commit to and throw my lot in with full heart and soul, but New Play Project is one. I’m in it for the long haul. (Hopefully I’ll keep getting better as a playwright so that my plays keep getting accepted. ;) I’ve already got ideas for a couple more plays I’ll be submitting to the remaining festivals this year, actually, and tonight I started outlining one of them.)

I’ll wait a few more days before I give another update on rehearsals for Safe and Sound and Prodigal Son, by the way. (And purely for the historical record, with respect to that quote from James’ essay, Katherine Gee acted in my first play, and she and I are now directing Prodigal Son. Which James wrote. :) There’s connections all over the place, folks.)

Anyway, New Play Project has definitely found a warm spot in my heart, and I really feel that it’s a movement that is going to make a difference and change the world. And it’s unmistakably part of the Mormon renaissance.

Yesterday we held the first rehearsal for Prodigal Son (James Goldberg’s play that I’m assistant directing), and tonight’s the first Safe and Sound rehearsal. As a playwright, my role in rehearsals really is up to the director; some don’t care if I’m involved (with Snowstorm, for example, I didn’t go to a single rehearsal), others want close involvement. It is nice to be on hand to rewrite things if necessary, or to provide vision and explanation. (Though one would hope, of course, that all that would already be clear in the script. :))

Anyway, Prodigal Son is going to run about 45 minutes long — by far the longest play in the set — and so we’re rehearsing Monday through Friday for the next few weeks. It’s intense (not to mention that the actors need to be off-book by next Wednesday), and I still really have no idea what I’m doing as far as the directing goes, but I’m diving in headfirst and we’ll see how it turns out. :)

Over the past few days I’ve been revising Safe and Sound, trying to gut out the flaws and replace them with new, living flesh. With every rewrite, though, it’s hard to tell if I’m actually making things any better. Sometimes I can tell that I am, but sometimes I have no idea, and I have to wait long enough for it to cool down so I can step back and look at it somewhat objectively. Or I get a third party to look at it. (Second party? I don’t know. :P)

Anyway, it’s been interesting to see how the play’s evolved so far. Originally it was about two guys, Dave and Martin. Dave’s dad had died. In the second draft, it was Martin’s dad who’d died. Then we had auditions, and not enough guys showed up, so we ended up casting a girl as Martin. That of course meant rewriting the script so it would work with a girl in that role. On Thursday we had a full company meeting and read through all the scripts, which was the first time I’d heard the new rewrite read aloud. I’d written the new draft pretty hastily, and the ending was fairly pathetic, so earlier today I rewrote the script once again, completely redoing the beginning and ending, and touching up the middle section as well. And now I’ve learned something new about Dave’s dad (I needed a reason Dave was close to Abbie’s dad — Abbie is Martin’s name now, though it was Gwendolyn in the last draft and it could very easily change in the next draft :)).

Writing really is a discovery process for me. I feel like I’m unearthing pre-existing characters and situations, not inventing them. It sounds weird, but that’s really how it is. And it’s awesome. :)

I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, and it’s chock-full of nuggets that inspire me to take up my pen and write, write, write. (The other part I love is that she’s unabashed about her Christianity and its influence on her writing.)

Here’s one bit I loved:

If you are an artist, regardless of your religion, everything you do is your witness. You cannot hide what you are. Emerson said, “What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.”

And another:

The writer cannot write just when he feels like it or he won’t have anything to write with. Like the violin, he has to be constantly tuned and practiced on. This can sometimes be very hard on husband or family, but it’s absolutely essential. My family has with the utmost forbearance and patience put up with innumerable saucepans, the bottoms of which are permanently speckled from burned vegetables. Last year it was peas, and this year I seem to have switched to string beans. I not only burn dinner when I dash to the typewriter to set down just one more sentence, I’m also given to excitement and enthusiasm far beyond the dignity of my position of somebody who’s past the half-century mark.

Yesterday I wrote more of The Widow and the Wizard story (and learned to my surprise who the witch really was — not at all what I’d been thinking all along), and right now I’m revising my play Safe and Sound (auditions are today and tomorrow).