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. :)

I redesigned Top of the Mountains yesterday. Here’s what it used to look like:

And here’s what it looks like now:

It’s a cleaner design, more in line with my current aesthetic sensibilities, and done pretty much completely from scratch. (I did use 960.gs for the grid, though. I love 960.gs :))

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

I’ve started using Google Docs in earnest again. Before, I hadn’t really used the folders at all, and I’d left everything on the “inbox” page, which made it rather cluttered. But today I organized my folders and put everything in its proper place, then cleaned up the inbox page (dashboard? I don’t know what it’s called) so only the stuff I’m working on shows up. And it feels good. I’m going to start using Google Docs more in my writing process, storing everything there.

One of the things that’s kept me from using Google Docs for my writing, though, is that the default document look — über-wide (well, fitting your browser width) and no white space around the edges — doesn’t jive well with me. It’s tolerable, but not conducive to work.

Luckily I can change it: by clicking on Edit->Edit HTML, I can add a <div> wrapper that looks like this:


<div style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto; padding: 15px 30px; border-left: solid 1px #eee; border-right: solid 1px #eee; font-family: Arial">
blah blah blah
</div>


(”width” sets the width, obviously; “margin: 0px auto” centers the whole document on the screen; “padding: 15px 30px” gives it some breathing room; the borders act as the edges of the document; and I prefer Arial to Verdana for editing text.)

Anyway, the whole experience feels good (especially with the new Google Docs look for documents), enough of an improvement that I’m actually motivated to use it. Already I can tell that it’s going to become a mainstay of my life as a writer. This is good.

Now if only I could make my <div> hack the default… (And I want styles, so playwriting will be easier. Without styles it’s a heck of a lot of formatting.)

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. :)

I went to a Coptic bookbinding workshop yesterday (a pre-conference part of the A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference, which was today) and made my first book binding:

(You can see more photos on Flickr, by the way.)

So, it’s actually an Ethiopic binding, to be particular, but the generic term is Coptic binding. I’ll admit that it’s not my favorite type — I much prefer books with a spine board, especially leatherbound — but spending a day making one has definitely endeared it to me more than I expected. (The advantage of Coptic binding is that you can lie the book flat open quite easily. With pretty much any other binding, that’s a lot harder to do.)

The whole experience was fun. Very soothing and relaxing — working with one’s hands is wonderful — and it’s delicious seeing the final product. Not to mention that the time completely flew by. Flow state all day. It was great. :)

Most bookbinding classes and workshops use blank text blocks (as you can see in the pictures), which is great for journals (and I’ll use this one as a writing journal, I think), but what I really can’t wait to do is start designing and printing books and then binding those. Mmm.

Today I went to a class on English Bibles and a class on editions of the Book of Mormon (in which my reader’s edition was showcased, I should say :)), and now I’m itching at the bit to publish a pocket-size reader’s edition of the Doctrine & Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. I just need to find a public domain edition of the text… (The texts aren’t on Project Gutenberg.)