Logging words

I’ve been intending to start writing my next play for a few weeks, now.  But the siren call of the TV or dirty dishes keeps luring me away.  I have a deadline to produce a first draft in about a month, so I really have to get moving on it!  I also have to submit a ten minute play (that I have to write, as well) in about two weeks.  Mama mia!

I’ve been telling myself that I need to commit to two pages a day.  With a daily goal of two pages and the likelihood of writing more than that on a few occasions, it shouldn’t be too hard to meet my deadlines.  However, with each day missed, that goal seems less and less attainable. 

Yesterday, my wife told me about a weight loss website a coworker showed her: myfitnesspal.com.  I had seen it before, but I decided to sign up because there’s only two months left in the year and I still have 13lbs to lose if I want to meet my New Year’s resolution.  Remember yours...?

Anyway, it’s a free website (so far) that allows you to log what you eat and how much you exercise.  I remember reading somewhere that the fact of recording your activities is more effective to weight loss than any diet.  It’s about awareness.  A lot of calories are consumed through mindless snacking.  You’re watching TV or bored or whatever. 

Myfitnesspal.com also encourages you to get some family or friends involved.  For example, as I bit into a homemade brownie last night, my wife asked: are you going to log that brownie?  Of course, I was. Damn.  Busted.   Later in the night, after my wife had gone to bed, I saw the pan of brownies.    The thought of biting into that gooey chocolate goodness, started me salivating.  But then I thought, “I’d have to log that.  Am I really that hungry?”  The answer was no, so I didn’t eat the brownie.

Anyway, it’s time to do the same with my writing.  Again.   I need to log my output.  Instead of having a page count, I think I’m going to go for a word count.   I want to have a daily minimum of 500 words.  250 of those words need to be playwriting related, but blog writing and journal writing will be included as part of my daily total.  I am expecting to exceed those goals but I want to keep the minimums attainable and not too scary.  500 words a day translates into 3500 words a week. 

I can do this.  This blog is approximately 450 words, so now I only have to write 250 words of script and I will have met today’s goal.  Let the writing begin!

Naming Names

They say you should write about what you know.  And what are you more knowledgeable about than the events that you have experienced?   Alas, you tread dangerous ground writing about things that friends and acquaintances may recognize. 

After one of my performances of my play Cast Away, someone came up to me and asked, “Which character was X?”  X being the real name of one of the people who were involved in the experience that inspired me to write the play.   The problem is that no character was X.  There was a character inspired by X, but the character was also modified to make the play more dramatic.   

Much of what I wrote in the play simply didn’t happen in real life.  Conversely, a lot of it did.  So where did the boundaries of fact and fiction lie?  For the regular audience member, I don’t think it matters.  I was trying to tell a story about persevering against the odds, so obviously I increased the odds against the protagonist.  Drama = conflict.

Y, another person involved in the original experience, came up to me and said such and such didn’t happen.  You’re correct.   I made it up.  My play isn’t about what happened.  It was inspired by what happened and in the process, it became something new. 

“But people are going to think I did it,” Y continued.  They are?  The regular audience member doesn’t know who you are or that you were involved in the experience that served as the inspiration for the play.  They’re not going to make that connection.  And the people that do know you, know you wouldn’t do that.  It’s pretty obvious to me (again) that the character and the real person are very different people.  In fact someone else came up to me and asked who that character was based on because they know that Y didn’t do that.  You’re correct.  I made it up.  

Now Z, another person involved in the original experience, has contacted me.  They heard that I portrayed them in a negative light.  The character isn’t Z!  I feel especially bad about this because I like Z and I wouldn’t want them to think that I was dissing them.  I guess this particular example gets a bit grey because I did take an experience that happened between me and Z and attribute it to another character and I changed what actually happened in real life.  But this wasn’t to make anyone look bad, it was to service the story.

Should I be worrying more about how the story will make some people feel or try to make the story as effective as it can be?  Ultimately, only a few people were directly involved in the experience that served as the inspiration and I’m hoping that many more people will see the play.   Should I be concerned about the needs of the few?

I just can’t justify it to myself.  Once I started writing the play, it became its own entity even though it was inspired by actual events.  I remember writing a short story once about a mother who becomes possessed and when my father read it, he said, “But your mother is so gentle.”  It wasn’t about my mother! 

People are always going to look for patterns or people in your characters.  And some people will find what they are looking for regardless of whether you put it in there or not.  Ultimately, you are telling a story and that should be your first priority.

Finding out who your inspiration was is like finding out how to do a magic trick.  There are always going to be people who want to know “how you did it”.  Most people are content to enjoy the show.  Just make sure that you put on a good show! 

How do bloggers blog?

I started this blog with the best of intentions to chronicle my journey as a playwright.  But the darn thing is that I'm a lazy bugger and I sometimes find it challenging enough just to get in my quota for writing, let alone writing about my writing! 

Even when I just kept a journal, I found it difficult to make the time to write about things when I was in the midst of them.  If you go through my journals -- and I don't recommend it, they're filled with lots of "man, I should really write more" -- you will notice that I rarely have written about stuff when it is happening.  It's usually just afterwards or weeks later.

I had intended to write about my experience preparing for my show Cast Away.  Well, I opened it two days ago.  Checking back, I only wrote six blogs about it and four of them were before I really got started.  You know, I think if I had kept up the blogs, I might have gotten the script done sooner.  Which would have allowed me more time to tinker with it and given me more time to learn the lines.  But I won't go there.  In this post, anyway.  ;-)

Fall down seven times, get up eight times.  So, this is me dusting myself off and getting up.  I will try to be better writing blogs.  It was reading Nancy Kenny's blog that inspired me get back on the blog-wagon.  I recommend checking out Nancy's blog.  People only see our projects up on stage and it's helpful to see what it takes to get them to that place.  And what do we do when we're between projects.

Blog on!

Be Careful What You Wish For

I just finished writing my sixth play.  Yay!  But I was troubled by a previous wish.

I have been wanting to write a full length play since the beginning.  Unfortunately, my plays only seem to want to be one act plays.  50 minutes or less.  It's not a bad length for a Fringe show, but if you want to get your work looked at by a big theatre, they want a full length play.

My current play, Cast Away, tried to fulfill my wish.  When I didn't want it to.  I had submitted a proposal for The Pearl Company Canadian Theatre Festival and it got accepted.  Uh-oh.  How long was my play?  Uh... 50 minutes?  Like most of my other plays...

Well, when I started writing it, the play didn't want to be 50 minutes.  It wanted to be twice as long as that!  But I had already confirmed that it WAS 50 minutes!!  D-oh!

I finished the first draft and then I had to cut.  Mercilessly.  I cut and cut and it was still longer than 50 minutes.  I cut my darlings.  I slashed anything that could be taken out without being missed.  When I couldn't look at it any more, I sent it to my friend and he suggested more cuts.  And it refuses to shrink.  :-( 

It's a one man show, so I'm rehearsing it now and whittling a sentence here or a line there.  But I keep thinking to myself.  Next time I'll write it first before submitting the idea.  Or be careful for what I wish for...

Do One Person Shows Suck?

I was going to write this post a month ago, but procrastination got the better of me.  I'm glad it did because the Hamilton Fringe Festival happened and I got to see quite a few one person shows.  It gave me empirical evidence for the conclusion I had already reached.

I'm working on my one person show called Cast Away and I was angsting about one person shows in general.  Are they effective, I wondered?  And then Brad Fraser, a playwright I respect and admire, posted this on Facebook:

Honestly, the majority of one person shows (and there are excellent exceptions) are like being masturbated on by someone you're not particularly attracted to.

It was followed by many people concurring.  Not exactly the inspiration I was looking for.  :-(

I think I know where Brad is coming from (but without the graphic metaphor).  Drama is about conflict and it's hard to have conflict when there's only one person on stage.  Even when there's two people onstage, sometimes.  Put three or more people on a stage and someone's going to cause problems.  Someone's going to gang up on someone else.

A one person show is basically one honking long monologue.  Some people hate monologues.  They see them as boring, static or even self-indulgent.  But others love monologues.  They can be honest, intimate and revealing.

Judith Thompson, another playwright I admire, likes to start from monologues to discover her characters.  Ironically, I took workshops with both Brad and Judith in the same 12 month period.  Judith had us starting from the monologue and Brad wanted us writing scenes right away.  You say potato...

We listen to comedians do their monologues and make us laugh.  It's essentially a one person show.  Usually in smaller doses than a theatrical show, but the concept is the same.

And really there are a couple of forms of the one person show: lecture and dramatic.  The lecture show is basically a performer telling the audience about something that happened to them.  At the Hamilton Fringe there were a few shows that fell into this category: An Inconvenient Truthiness, A Different Woman: A True Story of a Texas Child, Bookworm, and Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter.  All of these shows were interesting and compelling in their own right, but I could see how they might not appeal to a hard core Theatre Person.

However, there were some dramatic one person shows such as Roller Derby Saved My Soul and When Harry Met Harry.  In each show, a single actor played a main character and some secondary characters, as well.  Both of these shows were dramatic and funny.  And I can honestly say that they were more entertaining and polished than some multiple performer plays that I saw.  And they were some of the best shows at this year's Fringe.  Both of these shows have done well in other Fringes as well, so it's not just a small audience that is appreciating them.

In the end, it probably boils down to a matter of taste, but I wouldn't dismiss one person shows outright.  For one thing, they are cheaper to do than multiple actor shows.  And in the hands of a talented performer, they can be absolutely mesmerizing.  I feel a little better about one person shows myself, having seen so many wonderful shows at the Fringe. 

Now, we'll just have to see how my one person show fares...

Taking the good with the bad

Yesterday was a good writing day.  Today, not so good.  I didn’t get any writing done in the early part of the day and it’s likely that I’m not going to meet today’s target.  Okay, scratch that.  It’s inevitable that I’m not going to meet today’s target.  Avoiding the self-flagellation, I can examine this and see that I really need to get some writing done in the morning or at the very latest during lunch.  I have to commit to getting part of it done on the way to work.  Otherwise, there’s too much pressure to do it after dinner and there may be other commitments to fulfill.

I officially commit to writing a little bit in the morning.  Just “starting” to write is enough to get me going and getting a page in. 

My challenge is that I tend to procrastinate and then binge write to get the play finished.  But, I’m going to be performing this, so I’d like the script to be as good as I can get it.  So, I have to focus.

I’m reading The Success Principles by Jack Canfield.  (Have I mentioned that I’m a self-help junkie?)   Anyway, it’s reminding me that I should probably be visualizing the process – not only of writing, but of performing this piece.  I find that when I am completely focused on a project, I see more things in my life that can be incorporated into it.  I come across stories, anecdotes or images that can be pulled into the piece that I’m working on.

One of the good things about yesterday’s writing session is that I had gotten a little stymied writing the play chronologically.  So, I just jumped ahead to a scene I had worked on before and wrote from there.   Although the piece takes place chronologically, there’s no reason why I need to write it that way.  At this point, it’s really important to get the writing in, so jumping around is fine, as long as it keeps me productive.

Of course, maybe the play doesn’t need to be chronological… 

That’s when a program like Scrivener is good because you can outline different scenes and maybe type up some ideas and move back and forth a lot easier than when writing in Final Draft.   But that’s just me.  I find Scrivener is the closest computer application that lets me think similarly to how I think when I’m writing in long hand.  I can easily jump to a different part of the page to write an unrelated note or tangent. 

I’m hearing a nagging voice that this idea may suck.  But I’m committed to it, now.  If it does suck, then hopefully I can learn something from it.  I’m feeling like I should read a one person play.  As mentioned, I saw a couple of them this year, but maybe seeing one written out would inspire me.  Or maybe I should just shut up and write.   I do have a tendency to want to read instead of writing.

And before I discourage myself, I have to remember that I thought it was a good idea to start.  Until I finish a draft, I don’t really know what I have.  And if the draft sucks, then I will at least have an idea of what doesn’t work and it will help inform my rewrite.  It’s all good.

Another reason to stop second guessing myself is that I really don’t have a lot of time to worry about it.  It will be what it will be.  And I will learn from that and hopefully grow from it.  I’m going to be pretty busy in mid-July because my other play, Minced is going to be in the Hamilton Fringe Festival.  And there’ll be other shows to see and people to visit with and audience reactions to gauge.

Maybe I should just giving up sleeping for the next couple of months.

Keeping focused

What the heck am I doing?  I let two days go by without doing my quota.  No pages on Friday or Sunday!  The month is going to be over before I’ve even gotten halfway through the first draft.

It’s hard when you keep looking at the big picture.  When you keep looking at how far you have to go.  To be honest, my daily output to get there is pretty ambitious, anyway.  Four pages a day.  It’s completely within my  ability to write that much, but it’s currently beyond my routine.

I feel like Sisyphus, looking at that damn rock that he has to push up the hill.  Forget the fact that it is going to roll back down, just as I reach the summit; it will be a hell of a lot of work just getting it up there.  But the struggle is part of the journey.  It’s part of how you get better as a writer.  It’s like a training run for a marathon runner or playing scales for a musician.  It must be done.

The temptation is to try and play catch up.  I missed writing eight pages, so I’ll write twelve pages today, instead of just four pages.  Or I’ll write five pages for the next eight days, instead of writing four.  But I will stick to the schedule and only focus on getting four pages done today.   Today is all that matters.  Let me be successful today.  I’ll worry about tomorrow’s pages, tomorrow.

As Samuel Bekett said, “Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

Time to start writing.