A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Hundred-Eight

I am, as mentioned, focusing my effort on revising my play.  I need to be done with the current draft for the next session at Theatre Lab on the 11th and did a pass through that took me almost to the end.  I stopped short, as I am at a point where I know that I am going to add a little more and I want to put a bit more thought into it before I go on.

In the current draft I am focusing on changing the age of the character, shifting into a present tense, and also adding the voices of the characters into the speech.  This required me to also do a fair amount of the work that will reshape the plot, as well, since much of that is a result of these things.  I think I've done a good job thus far of creating the frame for that, but I expect that I will want to go back and retexture much of the quoted speech.  I think it will become important to do that, and am especially interested in creating more distinct voices so the actor can really play with that.

I think that I do have a lot more work on this.  For one thing, it may well have expanded in this draft, and might need to shrink down a bit more.  I am not sure of that, really, as I don't recall the exact length of the former draft, but I expect it has at least a bit.  It may, therefore, be swelling to a point where it is going to be too long for the allotted performance time.  That will, of course, mean that I must trim it down.  My goal is to first put it together, though, and then to worry about just how long it can actually be.  It has to be shaped and put together, and then I can prune it back to size once I am sure of what is actually there.

I suspect that I will email Matt about it fairly soon, to share some of my progress and to perhaps ask a few questions.  I feel good about the work that I am getting done so far, but I am a bit worried, still, about making it feel a bit more active and dramatic in a way.  I think that the tense change is doing a lot for that, but I also am wondering what else might be needed to facilitate that.  In some ways, it is a bit difficult for me to think about, but I am learning to see it on stage and not just as a voice that I am conjuring on the page.

At this point, I am not looking at the big picture.  I think that much of the subtext and larger issues here are things that I need to allow to happen on there own.  My goal must be to work towards crafting the moments in the piece, and making it really about other things.  I think that the issue of the father's health and the potential need for Jeffrey to move out of his parent's home is an important thing, and I think it may also need to be shown a bit more earlier.  There is an implication of it, perhaps, already hanging over the play, but I know there are little things that I can do.  The key is that Jeffrey is being protected from this, I think, and so it needs to be done in a very subtle way for the audience. 

I am feeling, overall, excellent about what I've achieved in the current rewrite.  As I said, I expect it is getting too long, but I know that can be trimmed back, and I would rather write too much, and then cut, then have no idea what to add.  The material is growing because it needs more, but once it has what it needs, and I can look back to see just what that is, I believe I'll be able to do significant trimming. 

Anyhow, the trimming is a minor concern, really, as I was actually more concerned about my ability to produce.  Over the past week I have definitely been less productive in my work, and I had been somewhat concerned about that.  Now, however, I do feel that I am back in gear, and I am extremely excited to get back to work tomorrow and see where it goes.  I am sure I'll have much more work to do on the next pass, but I am very happy about the current progress.

It's been a very long day, but I am not going to get into that, except to say that it is long enough that I need to be in bed already...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is this whole blog thing for anyway?

I am starting this because I said I would.  My friend Tim persuaded me, and that was probably a far more difficult and complicated maneuver on his part, that I should start this blog, and I made a commitment that I would, so here I am.  Which gives a reason for why this blog exists, but not really much of a purpose for that to lend meaning to that existence, which makes it like a lot of us, I suppose.  Of course, there are two purposes to this exercise, though there might only be one at a time, as they are largely about perspective, I think.  For instance, right now, a large part of the purpose, for me, is to have the commitment of adding to this blog consistently, as a matter of building the habit of working more steadily.  I have built that habit before, but it has always been intermittent, largely driven by situational demands.  In college, many years ago, I wrote daily, because I had an audience and because I was in classes that I felt committed to wr...
Read more

Part Three Is Coming

I want to apologize for the lateness of my post today.  Last night, I was out of town and only arrived home this afternoon.  It being a quick trip,. I decided not to bring a computer and to do my work when I arrived home, so I will be reading the next chapter and writing today's post shortly. While I am on here, though, I wanted to return, momentarily to questions I raised earlier.  One issue that I hadn't mentioned, although it is something that I have wrestled with previously, concerning the personal, is that I am not entirely comfortable speaking about third parties that I personally know in the context of written work.  This is largely because those people are not present as I am communicating, and they have not given any actual permission for me to discuss them.  That having  been said, I do feel a bit of leeway about telling things of myself.  For example. I feel very strange about yesterday, as it was Friday the 13th and I had a number of un...
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Day Thirty-Seven

I spent much of today attempting to write, but I did not get all that far.  I've continued work on the Bimble story, but the new story is proving difficult.  It was not entirely a wasted day, though, as I came up with a number of new ideas that I think will make for good stories in the near future.  It may be that I will work on one of those right now.  I also have a fair bit of development in terms of one particular character that will figure somehow in all of this.  Most of what I've been thinking about does interconnect and revolves around Florida, and I like having a sort of center around which to wind the ideas. The second workshop in the course at FAU was this evening, and it seemed fine.  We didn't have any actual workshop to do this week, but I handed in the first chapter of my novel.  Honestly, that only occurred because I didn't get the writing done that I had originally planned, but it's probably for the best anyhow.  I think it might...
Read more