Despite what I said about there not being that much general interest in watching writers write, from a professional or semi-professional perspective I was interested in how people went about the task of writing. When we showed up we picked three words out of the dictionary. Mine were: muster, epilepsy and dentine. Then at 6 sharp, the organizer was texted the theme for the festival. As best as I can remember it was: everything changes in a single moment, or does it. And the secondary set of key works was: maturity, openness and something I am blanking on. It wasn't transformation, but maybe along those lines. (Edit: it was recovery.)
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| Words, words, words |
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| The theme for the festival |
Now in addition to simply seeing if I could write a play in one day, I did have an ulterior motive and that is that one or more of the plays written during the festival will be staged at Red Sandcastle. I really wanted to see if either of the plays I had started (The Study Group or Straying South) might fit with the theme, and I could use them as a good starting point for the writing and maybe have a shot at getting one of them staged. But frankly, I didn't think either of them fit particularly well. The play based loosely on King Lear does have more of this transformative aspect to it, but it is a darker play, and this seemed to be calling for something more upbeat and positive. I'm sure they wouldn't reject a play with an unhappy ending -- this is mostly about kick-starting the creative juices -- but I decided I would start completely from scratch.
I'll get to my own process in a minute, but I was interested to see how these various writers started on the task. (There were 13 of us, including me.) Several had the specialized writing software that puts the dialogue and stage directions in the proper format. That looks pretty handy, though maybe a bit more software than I really need. I think most people were just writing in word. The guy next to me had an upgraded writing software that actually allowed him to put notes in various places and rearrange chunks of text to fit into an outline. I can see if one was a professional writer tackling books and so forth, this could be really handy. Nonetheless, I am a bit more old-school, preferring to write straight through and not make too many revisions on the first pass, just trusting the characters to start interactions and see how the story develops. That doesn't mean in some cases I don't have clear plot points I want to hit, but I have some flexibility in how I get there. Corporate Codes of Conduct was completely open when I started it, and I thought it might even be about aliens when I first started out, though it morphed into a relatively conventional office romance story, though with some slightly strange elements (the cryptography).*
There was one younger woman who wrote out notes to herself and tore them out of her notebook and kept rearranging the pieces. Finally, there was another woman who pondered the theme and then reached for her Tarot cards to help decide what the plot meant. I thought I heard her rolling dice or throwing runes as well, but I didn't actually see that. I know that the festival organizer tore up (metaphorically) everything she had written in the first 2 hours and then went off in a totally different direction.
For myself, I basically start with a core idea and then try to gin up some dialogue around it, and then see where things are going. I try to just barrel through, relying on dialogue and not worrying overly much if the characters sound like distinct characters or just variants of my own voice. There doesn't seem to be too much point in being precious about the writing in the early stages. I have to admit that of the three or so major issues I wanted to work through in my writing, I have basically done so. After some thought, I decided that maybe I should address in an oblique way the household tensions that came up when I moved the family to Vancouver. I added a bit to what might have been the biggest trauma had the family actually split up (maybe even surprising myself).
As far as the form, I have had PKD (Philip K. Dick) on my mind recently, and I originally thought that the theme might call for a Sliding Doors kind of approach where things go one way in Act I and a different way in Act II. I moved away from that, though it is still alluded to a bit. Then I decided nested stories might be kind of interesting, drawing a bit on David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or perhaps John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. The final story is told while two characters are in bed, a la Scheherazade/Shahrazad from 1001 Nights.** Then I thought I would need something to make it a bit more interesting, so occasionally you have the scene freeze and voices from the higher level story intrude, then the story picks up again. (Actors and directors tend to love this sort of thing; audiences perhaps less so.) This may have been somewhat influenced by the Chris Nolan's Inception.
So I got to the core story and found myself writing a somewhat stereotypical tear-jerker about a poor girl (probably in Greece though this is not completely spelled out) who more or less becomes the chattel of the wealthier and much older neighbour. But it has some physical action (most of my plays are just talk, talk, talk) and it doesn't last that long. Then I slowly close down the story layers.
I thought the thing might go in a completely different direction, sort of a third act, to bring it to 45 pages, but I was getting kind of sick of the whole thing. I had written the first 20 pages from 6 to midnight, which I thought was not a bad pace at all, but deciding exactly how to wrap it up -- and not be too sentimental or too cynical -- was tougher. I squeezed out the last 10 pages (or really 9.5) from midnight to 3:30 am, which is actually not too bad. One person finished much sooner, 12:30 or 1, and I will be quite interested to see how long a piece she wrote. At 3:30 everyone else was either working away, or far more common were sleeping in the basement. Given that I knew this wasn't going to be a 2 Act epic, I figured it was just better to wrap it up and go home.
One factor in this decision was that the food provided was less than ideal. The pasta had ham in it, and basically the only other thing to eat were these loaves of bread, though someone went out and brought back some cheese. Apparently, the original idea behind the festival was to keep everyone completely locked in, but this never happened. That was good for me, as I wandered over to the Shoppers and got some diet Coke and a yogurt parfait, along with some other snacks to see me through until morning. A few of the writers went off for smoke breaks periodically. I took a short walk to clear my head a bit at 10 (and almost bought ice cream next door at the parlor that was just closing) and then a bit after midnight, as I was struggling with closure. As it became apparent that I was not going to need anything like 24 hours (or even 12 hours), I grabbed some cash from the local ATM.
I had to do this because, even though most streetcars run 24 hours, the subway does not, and more critically buses that feed the subway (like the 72) don't run either at 3 in the morning. I faced this at the end of Nuit Blanche last year when the subway was indeed running, but not the buses, and I had to cab it home. This year, assuming I go again, I probably can just walk home from the subway assuming it is not raining. So I cabbed it home. I kind of stumbled into the house and picked up the paper, then crashed pretty hard. In the morning, I called the newspaper asking where my Sunday paper was! I suspect they thought I was dealing with a hang-over.
One of my goals all along had been to finish up in time to get back to TIFF at 5:30 today to see La Dolce Vita. Then it became apparent that I had several more hours than that (a kind of bonus time I guess), though I've tried to take it pretty easy. I sat outside for a while and read part of the paper and finished up Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which is quite good, even though I like Street of Crocodiles a bit more. I'll be writing about Schulz shortly. This deck should be quite the refuge this fall (I didn't even realize that there was a flowering bush there), and tomorrow I will probably have the time to put up the patio table, which we bought last year and never used once!
I was hoping to get started on putting up the new ceiling fan today, but actually I am still still just a bit woozy, so I think I'll put that off for another day. I think I'll head out fairly soon (after taking a nice long shower!), stop off at the library and then work just before I settle in for this long, long movie.
Tomorrow, I have to be back at Red Sandcastle for the reading of the scripts. If anyone is interested, they are welcome to drop by. This will be at 8 pm, so I have almost the entire day. In the morning I should get some groceries, since the stores will be shut on Monday. Most likely I will tape up and paint the bathroom in the late morning. It's pretty small, so I should be done by early afternoon, and then I may tackle the ceiling fan or leave that until Monday. Now there may be a few scripts left to go through Monday afternoon, though I may bail. It partly depends on whether Sing-for-Your-Supper takes place or not and whether my Shakespeare spoof was accepted. But anyway, I should have a bit of time left over to take care of some house things, straightening up and maybe catching up a bit more on work. I kind of want to put that out of my mind for a day or two, since I have been pushing very, very hard at work, and I do need a break. (Edit: Mine was the last read on Sunday night, and I thought it went over pretty well. But I'll try to still make it Monday from 2-5 or so (assuming I can paint at least a little bit tomorrow and perhaps run a couple of model runs) and then maybe run up to Sing-for-your-Supper with Burke. I still haven't heard if the Hamlet in Wittenberg piece was accepted.)
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| The scripts! |
I have to admit, I don't have enough distance on this new piece to even tell if I want to see it staged in the future, in part because it is too short to stand alone. But if the consensus is positive, I might suggest pairing it with this piece I wrote many years ago and then polished up for a stage reading just before we left Chicago. It also has twinned moments where everything changes and similarly it ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. Anyway, no point in getting ahead of myself, though I will go ahead and link to the older piece here. I thought this was a useful exercise, though more than anything it just points out that I need to carve out space from work and working on the house and even from blogging, and then I should be able to crank out these final plays. Then I can have a marathon editing session and decide if it is worth getting them staged. So watch this space over the next year or so.
* As a total side note, I am starting to agree with Adam that original dynamic worked well in the first act and it was a bit of a shame to break it up in the second act, which is almost entirely conventional. I've started changing it around (I did some serious editing a couple of months ago). I probably need to leave them entirely in the office setting, and if Li's mother shows up at all (rather than being one more voice-over) she has to show up in the office, catching Li in the corridor right outside the offices. Now if I can squeeze in one more bit of cryptography into the second act that would also improve the structure.
** Actually, leaving the Burton translation of 1001 Nights boxed up downstairs is a significant shortcoming of the current arrangement. I will give myself roughly 9 months to figure out which books I need to discard or demote to make room for 1001 Nights, but it has to be out where I can get my hands on it from time to time. The most likely space is where the Canadian paperbacks are stashed, since I have read or will read most of them over the next year.
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