30/60/90

Austin Scriptworks is about to start its (now annual) 30/60/90 project.  I heartily recommend getting involved.

It's basically a month, two-month, or three-month commitment to write EVERY day.  Anyone who signs up will receive a daily writing prompt email from ASW.  The organization was inspired to start it by the 365 project, and has solicited writing prompts from people all over the country.

Maybe you get 30 3-minute plays out of it.  Maybe you get a full-length.  Maybe you get fifteen minutes of daily frustration.  In any case, the nominal fee to participate seems worth it.  Personally, I'm planning to keep a folder with the prompts for the next time I'm stuck for a freewriting prompt when I teach.

Go forth and write.  

Back-up plans

My dear friend wrote to me today about a mantra she's got.  It's a good one for all striving/struggling artists: "don't have a backup plan because you'll fall back on it."

Her goal:  to avoid the 9-5 day job for AT LEAST a year, to make sure her energy is aimed straight at her writing.  I applaud that.

It also makes me wonder: what IS a backup plan?  Is it something you'd be happy doing if your dream plan doesn't work out?  Is it the way you make ends meet while you wait for your dream plan to work out?  When does a plan move from a "good, practical version of how to have a life doing what you want to do" to "backup plan?"

This is an honest question.  It makes me think about the obituary I wrote yesterday (for myself).  Is it truly the height of my ambition?  Is  it a "backup plan" with some bells and whistles?

Where do we draw the line between artists who give everything to our art, and people who MUST live in the world as citizens, friends, children, parents (with all the responsibilities to ourselves and  others that those roles entail) while STILL finding time to fan the flames of our "inner artist?"

That "flame" analogy may seem a little over the top...but sometimes I imagine that my writing is a small fire, zippo-size, that I can warm my hands at...but that I also have to protect from strong winds, with my whole body if necessary.  My job is to keep the flame going so that it can keep ME going.  Which maybe means I can't have a backup plan (which would snuff out the flame), or maybe means that I HAVE to have one (to keep the wind at bay).

I don't think artists have the monopoly on this analogy.  Most people I know have  their own flame, the thing that protects them and needs protecting, the engine that keeps them moving through the world.  There are friends for whom it's religion, family, teaching, service...important to remember and honor that, too.

All that to say, I think my friend has discovered what she needs to do to keep her flame lit.  Which is awesome.

Writing for TV, Part II

The list of things I/we learned in Stuart's class, continued.

1.  "Never be afraid to put your character through the wringer."

2.  Conflict, conflict, CONFLICT.  If your main character isn't in hot water or trying to solve a problem, YOU have a problem.

3.  Keep your stakes high.  This is true for comedy too.

4.  Sit-Coms are just that...SITUATIONAL comedy.  The joke and the one-liner are the LAST layer of comedy...find the good premise, the good characters, and comedy should arise pretty naturally.

More later.

The Obituary Question

Actually, less a question than an exercise.  It's from Daniel Alexander Jones, second-hand.  I don't know where he got it.

Are you wondering how to move forward in your life?  Having a bit of a writerly existential crisis?  Get a pen.

1.  Write your obituary.  This can be as long as it needs to be.  Write down all the things you hope they can write about you when you're dead.

2.  Read it through.  What would you need to have accomplished in FIFTEEN YEARS to be well on your way to earning that obit?  Make a list.

3.  Now look at the Fifteen Year list.  What do you need to do in TEN YEARS to earn the Fifteen Year list?

4.  Now Five.

5.  Now Three.

6.  What can you do in the NEXT YEAR to work toward  your three year list?

See, wasn't that fun?

Writing for TV Recap, Part I

There will probably be more posts for this.  What follows are the "pearls of wisdom" I got from Stuart Kelban's writing for TV class...and ones suggested by other students in the same class.

1.  Writing a spec script?  Here are the major steps:  (1) get extremely familiar with the show.  Watch a lot of episodes.  Go online to its official and unofficial fan sites.  Do a breakdown of how long scenes are.  Get your hands on a copy of a script written for the show, if you can.  Either FIND or WRITE YOUR OWN "Bible" for the show -- basically a document that outlines everything that is true about the show's universe.  There's a good one online for "Freaks and Geeks" which serves as a strong, possibly over-the-top model.  Make sure to think about commercial breaks, about the network on which the show appears (2) Write an OUTLINE.  Revise, revise, revise.  More on outline writing below.  These are called "Beat sheets" in the TV/Film world, and they basically go scene-by-scene through your show, with the location and a description of what happens in the scene.  I swear, if playwrights were this organized, we'd save ourselves some trouble (and maybe some "eureka" moments, granted...).  Get people who know and love the show to look at your outline.  Make sure that the show's protagonist is your episode's protagonist.  Try to write an episode that is relatively "stand-alone." (3) Write, and keep revising.  Make sure the characters sound like the characters you've heard on the show.  Make it awesome.

2.  The protagonist in your spec script should be the show's protagonist.

3.  In TV, your act breaks are your commercial breaks.  The standard half-hour has a "Teaser", first act, second act.  Hour-longs can vary more, especially depending on whether it's network or cable, so pay attention.  They can have as many as five or six acts now, if you count the teaser.

4.  Your acts have to end on a climax, preferably of your A story.

5.  Obvious to anyone who's already a screenwriter -- TV shows have A, B, and C stories.  The A story is the main story of the episode, and gets the most scenes.  The B story is the secondary story, maybe it furthers a longer story arc, maybe not...and so on down the line.  Depending on the show (West Wing, Dirty Sexy Money...) there may even be D, E, F stories.  The bigger or more ensemble-oriented the cast, the more likely you are to run into more story lines.

6.  The cool thing about television, and the thing we're probably all more aware of now that we can watch whole seasons on DVD, is that shows don't just have stories that start and end in one episode anymore.  Story arcs can last three episodes, half a season, a couple of seasons.  Not maybe so crucial in a spec script as when you're doing a pilot, but if you can nod to longer arcs, bully for you.

7.  I said this already.  But there should be a major story turn/climax right before every commercial break...so people come back AFTER the commercial break.

8.  When you're outlining your script, don't try to outline it beginning, middle, end.  Start with placing the things you know you want to hit and fill in from there.

9.  This was  one a lot of the screenwriters found really helpful.  Stuart says that for every scene, you've got "options A, B, and C."  A is the first one you come up with.  It's usually not great.  B's the better option, but still not great.  C is the option that not only moves the story forward the way you need it to (because your other options did that, too), but it ELEVATES the story, and twists things in a surprising way.  Sometimes it's the way you find "to talk about the thing without talking about the thing..." if that makes sense.  I'm sure fellow writers can chip in on that.

10.  When you're faced with choosing between the good piece of writing or the delicious scene you just wrote, and the story you're telling, it isn't actually a choice -- you choose STORY every time.

More to come, I'm sure.

"Circles Rise Together"

"Circles Rise Together"

This is a lovely phrase that got tossed around in Aspen, when I was part of a group of MFA playwrights from around the country who were invited to show work there/in NYC. I think it was attributed to Paula Vogel. (Sometimes I wonder if the legendary Ms. Vogel has ACTUALLY said all the fabulous, inspiring things that are attributed to her? What is she, the Oracle at Delphi? Anyway). The idea is, we all need a peer group, we all need to encourage our peer group, that as their fortunes rise so too will our own.

It's a lovely sentiment.

I hope it's true.

I wonder if it's true.

And it makes me ask questions like "how big or small a circle? what circles am I part of? what about squares?"

Really, it makes me ask questions about Community. I think community is really really REALLY important. More than anything, the idea of community (Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities?") is why I keep this damned blog in the first place, on the off chance that something I've learned in a classroom or picked up at a cocktail party might prove useful to someone I know or someone who finds these posts. The posts are my effort to widen the circle, my messages in a bottle to anyone who DOESN'T get to sit in a classroom with the likes of Suzan Zeder, Paula Vogel, Marsha Norman every day (which, uh, will be me in a year or so).

And it's nice to think that our circles will rise together. But I also want to think that our circles are a...well, I think the word I'm looking for is Mitzvah...in their own right (says the shiksa). It is right and good that we, who are working hard to tell meaningful stories, should come together at a table, should support each other, should share the joys and, yes, burdens of trying to make stories in a world that still needs stories. It is right and good that we should form a community, whether or not the members of our community can ever help us "get somewhere." We are somewhere. We're together at the table.

In graduate school, that table is often literal. The workshop table, the table of the nearest local bar (bless you, Sao Paolo's and your happy hour), at the kitchen tables of our classmates. It's been a real joy to cook for people at my house over the past few weeks, and I look forward to doing it a lot more next year.

But what about BEYOND graduate school? What about in the big, bad world, when the community that we have formed moves to far-flung parts of the globe (Los Angeles, China, Germany, Chicago...)? How can we maintain a meaningful circle across space and time? How can we be sustained when the table goes from tangible to metaphorical?

I don't know. I know websites help, listserves help...but I'm someone who, as fellow playwright David Modigliani has said "lives in the analog world." I love Facebook, but God, please, give me face TIME. Give me table.

Is All Theater Political?

A dear friend of mine was talking the other day, and said something along the lines of "all theater is political."  It might have been "all art."

This is a comment I've heard before.  Usually I nod my head, sip my wine, and silently castigate myself for not being someone who invests heavily in the idea of "the political."

But the other day, I put down my wine.  "Wait," I said, "is ALL theater really political?  What do you mean by that?  Because I can think of theater that is telling very small stories, that really deals in the microcosm, in interpersonal relationships, in structures that are, in some sense, timeless or cut across cultures or...."

"No," my friend said, "even that is political."

For me, then, this raises the question of "what do we mean when we say 'POLITICAL'."  How are we DEFINING the "Political" that we  say all theater/art is?  And at what point are we defining it so broadly that it ceases to be a useful term?

Because if we, as artists, are holding ourselves to the mandate that our work be political, and then we point at anything and everything and say "yes, THAT is political," aren't we, in some way, letting ourselves off the hook?

Of course, you can argue that the act of bringing people together in a room to watch a one-time event, the act of sharing your thoughts, hearts, talent with a room of people is a political act.  Sure.  But I do that when I invite people over for dinner, don't I?  Is dinner political?  Does it depend on the dinner?

I think we (playwrights of all people) need to be careful when we're defining our terms, especially if we're going to move into action based on those terms.  Because I think that the act of sharing art is inherently SOCIAL, that there are lenses other than "political" through which we can view the world and...what...the lines of connection, disconnection, power that run through it?  There's religion, there's marxism/economics, there's a cultural materialist view of things...I could throw out a lot of terms here, you know?

All this to say that I don't think all theater is, or need be, political.  It does and  should bring people together, it does and should make people think about the world and their relationship to it, but while this CAN be a political act, it would be an overstatement to say that it always is.

Reminder about why we do this (and why we don't)

This links to a speech Craig Lucas gave at a recent commencement in Boston.  Good words to remember.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-lucas/leaving-your-artistic-leg_b_102332.html

On GOOD (not icky) self-promotion

I promise this whole blog won't become about promoting our work (or my work)...but if we're gonna be freelancers, it's a big part of what we've got to do, and it's something that makes me nervous, so it merits some thought.

This is a great post.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-get-ink

Exciting Updates

"Summer People," my play about the homefront and our current war, was named a Finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and received an honorable mention.  It'll be produced at The University of Texas, on the mainstage, this fall.  We just cast it!  Great cast.  And The Gift Theatre, my company in Chicago, is looking at it for the following season.  I don't know that either of those productions will be its "world premiere"...we'll see.

"Alice's Boys" is ready for a serious reading...I'll be doing one at The Gift Theatre, with Mary Ann Thebus as Alice, on June 3.  The play is about the painter Alice Neel, the first woman to ever have a solo exhibition at the Whitney.  Her life is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale, and her relationship to her sons is DEFINITELY the stuff of drama...or at least my drama.

"The Psyche Project," the ensemble-created (but mostly Jenny written) piece I've been part of since January, just finished a week-long intensive.  The goal: a full script within the next week.  We'll decide at the end of the summer whether to propose the piece for the Cohen New Works Festival and Refraction Arts' Fusebox Festival, both in Spring '09.

Several other plays are in the hopper, but not as far along.  FYI.

What Kind of Playwright ARE You?

Just had my end-of-semester meeting. The GOOD thing? My professors like what I'm writing. the BAD? They think I'm working on too many projects at once. The word "promiscuous" might have come up. Or was it "Polygamous?" It was suggested that I'd better mend my ways and learn how to stand by my man...er, plays.

I admit it. I cheat on my plays. I string them along, make out with one play while I let another buy dinner, I write love-notes to an old play when I should be sitting by the phone, waiting for the latest one to call. I wear white cotton underwear for one project, and never let on that I've got a drawer full of red lace ready for another. I'm a total hussy.

I then ran into a dear friend, who said he'd been told that his work was a little "surface-y," that his characters "lacked interiority," that his plays were a little, to use his word, "shallow."

What did I learn today? That I don't sit down to my keyboard and morph into a different, better, more focused, more patient person than I am during the rest of my waking hours. That we're the same PLAYWRIGHTS as we are PEOPLE.

Because while my dear friend isn't in the least bit shallow, he's also not someone who allows every passerby beneath his surface. You can't know him at a glance...in fact, if all you do is glance, the rewards are fun, but fleeting. But his surface, and the surface of his plays, definitely are the gloss on top of some deep, dark, depths. And if you think I can't stick to one project in my writing life, you should (or maybe shouldn't) see the rest of my life. I always think the grass is greener on the other side of the genre. The good news for world, if not for my professors, is that I manage to sleep around on the plays in my life, and stand by the people.

Does this mean that I should throw on a dress on Sundays, throw out my fancy underwear, see the error of my ways, and commit? Does this mean that my friend should invite a few more people to see his dark depths? Maybe, maybe not. But I DO think that it means that my relationship to my craft mirrors my relationship to the world, that to alter one means to alter the other. If the plays are the project, then so is the playwright.