On (Film) Structure -- Some Models

I got a chance, recently, to go teach a workshop to film students at Brown University.  Basically, I used the workshop as an opportunity to consolidate and clarify some of the great lessons on (Aristotelian/Campbellian) structure that I've learned over the years, from teachers ranging from Stuart Kelban to Steven Dietz to (through books) Blake Snyder and Joseph Campbell himself.  It's fun to see the lineage of all these ideas, and to stack them on top of each other to see where folks have tweaked the lessons of their teachers over the years.

The result...well...is hard to show here.  It's a series of excel spreadsheets, which I'm happy to share if you email me.

So this is sort of a placeholder post, and an invitation to contact me for some helpful tools :)

On Space

I've spent the past two weekends doing Lisa D'Amour's workshop through the Flea.  She's pretty terrific -- grounded and smart and insightful about craft, with an openness to a lot of ways of thinking about a play without seeming to elevate one way of thinking over all others.

This particular workshop was about SPACE, and the relationship between character, story, and space...and it included a TON of different exercises and prompts...only a few of which I'll include here -- you want the rest, you should try to sign up for one of her workshops, which she does all over the country :)

Here's a few things to ponder/questions to ask, either next time you're stuck within a scene, or trying to generate material, or finding yourself too fixated on plot:

SOME SPACE QUESTIONS
(1) Which of your characters are most OF the space in which your play takes place?  Which are most alien to the space?  How does that change how they interact with it?
(2) What do your characters most value in the space?  What do they least value, or even despise?
(3) Every character has an "interior landscape."  If your character's landscape were LITERAL, what would it look like?  Is your character a swamp?  A high school gymnasium filled with naked girls and cadillacs?
(4) How does your space give gifts to your characters?  How does it fail your characters or betray or work against them?  How do your characters fail it?  How does the space reveal itself or surprise the audience or give up its secrets?

SOME OBJECT QUESTIONS
(1) If one of your characters brings in an object that tells/speaks to either the immediate past or immediate future, what is that object and how does it do that?
(2) What objects in the space does your character think are most stupid, worthless?  Have him/her talk about that.
(3) Have one of your objects tell your character a deep truth (when I did this, my beer bottle turned out to be pretty damn insightful).

ON STORIES
(1) What if one of your characters says, very simply, something about the space or the past?  What if your other character draws out the story, and it turns out to be not-so-simpl?
(2) What if your characters misremember something that happened in the space, or argue because they remember it very differently?

Inspirational Readings/Resources

The following resources were suggested by members of Lisa D'Amour's writing workshop through Pataphysics at the Flea Theatre.  More on the workshop itself (which is fantastic) soon.

Chronicles Volume One by Bob Dylan
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther
Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
Nobel Speeches by William Faulkner and Harold Pinter
Paris Review Interviews
Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for the New York Times by Frank Rich
The House that Jack Built by Jack Spicer
Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Enter a Fox by Simon Gray
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino

To MFA or not to MFA?

...and, more to the point for those of us who have one, how do we move PAST the MFA in a healthy and productive way?

I love Polly Carl...and I say this without having met her.  But I've been reading her stuff for 2-3 years and tend to feel like I've landed in Church (good church) when I do.  I would like to drink tea with her and compare stories about tattoos.  But in the meantime, I will pose her very good thoughts here.

I've lived by a few of her suggestions.  I've done the opposite of others...and generally then circled back around to doing what she suggests here, after many bruises and rug burns.

So.  This Howlround Post to revisit when you feel like your compass is maybe not pointing to your own "true north."

The Role of a Critic?

Recently, Charles Isherwood panned the play of a friend of mine.  That's a very double-edged thing for an emerging playwright; it means, on the one hand, that you're considered important enough for the most influential theater reviewer in...well...probably the United States...to review.  Which is no small thing.  But a bad review from Isherwood?  The folk knowledge is that it can kill a play, kill a career.

I *don't* think that will happen, in this case.  The playwright in question is too damn good to slip into obscurity, and too entrenched/connected in the NY theater scene to ignore.  Still, will it slow his (relatively meteoric) rise?  Yeah.  It might.

I will admit that this post is, in part, a pissed-off and defensive reaction on my part:  I want my friend to succeed, and I don't want him to be hurt or upset.  Still, to my mind, there was something fundamentally out-of-balance in Isherwood's review, something that flies in the face of what I think is a critic's job to do.

Because he went after the play, yes, but to my mind he didn't go after the play in its own terms.  Isherwood has made it clear that there are certain stage conventions, certain kinds of stories, he prefers to others.  It's absolutely his right to have preferences.  And I have to say, much of the time, especially when he is praising the work of realist playwrights like Amy Herzog, Annie Baker and Stephen Karam, I'm in complete agreement with him.  These are skilled playwrights who know their craft, who are writing beautiful plays.  But it seems to me that, far more often than he should, Isherwood will (to bastardize a catchphrase) criticize dance because it doesn't look like architecture.

There is more than one way to write a play.  There is more than one kind of play.  There is more than one set of intentions that can be ascribed to the writing of a play.  Small, slow dramas where we watch characters deal with each other onstage?  Great.  Huge glitzy, testosterone-driven spectacles with plenty of direct address?  Also great.  Musicals, yes.  Magical Realism, yes.  Fairy Tales -- yes.  And Comic-Books-no-Really-it-IS-"graphic-novel"-come-to-life?  ALSO yes.

We need a multiplicity of narrative forms to contain a multiplicity of voices.  Just because you prefer one set of conventions to another doesn't make the other conventions invalid -- the job of a critic, as I've always understood it, is to take a play on its terms, not cut off its limbs to fit it into the procrustean box of your own assumptions of what all drama should be.

Like I said, everyone gets to have preferences.  But the danger, when you're the most important critic in a field that is expensive, that is increasingly risk-averse, is that when you candidly dismiss out-of-hand the terms at work in a certain mode of story-telling, rather than taking the work on its own terms and arguing against it within those terms, is that you are cutting off the oxygen not just to a particular play or playwright, but to whole modes of storytelling.  Yeah, maybe you don't like THIS play, but the next play LIKE it might be brilliant -- and with every review slamming a play for the use of direct address, for working within the (incredibly popular, incredibly relevant) conventions of the graphic novel -- you're narrowing the possibility of cross-genre-pollination, you're narrowing the fields of gender, age.  You're actively working as a gate-keeper not just to quality but to diversity of experience.  You -- and the people who make decisions based on their predictions of your judgments -- are cutting off our chances of reaching new audience at the knees.

We no longer live in a world (and haven't for a long time) where the Aristotelian conventions are the ones by which we can or should judge work.

How Language Shapes Form

I've been thinking, lately, about feedback, and its relationship to structure.

When I am talking with TV and Film people, I will nearly *always* hear the following:
- Act Break
- Climax
- Midpoint
- "Likeability"
- Logline/hook

When I am talking to theater people, I will nearly *always* hear the following:
- "your intention"
- "realism/non-realism"
- "playing with form/structure/time"
- "stageable"
- "language/poetry"
- "linear/non-linear" and, sometimes "narrative/non-narrative"

Now, you can argue that this language developed as the most useful shorthand to talk about most of what was being created within each medium.  Fair enough.  But it's also fair to say that the majority (CERTAINLY not all, but the majority) of plays, screenplays and television shows are, fundamentally, about moving people and objects around in space to tell stories over a finite period of time.  In other words, on some level, the people talking about screenplays and the people talking about plays have very similar (if not entirely the same) goals.

And what's interesting to me is to step back and think about how my own plays and screenplays, indeed, how the basics of my writing process are shaped, on a DNA-level, by the different language used to discuss each medium.

I noticed it most on the most recent beat outline I did, of a new romantic comedy.  The "beat outline" is a step-by-step description of every scene or key moment in a screenplay -- the story, stripped bare.  And the reason you do it is, in part, so that you can talk to executives about your story...before there even is one.  Before you necessarily know your characters, before you've spent much time in the world you're thinking of creating.  I knew I needed to map things out early, so that the people who might invest in me know where I was headed.  And knowing that -- that I would, eventually, be expected to "hit my mark" as a screenwriter, with the Act One break clocking in somewhere around page 20-25, with the climax hitting about ten pages before the end of the script, with at least 100 pages of screenplay before my manager would think it felt "finished" -- very much influenced the entire process by which I was working, the story that I was telling.  When the silent request is (at least structurally) "no surprises, please"...well...you're gonna get yet *another* iteration of the hero's journey, no matter what other stories you have to tell.

Now, at the same time I was creating this beat outline, I was doing a playwriting workshop with the Flea Theater.  On the first day, we wrote the name of a place on an index card...then swapped cards.  And had to write a play in the place we'd been given.  We were given a series of crazy/interesting constraints...one after the other...each one forcing us to rethink and restructure and renegotiate what we had already begun to create.  The goal:  to surprise each other -- and surprise ourselves.  And we did -- the plays people were creating were imaginative, funny, played with language, jumped through time, space and reality...but you know what?  Very few of them were satisfying.  Characters did things and said stuff, but it was only sometimes clear why.  There wasn't necessarily much forward movement of story.  And there was a distinct undertone of "so what" in the room, as we finished some of the (admittedly very early) drafts.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had a playwright claim they "had no idea what was coming" in his or her own play, "no idea" what they would write next...in fact, it seems to be offered up as a badge of pride, as casual, implicit proof of a writer's "true genius."  The creative act is marked as something spiritual, a laying-on-of-hands by Dionysus or The Muses.  Screenwriters, on the other hand, tend to look at you like you're a moron if you haven't got at least 40 index cards and a beat outline before you type your first "INT-" -- the idea of "waiting and seeing" where a story goes flies in the face of every book on screenwriting I've ever read.

There's wisdom and folly, of course, in both approaches.  One leaves so much room for the muses that it can, at its worst, ignore fundamentals of craft, and lose sight of its relationship to the audience, lose sight of its responsibility to entertain/tell a story (again the caveat: there are people who don't stage shows with these goals in mind.  I'm not talking to/about them).  The other focuses so much on telling a story that it can forget to leave room for the muse at all, can reduce what truly *is* an art to its basic underpinnings of craft.

So what's the upshot?  I think I, at least, need to remember to cross-pollinate the lessons of one genre to the other -- to take my tools that diagnose story with me from screenplays to plays, to take the primacy of language and spectacle, the freedom to manipulate time and space, with me into film...and see what happens.  And I need to remember that the shorthand we use to talk about plays or screenplays is only that -- a shorthand -- not a list of commandments to which I or my work need necessarily be enslaved.

John August

My new favorite podcasts from John August (thanks, Marc Maurino, for turning me on to these).

I'm a fan of structure, not of being a slave to it but of understanding it and using it to diagnose a story that isn't working...both for screenwriting and for playwriting.  August talks biz, but also structure, in ways that can be fruitful.

Ask For Help

If you're an emerging playwright, asking for things kinda goes with the territory.  Every application is basically asking for an invitation to the party; you often ask mentors to write you recommendations, you probably find yourself asking people to come to your readings or shows or read scripts and give feedback.

After a while, it can start to feel like begging.  After a while, you can start to feel like you're imposing on people, sucking relationships dry.

I'd reached that point -- the point where I was *literally* afraid to ask a recommender for one more letter, or put up one more "hey! come to my reading" facebook post.  And then I did a 180-degree turn.  Why?  Because I was at the end of my rope.  Just...discouraged, wheel-spinning, you name it.

So.  I made a list of organizations I wanted to work with -- not a long list, just the ones that really got me jazzed.  And I (very timidly) asked someone I know if she could broker introductions.  I mentioned specific people.  I figured she'd tell me to go away.

Instead, she reached out to ALL of them.  And I've had meetings with ALL of them.  And I've met some lovely, engaging, engaged people...who may or may not be "of use" to me and my plays, who may or may not connect with my writing, but who renewed my faith that the New York theater community need not be a terrifying monolith.

And I realized those introductions were always there, waiting to be made, but that it was MY job to seek them out -- to be SPECIFIC and PROACTIVE about who I thought should see my work.

Then I thought: "okay, that went well...what else is on my 'wish list,' and how can I turn that wish into a reality?"

I called my friend who works at Brown, and I asked if I could come and guest lecture.  I asked for admission to some fantastic playwriting workshops, and I asked for (necessary) scholarships.  I invited a couple of directors who I deeply admire over to hear a new play of mine aloud.  I invited a brilliant friend of mine, who works in artist development, to lead a professional development workshop for me and my friends at my house.

I've now guest-lectured at Brown, done two workshops, deepened relationships with a couple of great directors, learned a ton about artistic professional development, shared that information with friends, and made a couple of new friends.  NONE of it would have happened if I hadn't asked. 

Now, at Brown, a girl asked me how I'd gotten the opportunities I'd had.  And I told her that every single opportunity I've had has come because, at some point, a friend helped me out.  And the flip side of this should be clear:  I think we, as artists, have moral obligations to help each other where we can.  That's what we mean by theater community -- whether it's showing up at somebody's doorstep with soup, offering a couch for a night or ears for an afternoon, making an introduction or passing on a terrific script, or simply (and perhaps most importantly) reminding each other that we value each other above and beyond our ability to be professionally useful...we weave ourselves together as a community one thread of obligation at a time.  And that's beautiful.

So.  I need to keep figuring out who and how to ask for what I really need.  And I need to keep thinking about what support (both moral and practical) I can give to the artists around me.  How about you?

SMART Goal-Setting, SWOT Analysis Matrix, and Elevator Speeches

This is a (brief) overview of what we covered at the first of two professional development workshops a friend (the brilliant Ann Marie Lonsdale) gave at my apartment, which people universally said was helpful.  We covered THREE items:

(1) Productive Goal-Setting -- what it is, and why to do it

(2) The SWOT Analysis Matrix, and how to use it

(3) The "pitch" or "elevator speech" or "artist identity thesis"

There were two documents that went along with the workshop -- if you'd like them, please email me at jennyconnelldavis@gmail.com (or leave a comment!)

PRODUCTIVE GOAL-SETTING

There are a number of reasons to set goals:

(1)  To help you clarify and identify them – to make sure the thing you think you want is actually what you want.

(2)  To help you actually think through what will be necessary to accomplish them

(3)  To give yourself a reasonable time frame in which to accomplish them (and to figure out why that frame is necessary.

(4)  To learn from your failure.

The SMART Goal-Setting sheet goes through the different elements that are true of productive goals – I won’t re-hash the sheet, just highlight that it makes a hell of a lot of sense.

A few key points:

(1)  A goal list is different than a to-do list (if you’re putting down “goals” that are really just part of a larger goal, you might want to re-think how you’re organizing your goals).

(2)  It helps to lay out several of your goals, WITH their time-frames, to identify whether it’s realistic to accomplish all of them and, if so, what you’ll need to do to make them reality.

(3)  A goal is something that you can accomplish, not that you’ll need to rely on other people and/or luck to bring to fruition.  If you find you have “goals” that are dependent on others, you might want to rethink that goal, or frame it so that it’s geared toward what you can do, not what others can do for you.

(4)  Failing to meet a goal may feel like it sucks, but every failure to meet a goal is also an opportunity to gather data – why didn’t you meet the goal?  How could you have organized your life, or the goal, to make it something you could accomplish?  What can you learn about yourself and your process, or your goals themselves, if you’re not achieving them within the timeframe you’ve set for yourself?

SWOT ANALYSIS MATRIX

The SWOT matrix is a way for you to begin to identify positives and negatives, both internal and external, that are at work in your career, and then figure out how to take control or ownership over them.  Strengths and weaknesses are internal, opportunities and threats are external.  See the attached handouts.

(1)  The first step is to identify what it is you’re trying to accomplish – personally or professionally, project-based or more broadly.

(2)  Then try to identify as many elements as you can that exist within each quadrant of the matrix.  Don’t judge, just observe and try to name the things that you think are either working for you or standing in your way.

(3)  There’s a big power in simply naming these things.  But the next step is to see how you can begin to SHIFT the things you’ve identified from one quadrant to another.  If you’ve identified something as a threat, in what way can you find an opportunity within that threat?  In what way is that thing something you can re-name as a weakness (something internal, and thus something over which you have control) something you had identified as a threat (external, and thus less controllable)?  How can you turn opportunities or weaknesses into strengths?  What would it TAKE to do that?

TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR WORK

This was a quick but really enlightening/inspiring exercise we did toward the end of the session.  The point, here, isn’t necessarily to come up with the pithy “elevator speech” that will get a billionaire to give you a million dollars – it’s to find a place of authority from which to speak about your own work, so that when the (inevitable) question comes “tell me about your work,” you can speak succinctly, confidently, and truthfully about what you do.

Step One:

Write down five (or seven, or thirteen) different words to describe your work, or that you hope describe your work.  Don’t think too hard, just write.  Try to be rigorous about sticking to words rather than whole phrases.

Step Two:

Study those words for a minute.  Now write between three and five sentences that begins with “I am a writer who…” or “I am a writer whose work…”  See what you get. 

Step Three:

Read it out loud.  See how it feels coming out of your mouth.  Ideally, read it alongside several other people doing the same exercise, and see how different or similar their statements are.  Appreciate the commonalities and differences.  Refine your statement as necessary.