Will Goldberg is typing with one eye shut

OHHHHH

2010-10-09T15:14:00.002-04:00

As has often been the case, a while ago something ridiculous started happening with my stomach, there was pain and weirdness, and now there's a new thing I can't eat: gluten. Gluten! The problem with that is, I love gluten, so I tried to appeal the decision of Gluten v. Will, and I lost my appeal violently, and now have to pay gluten's legal expenses, even as this metaphor becomes increasingly tortured.

The better thing that happened recently was that I started taking a class at Chicago Dramatists about structure, because I struggle with it a lot. I think most of the difficulty I have with writing and rewriting is attributable to what I don't quite understand about structure, so I'm excited to learn some more concrete stuff. The first class was last Thursday and there were several moments where I went OHHHHH inside my head, because a little scribbly diagram on a whiteboard had explained something to me that I hadn't figured out on my own. Which was awesome. We're going to have to write an outline for a new play and present the first ten pages, and that will be good for me.

Very quickly

2010-08-25T22:38:00.002-04:00

I think everyone who reads this blog either knows about this already, or doesn't live in Chicago, but I have a reading tomorrow evening of my play We Three. Come see!

Most of the cast came over last night and we ate ice cream and did a preliminary reading; it went very well, although it reminded me that I should never direct anything, because I suck at it.

What a terrible note to end on, but I'm not feeling that great, so I will in fact leave it here.

Raaarrrgh he lives etc.

2010-08-23T17:48:00.002-04:00

I have been frantically editing for the past several days, to prepare We Three for a reading this Thursday (AAGH), and now that I've finally turned the thing in (basically at gunpoint), I don't know what to do with myself. I have a bunch of stupid fears about the play I'm trying to ignore. It'll be read by excellent actors, and that's really all I could ask for.

So, to change the subject, I've been thinking about the newest play (half-play, little stump of a play, whatever), and for a while now it's been clear that the thing needs a happy ending. Not a really happy ending, but definitely one where Shit is Looking Up. This is not something I do very often, but if the play works the way I want it to, it's going to be very tough to watch, and it's not fair to the audience to pummel them for two hours and then leave them even more depressed at the end. (Not that great plays don't do that, but I don't think it's gonna work here.)

And so. I've been wondering: how the fuck am I going to get to a happy ending with this thing? What does a non-sappy happy ending even look like? How is it going to feel genuine? This might be a very basic thing for a lot of writers, but it's not my area of experience at all. I was trying to come up with some kind of formula, basically, and to introduce my problem I will give you a vague chart thing:

- CHARACTER WITH A FUCKED-UP PAST
- MAKES A TERRIBLE DECISION
- IT TOTALLY SUCKS
- WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM

(I know, what a great plot! I'm a friggin genius.)

So then I felt like a happy ending would require

- CHARACTER TO GET OVER HIS SHIT
- ENOUGH TO TAKE MASSIVE ACTION AGAINST SOMEONE
- WITHOUT IT BEING MELODRAMATIC

Which was not working in my head. And it felt like it was going to require a ton of exposition, and that is my least favorite thing.

But, like so many annoying writing problems, the real way to figure this out was to determine the right question to ask. So I said to myself: what is one problem this character has that I can fix? And it was: he is terrible at connecting with people. And I realized that, okay, it would be enough for him to make a friend. That's happy enough. There's hope.

SYNOPSIZED

2010-08-06T13:51:00.002-04:00

Okay, here's what I've settled on for now:

Tommy’s put up with a lot from his older brother Amory, estranged from their parents and struggling with mental illness. College looks like the only way out from under Amory’s problems, a chance for Tommy to make his own life. But Amory fears Tommy’s departure as much as Tommy fears Amory’s slow, disguised slide into a place neither of them understand.

Woo hoo!

I basically got there by shaving little bits off sentences and structuring everything clearer and clearer -- every sentence had to be shorter and simpler than its previous iteration, until we got to the real spine of the thing. The hardest part for me was trying to balance the brothers in the synopsis so we understand that the entire thing is not from Tommy's point of view and all about Tommy's problems. Tommy has the toughest opposing wants in the play (and, as a result, the hardest decisions to make), so the story is slightly more his, but Amory and the way he feels about stuff are a major force in it too.

The thing that was really helpful for me in the end was running it by a friend (hi Ted) who hasn't read the play and asking him to paraphrase the synopsis. If you've read or seen We Three, though, let me know how well you think this lines up with what's in it.

BONUS QUESTION: Should the first sentence say "...who's estranged from their parents?" I don't want it in there, but I'm concerned that the meaning of the sentence could be unclear in a first readthrough. The subject/object confusion of two-guys-with-y-names is killing me here.

Ugh

2010-08-06T12:37:00.002-04:00

I'm writing a synopsis of my play We Three and it is driving me insane. I know what We Three is about and I have done the two-sentence pitch to a lot of people, but that pitch is very conversational and it's not interesting to read. It is this:

It's about these two brothers, and the older one is mentally ill, so he's estranged from their parents and the younger brother is his primary caretaker. And it's about what's going to happen when the younger brother goes off to college.

Basically, if I have ever talked to you about We Three I have used those two sentences verbatim. But, uh, it needs to be a little more compelling if someone is going to print it and people are going to look at it to decide whether they want to see a reading of the play. So I'm trying to arrange it in a more pleasing way, and later when I finish, I will make myself post it so you can see where I eventually got.

(When I joined the Dramatists' Guild, they sent me their amazing resource directory, which has a ton of information for playwrights in it and simultaneously gives me all this help while not being the exhaustive I-know-kung-fu brain dump that I wish it could be. The directory has seven pages on synopses, and yet it refuses to actually do the work for me, and that is not acceptable.)

One last thing, and then I will go pound away at the synopsis some more: I knew that We Three was not a whole play until I could present it to people in those two sentences. At first I only had an idea of the play as stated in the first sentence, which was great and all, but it had no problem to force the characters to do something. I would say the first sentence and then try to justify it with inane shit like "It's...atmospheric," or "It'll feel like this" (making hand gestures), and then some people would nod and smile and then some other people (notably my uncle, who is a poet and brooks no shit) would look at me with skepticism. Once I hit on the second sentence the play began to actually work, both in terms of actual plot mechanics and of believable, involving emotion.

Check back later, so I will have to make myself finish this thing!

Getting the old gang back together again

2010-07-28T20:18:00.003-04:00

1. So we're beginning the planning process for Element '11, which is tremendously exciting. The novelty will have worn off by about October, when I am terrified about money and whether we will only get submissions that are Mamet ripoffs and oh god oh god I am such a fool to sleep six hours a night when there's all this stuff that needs writing...but for now, awesome. If you would like to help or contribute, even if you don't live in Chicago, send me an email (on the sidebar there).

2. I was away for a while there because there was some personal stuff, and then a death in the family, and then laziness, but here I am again. Still hammering away. I got a second job, so now I won't starve to death while I do my third and fourth unpaid jobs (Element and Theoretically Writing My Own Stuff in My Theoretical Spare Time). I would like to wedge a playwriting class into my schedule now that I can sort of afford it, but I dunno how exactly.

3. One thing I want to say in this entry, before the feeling wears off, is about a play I recently went to see, which was well-acted and well-designed and put on by a new company that obviously has some serious fundraising ability, but which should never have been put on. It was pointless to do and it was pointless for me to go see it, and that's because it has nothing to say.

The play was written in the eighties, and it became obvious about ten minutes in, because all the references were super eighties. But it was also obvious because it was trying to evoke emotions in me with really dated, overused tropes and topics that have not worked since the eighties. Shocking Thing X is now so widespread it was absolutely not shocking. As a result, I couldn't care about the characters or the plot, and once that happens, there is a system failure.

I'm not sure why this obviously talented company didn't realize that they were putting on an emotionally redundant, dated-ass slice of boring, or what they thought it expressed well enough that they absolutely needed to put it up. But there is a solution to this problem, and the solution is: put up new plays. One of the things we discovered with Element is that you can put an ad up almost anywhere that says "We want new plays" and people will send you new plays until you shout at them to stop, and sometimes not even then. And some of them will be awesome. If theater is in such trouble as a medium, maybe we should try to promote work that, I dunno, is relevant.

4. They're making another TV series for Avatar: The Last Airbender! The same people who made the original cartoon! You know, the one that doesn't have all the fucking white people! I'm so excited.

"Chair (optional)" and other stuff you don't want in your stage directions

2010-06-03T15:05:00.002-04:00

When I was reading submitted plays for Element, one of the major indicators of whether a play was going to be good or not caught me completely by surprise. On an intellectual level, I think we all know that stage directions and scene-setting notes need to be good (or at least not bad), but when they're the first information I have about a stranger's play, they take on an unbelievable importance. They reveal a lot about your priorities as a writer -- are you trying to design your play instead of writing it? do you not know what detail is extraneous to your story? -- in addition to your ability to string words together. Here are some traps I've been seeing people fall into (all examples paraphrased or made up, unless noted):

1. Death by generic-ass description.

Something like: The room is a typical college dorm room. It has two beds (one upstage left, the other upstage right), two chairs (one next to the desk, the other behind the other desk), two desks, a pile of socks on the end of the bed, lamps on top of the desks... About three list items ago, I fell asleep. If the college is a typical dorm room, I can picture it. Don't tell me what's obvious about that setup, tell me what's unique about the way the characters shape their environment:

A typical college dorm room, except for the fact that Alyssa has a pinup-style cartoon of Einstein above her bed.

It would be a typical college dorm room if it weren't for the corpse under the bed, one arm sticking out.

A typical college dorm room. So typical that it looks like it was designed by someone who's only seen movies about college and never been to one.

You get the idea. Use that space to be specific and get a head start on your story and characters. Anything that isn't doing that is wasting my time and making me dislike you.

2. GPS stage directions.

Something like: Upstage right, there is a balcony connected to the dining room by a spiral staircase with 24 steps; downstage left, a rug is perpendicular to the back wall; the dining-room table is a foot from the doorway... (reader dies from self-inflicted wounds)

You don't know where your play is going to be performed or what the limitations of that space are. Unless it is absolutely essential to an understanding of your story, do not put in this level of detail about the floor plan of the rooms where your play is set. Most published plays that include this level of detail (like, say, The Glass Menagerie) had it added during the publishing process to describe the sets in the original production. The major exception to this is Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is set in Eugene O'Neill's actual house and is described within an inch of its life because it's autobiography so thick and intimate you're practically up the Tyrones' noses.

Also: if you're using work like Glass Menagerie and Long Day's Journey as your references for play structure, you are doing it wrong. Read some plays written after 2000. That's a rant for another day, though.

In The Clean House, Sarah Ruhl gives us a brief but evocative note about where things are in relation to each other:

The white living room has become a hospital.
Or the idea of a hospital.
There is a balcony above the white living room.

That's it. That's what we know at the beginning of Act 2.

3. (optional)

LITERALLY: A chair (optional)... (Reader tears off clothes, runs shrieking into the night)

Why would you do this? This is insane. Don't make something as unbelievably boring as a chair optional; that's the point where you're stepping on the designer's toes and I start to wonder if you play well with others. A production is a collaborative process.

There's a difference between offering suggestions to actors or designers and just writing (optional) next to your nouns; a suggestion that enriches your play is one that gives us new information even if it is not used. Another example from The Clean House:

He does surgery on Ana.
It is an act of love.
If the actor who plays Charles is a good singer,
it would be nice if he could sing
an ethereal medieval love song in Latin
about being medically cured by love
as he does the surgery.

Maybe the actor who plays Charles isn't a good singer, so there won't be singing. But we've learned a ton about the tone of this particular scene. This is a place where pain and the coldness of technology and the fear of death and the dehumanized relationship between doctors and patients -- often seen in depictions of surgery -- are gone. We understand a lot about Charles. We begin to guess a lot about Ana. This is going to have a huge effect on the director and actors as they start work on the play.

IT IS INSANE HOW BAD I HAVE THE FEAR NOW

2010-05-29T18:16:00.002-04:00

(Title from the great Overcompensating, which is headquartered in the same building where I used to write about prisons.)

A quick update because I keep having a lot of ideas for Big Huge Posts that I'm not sure I am actually going to go through with writing, mostly because I'm concerned that I can't be productive or entertaining while writing them (two sample topics: WHY IS THIS GREAT THEATER SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE, DON'T YOU WANT POOR PEOPLE TO GET TO SEE THE SHIT YOU DO and WHY IS _______ SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE TO JOIN WHEN I CAN'T MAKE ANY MONEY WRITING PLAYS, GODFUCKIT). Maybe I'll combine them later, because the question of why it's often so economically difficult to make and see art is really important to me, and it's one that's not going to subside anytime soon.

I recently turned a corner about my career, I guess, in that I got really frustrated about not spending enough of my time doing theatre stuff and not putting my efforts toward my goals. I'm going to turn 24 in August and I'm not where I hoped I'd be, even though I've accomplished some things that were great surprises and successes. (Element, getting my work performed in New York and DC, etc.) I moved to Chicago to pursue theatre and I need to make sure not only that I'm working hard on my writing but also that I take personal risks with it -- that I show it to people, that I spend my money joining more professional organizations and taking classes where I can meet people, that I go to bed later and wake up earlier if that's how I'm going to have time to do what I need to do. I've been working some menial jobs and focusing on surviving, and that's not what gets the shit done. It sounds kind of obvious when I put it down like this, but the machine needs to be running better. More must be fed to it. Regardless of THE FEAR.

Ian McKellen, get off the stage

2010-05-15T16:29:00.002-04:00

So Newsweek oddhead Ramin Setoodeh, as many people already know, wrote an article stating that he found Sean Hayes unconvincing in Promises, Promises and that it is merely the most recent example of gay actors being unconvincing in straight roles. Many intelligent people have already poked holes in the article, because it appears to have at least a one-t0-one brainfart-to-fact ratio, but the part that I think is the most appropriate for me to draw attention to in this particular blog is that it implies that gay actors are just less talented than straight actors. (Dustin Lance Black, the ridiculously intelligent screenwriter of Milk, also touches on this in an interview in which Newsweek attempts to cover its ass.)

Straight actors (and actors we believe to be straight but are closeted) play gay people all the time; Meryl Streep was gay in The Hours, Colin Firth was gay in A Single Man, Sonja Sohn was gay on The Wire...you get the idea. Did Setoodeh say that no one can play against "type" when it comes to sexuality? Nope, just gay people. Why? He doesn't give a reason, but his argument certainly plays into the homophobic idea that gay people are much more controlled and defined by their sexuality than straight people.

If it were easy to tell (by their terribleness) who was gay in the movies, guess what: we wouldn't have closeted actors. Everyone knows that we do. We are also fortunate enough to have had the work of great gay actors like Ian McKellen, Cherry Jones, John Gielgud, Lily Tomlin, Graham Chapman, and others it would be pointless to name here (to say nothing of bi actors like Brando and Garbo and Josephine Baker). Wikipedia has a pretty good set of lists to start on. Suggesting that those people are not good enough to go up against straight actors is just absurd.

I take refuge in other peoples' frustration, maybe

2010-05-03T01:06:00.002-04:00

Writing hasn't been going well, but John Campbell's hourly comics make me feel like I'm not the only one with this problem. (Also, if I'm not doing anything of value, at least I have comics to read.)

I can't say much about it, but I'm being abruptly confronted with this whole situation where I could plausibly have an opportunity to be even poorer than usual, but maybe also do a lot of writing, and in that case I should do writing that would help me, and in that case maybe I should write an amazing screenplay or something and make a jillion dollars, and obviously I'm not thinking in a useful way about the whole thing. I'm not sure of what I should do. If I believed in ~~SIGNS~~, this might be a ~~SIGN~~, but I don't believe in them, so I can't really take it as an endorsement of one decision over another.

In other news, I've started watching The X-Files, but I have to reserve judgment because I've only seen the pilot and a smidge of the second episode. I keep thinking I recognize actors, but I think it's actually because they've cast semi-realistic wonky-looking people that resemble people I see in real life. I am proud to have Gillian Anderson represent me on the International Redheads Justice Squad, also.

Holy shit, you guys

2010-04-29T22:09:00.004-04:00

So, uh, Element happened! And it turned out pretty great!

There are things (in some areas, a lot of things) I wish I/we had done differently, but a bunch of them were due to insane crap re: the preproduction schedule, which is not going to be a problem in the future, and whatever, we did a lot of learning. The part I liked best was that we had really interesting plays and great directors and actors, which could have easily been NOT AT ALL THE CASE, but made everything so wonderful to watch. There are many people I should thank/advertise for that, so I will try to get to them next time, when my computer isn't angered when I open more tabs. (Computer, how do you not understand that I NEED tabs?) Also, I have post-mortem stuff to do, which I am kind of staggering through right now.

One of the most exciting things for me personally was that I discovered that I actually have the skillset to help with something like this, instead of just hanging around with my finger up my nose, which is sometimes all I think I am good for (in my most rational moments). So, there will be better planning and better execution and whatnot, but we have a good foundation, and that's awesome. Exciting news will undoubtedly follow, and we are planning to continue checking in via the Element blog, so you can also find me (and other talented Elementers) there. ("Elementers" is not our group name. "Elementals" is a little too Age of Aquarius for me. It is a problem with no solution.)

Now, though, my Unpaid Second Job is going to be working on my own writing, which is so haaaard. I really need to finish this draft of We Three I've been footling with for forever, and then I can be done with it, at least for now, and then I have a couple of little beans that need to be mushed into ten-minute plays. Normally I enjoy editing a lot, but lately I've been very critical of my work in an unuseful way, because it's not coming with solutions. Where is my Idea Fairy? The agency told me they were sending me one! Bastards.

Element time!

2010-04-19T20:21:00.002-04:00

So the Element New Plays Festival is now underway. All kinds of crazy, dedicated people are dropping in and out of the Charnel House, which is a former funeral home and our performance space. I'm kind of amazed that we've been working on this thing for months -- planning and fundraising and reading plays and choosing directors and making spreadsheets -- and now it's HERE. It's a REAL THING. (Obviously I'm pretty sleep-deprived.)

I (and hopefully other people) am going to be blogging parts of the festival over the course of the week, so if that's something you're interested in, that's where to find it. I haven't had a lot of interaction with all the actors and directors, but I'm happy to report that all the playwrights turned out to be awesome, and that's always good. More later!

Some thoughts on Kidnapped

2010-04-02T14:04:00.004-04:00

So I started watching Kidnapped, which is a 13-episode show about a rich kid who gets -- take a guess -- and the investigation by Jeremy Sisto, who is an actor I have affection for. (Even though he loves to play him some assholes.) I'd never heard of this show, but a) it was available to Watch Instantly on Netflix and I love Watching things Instantly, b) it was rated pretty high, and c) I like watching stuff about investigations. However.

Criminal Minds clearly has me spoiled, because (recent shittiness problems nonwithstanding) it values its female characters and their intelligence and participation. I'm about 20 minutes into Kidnapped and it's not looking like that's going to happen. There's kind of a problem anyway with the script being generic (early in our introduction to Jeremy Sisto, Child-Finding Badass, he sneaks up behind a guy lighting a cigarette, points his gun, and says "Those things'll kill ya." Uh, yeah, just like the first nine thousand times that line was used), but not all the characters are flat equally.

Jeremy Sisto's assistant (or something? his Jeeves? his Auxiliary Lady?), who presumably has seen a bunch of kidnapped kids go back to their parents and already knows this shit, asks Jeremy Sisto, "Is she going to be okay?" (He says something like "She will be," because that's what people say in GenericScriptLand. Also, maybe she won't.) The mother of the kidnapped boy is asking obvious questions about Jeremy Sisto's terminology so he can bad-assedly explain the situation, which is both lazy character work and unnecessary. Everyone over the age of 12 with even a passing interest in watching Kidnapped has already watched hostagey/kidnappy TV and movies, because we are all creepy losers and we love to watch fake crimes. We know the rules. The kid might die. You don't need to explain to the audience, and the parents are definitely already thinking about it.

What was the most egregious for me, even though it seems like a small thing, is when Jeremy Sisto returns a random girl to her parents so we know he's competent (even though, again, as audience members, we assume he's competent) and the shot lingers on the face of the dad hugging his daughter and staring meaningfully at Jeremy Sisto over her shoulder. The mom's not in frame; when the daughter goes over to her and they cry, they're not even in focus. It's not about their feelings, it's all about this dad, who we know literally nothing about, and his meaningful staring. That's how we know Jeremy Sisto's a badass.

Trends in playwriting, maybe: magical realism

2010-03-23T15:03:00.003-04:00

Let's face it. I don't read enough new plays to feel confident that I am COMPLETELY ON TOP of trends in playwriting to the extent that I could make a fancy graph or anything, but I can certainly crank out a blog post on one thing I keep seeing. That thing is Magical Realism.

I love magical realism! I have written some of it myself. My third play, a one-act, is called Cleanup and is about the ghost of a 12-year-old haunting a middle school cafeteria. I decided that the way I would keep the Magic Parts from getting out of hand and making the play all about wizards, or whatever, was to only do magical stuff with completely mundane objects and people. So there's a magic briefcase, and a magic group of accountants and mechanics and other people, and there's a whole thing with an egg, which is one of the most mundane (though iiiinteresting) objects I could think of.

Having been reading several new plays and plays in progress recently, though, I've been noticing a lot of magical realism. Some ideas why:

1) Playwrights are nerds who love wizards. But we think Serious Playwriting is kitchen-sink dramas. So we made them have a baby.
2) Deus ex machinas for everyone! This seems to often be the case in not-good plays. Magical realism is GREAT for this. I like Cleanup, but what drives the plot? Glorious deus ex machinas. Thousands of them.
3) Similarly, metaphors that don't quite work! Mr. Mittering's Magic Machine goes on the fritz every time the writer needs to inject a sense of melancholy! What a brilliant idea! (NO.) If you have a layer of symbolism or imagery that doesn't work on both levels, that's not gonna cut it. It has to work both as a concrete thing that could exist in the real world (or the world of the play) and as an abstract symbol or idea. Otherwise you're just decorating -- you're not making us feel anything.
4) Magical realism, to me, fits interestingly with the natural limitations of live shows, which are already mixing the magic of performance (and of effects like lighting, stage madness, and other wonderful shit the audience doesn't fully understand) with the knowledge that all the components are real. You can't CGI theater. I think, often, there's already a thematic tie between the medium and the message in the mind of the playwright. And that's pretty cool.

Please don't do this either:

2010-03-06T14:14:00.002-05:00

1. Use the wrong name for the festival you are applying to, the wrong name for the person you know is going to be reading your application, or otherwise make it obvious that you didn't read the website.

That's insane. I know you're busy and reading the website is hard, but it's an incredibly tone-deaf mistake to make, and it will fuck you.

The Element team (or whatever you might call us) is having an awesome problem right now, which is that we have a lot of great people to choose from. I get to be involved in decision-making for some of that, but I keep hearing the same thing from other people working on other aspects of selection (and sometimes then I do a dance of excitement in my kitchen). And that's fantastic; the only problem is saying no to people who are clearly talented and with whom we'd love to work. (PLEASE SUBMIT AGAIN NEXT YEAR!)

However. If you submitted a portfolio or application that we like very much except for the fact that you are getting our name wrong and being oddly general about our mission, we are going to pass you over in favor of other people. We want to know that you understand what you're signing up for, and that you will be productive and committed. When you get those details wrong, you've proven to us that you're not willing to take twenty minutes and make sure that everything presents you -- to us, not to your Amorphous Career Goal Plot Point -- in the best possible light. It doesn't speak well of the work you're interested in doing.

As soon as you know you would like to work with a company, festival, or other entity, the first place you go on their website should be to their mission statement, and your cover letter or application should prove that you have read and understood it. Your application should be (without pointless sucking-up) like one of those critical essays you wrote in ninth grade, bent on proving that the kind of work the Puppet Bike does is aligned with your strengths as an artist, and can help you achieve your goals. If you address the cover letter "Dear Mr. Bike," you just put yourself in the circular file.

So, please: take the twenty minutes. We enjoyed your submission.

Please don't do this: a list

2010-02-18T18:38:00.003-05:00

There are a lot of places to find broader writing advice like "show not tell," but here are some smaller things that make a big difference:

1. Don't give more than two characters names that start with the same letter. Especially if they are all introduced on the same page. I'm sure Jamie, Jaime, Jackie, and Jordi are all their own complex, fascinating people, but I can't fucking tell with my eyes crossed like this.

2. Don't get too symbolic with your names, unless you're writing one of these and it's the 15th century. Especially not by translating those names into words from languages that you don't speak. If your reader speaks that language, you are going to look like a tool.

3. Don't design your play while writing it. There are people who are going to do that, and they probably have better design skills than you. They are capable of translating your themes and ideas and characters into sets and lights and costumes; have respect for their jobs.

4. If the last play you read was The Crucible and you were 17, read thirty or forty more (written after 1995). Then throw out whatever you were working on and start over.

5. Don't use a piece of writing to get revenge on your ex. Everyone can tell. And we are all creeped out.

Woomf

2010-02-12T17:15:00.002-05:00

That is the sound of someone struggling up through vast amounts of rice-puddingy obstacles. I am going to start writing this thing again, so that I have to accomplish things to put in it.

Things that are new with me:
- I have a new job, having sacrificed various nonvital organs to a hyena-headed demon. It's not theater-related, unfortunately, but I work with a lot of theater people. And it's a pretty good job, though as always I could make about twice as much money and still be in some financial difficulty. But I am very glad (and lucky) to have it.
- We are still working on the Element New Plays Festival, the website for which is actually basically complete now (oh, except for bios and a bunch of other crap -- never mind). Play submissions are closed. We have a comfortingly-but-also-intimidatingly-large pile of them, which I may or may not have to read and meet with people about. YOU DON'T KNOW.
- I am taking a break from Tongues and reworking my previous play, We Three, in hopes of getting it seen by July, which is when Steppenwolf accepts unagented submissions. It's going pretty well.

As always, I am struggling with artists'-envy at people my age who are already successful (may they die embarrassing deaths) and trying to motivate myself in the absence of clear rewards or any real chances of success. But everyone has to start somewhere. Today it is here.

Broken clocks and other highly metaphorical items

2009-05-06T21:43:00.002-04:00

[A note before I start: I've been working on this post for several days, and since I began to write it, there's been another fire in the sf/f factory; I'm going to have to address that in a separate entry, because I have too much to say to wedge it in here. But that's forthcoming.]

I spent a big chunk of last weekend reading Clockwork Game, a webcomic by Jane Irwin about the Turk, a chess-playing machine made in the late 1700s (which played and won against people like Napoleon and Ben Franklin). The comic is clearly exhaustively researched and it's pretty fun for a historical account (although I'm sure it helps if you're a nerd like me). It has a pretty big flaw, though -- and Irwin says it best:

When I've given thought to the automaton's relationship to its owners and audience, I've been thinking this whole time only of the automaton as metaphor for the gap between man and machine, which it is. But what I've almost completely left out of my own mental equation is the additional subtextual metaphor of White society versus The Mysterious Other. [...] I'm suddenly realizing that modern Readers of Color are simply not going to be able to escape seeing that metaphor.

The Turk (which looked like this) was definitely a reflection of the priorities and prejudices of its designer:

When he created the automaton in the guise of a Turkish man, Kempelen was responding to late-eighteenth-century Austrian society's dual infatuation with the beautiful, exotic trappings and omnipresent threat of the Ottoman Empire. The Battle of Vienna was still undoubtably [sic] on everyone's mind -- it took place less than a hundred years before the automaton's debut --- and his audience would have immediately understood both the alien mystery and intimidation inherent in Kempelen's choice of costume for his figure.

Both quotes are from her blog post here.

The machine's human features are used to great dramatic effect, but its treatment at the hands of its creator/exhibitioner is echoed uncannily in the comic -- one example is the last panel here. You can't look at that and tell me that the group of people for whom the Turk is named are being respected. Not by the characters, and not by the author, either, since the comic (as it is now) never addresses the issues of racism, xenophobia, and exoticism, even as it cuts an object that looks like a Turkish man into pieces, and sticks those pieces in a box in a basement.

I first heard about Clockwork Game in the context of RaceFail '09, an extraordinarily complex barrel of events that I will now hideously simplify:

1) Fantasy author Elizabeth Bear wrote a post on "how to write the Other" in her LiveJournal.

2) A blogger of color, Avalon's Willow, wrote an open letter to Bear citing examples from her work that suggested that Bear was not the best person to give advice on this matter, because she had some of her own stuff to work on.

3) A discussion began wherein friends of Bear's (nearly all of whom were published writers, editors, and other industry professionals) essentially said that Willow's criticisms could not possibly be right, and that her reading was shallow. This progressed to the implication that she (and any other reader who objected to the content in question) was not smart or educated enough to make that call.

(Digression: at this point several people on the supposedly-uneducated team whipped out their academic credentials, many of which were very impressive, and I snickered to myself.)

4) Bear, who had initially stated that she would moderate comments on the post, moderated the comments of people her friends were attacking, not the attackers themselves. Lots of other posts were made, on other journals.

5) Things got extremely nasty. A surprising (to me) number of SF/F authors and other industry people started showing their asses in a number of ways, the most benign of which was "you can't possibly know what you're talking about; this could not possibly be problematic." Many of these people outright ignored explanations of why things were problematic, in addition to explanations of why it was very screwed up that a bunch of white writers were loudly telling readers of color that they were not qualified to comment on racism.

6) through 376290) Things got even nastier; people's real life identities were linked to their online names; someone used "orcing" instead of "trolling" to describe the actions of people of color protesting racism; etc. etc. Bear eventually told people it had all been a ruse (to educate others about racism, of course) and then my head exploded.

The entire thing is way beyond the scope of this entry, but it's important to look at -- a good first summary is here and a collection of relevant links is here.

So now that we've wandered far afield and stumbled into someone else's house and eaten something out of their fridge: this relates to Clockwork Game because its author, who watched RaceFail and the accompanying "NO, I DON'T HAVE TO EXAMINE MY WORK," actually thought "hmm, I need to examine my work." And she discovered that she'd been screwing up: that her work had ignored a major part of its setting and context, and she had assumed that her audience would not be bothered.

Irwin's first plan was to improve things in future installments of the comic, but she quickly realized that that was unrealistic and unhelpful. She decided to publish the rest of the pages in the chapter-in-progress and then abandon the project. (She has since decided to start over, hopefully with better results.) I wish there were something on the comic's actual website about this -- or, if there is, I haven't been able to find it -- but it looks like it's just on her blog right now.

I admire the self-awareness and maturity it takes to look at your work this way and then do what needs to be done; I hope to always look at my work as critically and honestly as I can, and follow Irwin's example if I need to. One of the hardest choices to make as an artist is the choice to kill a work in which you have invested crazy amounts of time, thought, and labor. But one of the most necessary choices you can make as a human being is the choice to harshly examine your own behavior, and to own up to your mistakes -- whether they're due to carelessness or outright hostility. And then to try to fix them.

Through the door to your left is a three-dimensional rendering of the world you actually live in

2009-04-26T23:28:00.003-04:00

After all that stuff last entry about immersive theater experiences, I actually got a job helping someone do something very similar. I'm stage-managing Static, a show similar to the audio tours you can rent at a museum, but a theatrical piece. (We can argue all day about what makes it a theatrical piece, instead of a "fictional art exhibit" or something similar; it's late and I'm not very smart right now, so I'm going with the it's-theater-because-they-told-me-it-is defense.)

Static is the story of a young couple who stumbles on an urban legend about "the collector and his wife," an older couple who obsessively tapes the sounds of daily life (Walt) or records it in journals instead of speaking (Millie). Walt and Millie collect other things, too: buttons, clocks, odd toys, tons of stuff, which they categorize weirdly but sweetly, according to categories like "mouse" or "night-time" instead of by type. Then, of course, disaster strikes -- but it's not clear exactly how. The Static audience listens to Walt's recordings and the younger couple's commentary as they walk through Walt and Millie's house (played by an actual house) and perform some of the tasks they did while they lived there.

I've been watching audience members do test runs of the audio and activities (some normal household activities, some more specific to the house's odd inhabitants), and it's definitely interesting watching, although it's still kind of a passive experience. The audio contains instructions about what to do, and that makes sense, because the point is just to walk in Walt and Millie's shoes, like the younger couple also did -- and learn about their story. It's much closer to being that kind of game experience than probably any other theater I've seen, but there are still guidelines, and obviously there are still clear lines between fiction and reality.

What about an experience where the audience members have to take an active role, to solve a puzzle or clear their own path? You could do it with actors representing obstacles (talk to this person, get them to give up a secret; fight with them; get their help), or the audience could work against the space itself (how do we get out of this room? can we find and light a candle?). Now that I think about it, it's a lot like the Cronenberg movie eXistenZ, which is itself about people playing a game that is basically indistinguishable from real life. Some of my favorite scenes are the characters figuring out exactly how to get what they want out of an environment that will completely unlock if they just do the right thing.

In my experience, people go see theater expecting to become invisible when they become part of the audience, and anything that necessitates their involvement ("You there! Come up onstage!") makes them very uncomfortable. Even actors looking straight at you can be incredibly unnerving. (I once had a part where my character was severely mentally ill, so I was already no fun to be around, and then the director instructed me to stare at one audience member during the performance. He looked like he wanted to figure out a way to kill himself with his chair.)

So -- would it be a thousand times worse to stick audience members in a situation where they're the actors, the engines of the story? Or would it be better, because the situation is clearly so different that there's no way a conventional production could occur, and so you can't pretend you're going to become invisible? I think better, although there are a lot of other problems with the idea, obviously. But it could be so much fun.

Will has died of dysentry

2009-04-19T22:54:00.004-04:00

I've been playing a lot of weird little online games lately, mostly escape games, in which you are stuck in a room (or house, or telephone booth, or fallout shelter) and have to use various objects inside to solve puzzles and get yourself out. I'm being general because there's a lot of variation; in certain games you wander through a crumbling town and collect eggs stolen from a museum, and in some you decode numbers scratched into a wall, and in some you pry up loose floorboards with crowbars or melt locks with chemicals.

My favorite kind are the post-apocalyptic ones, which are often strangely sad. I didn't grow up playing video games and wasn't expecting to feel so immersed in the various worlds I was visiting, but I was clearly wrong there. Daymare Town 2 and its predecessor, for example, feature worn-out towns populated by scratchily-drawn, angry creatures who follow you around, and windows that you look through to see, sometimes, a lone man who used to be the town butcher, naked and thirsty. The Daymare games fascinate me because they refuse to explain themselves -- the player has a purpose, to collect objects and fit them together to escape -- but there's a much larger story than you can possibly understand, and you're not relevant to it. Why is one section of the community mostly buried? Who broke into the museum? Whose blood is that? Why is the librarian so angry? The game doesn't care about you, so you don't find out. It's great.

The Fog Fall and The Fog Fall 2 are another pair I really like -- they seem to be in an alternate universe in which the Cuban missile crisis turned out far shittier, and you wake up trapped in the fallout shelter where you thought you could keep your family safe. But you're alone, your generator's in pieces, and you can't get out. A successful escape leads you to the sequel, where you have to trade favors and packets of freeze-dried food, and in order to do that you've got to walk through your ruined neighborhood, where grass is growing over people's cars and the dead are upright in their chairs as though they're still keeping watch.

I'm kind of jealous that game designers can create these highly complex, immersive experiences, partially because they're able to fit unlimited exploring-space into my laptop. Writing a play with this kind of experience would require an astonishing set, one that appeared to be completely realistic but was also sealed off from any outside influence that would ruin the illusion. Like a haunted house, but with a narrative. (I love haunted houses.)

I read a play once (and why can't I remember the fucking title?) that was meant to be staged in a house with several rooms, through which the audience was led and thereby exposed to different scenes. It's not quite the same, though, because it was clearly a play -- the action stopped and started depending on who was in each room; there were tour guides and commentary; you knew you were going to see a theatrical piece. And all you did was watch, if I remember correctly -- it would be really interesting to create a play where you forced the audience to save itself (assuming consent and safety). There's probably one out there already, but the idea of translating a game experience to a theater piece is interesting enough that there's room for two, I think.

Action sequence

2009-04-12T18:47:00.002-04:00

I was going to write a fawning post about how much I love Holes, no matter how many times I read the damn thing, but instead I thought I would comment on the flaming-bandwagon-going-into-a-ravine that is Amazon.com's new policy on GLBT books. Grab your hat.

In summary: Amazon has removed a significant number of books by GLBT authors or dealing with GLBT issues from its rankings, which means that they are no longer available in bestseller lists and in certain searches. This includes a book aimed at preventing teen suicide, a once-obscure novella that became a blockbuster hit, and many other significant works of literature and memoir. What's their rationale? Here's what they said to author Mark Probst, whose YA novel was one of the unlucky ones:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

"Adult" materials. Which includes works that have little or no mention of sex or genetalia, works of memoir widely acknowledged as classics, and works aimed at helping middle-schoolers accept themselves regardless of who they might be. (A list is being gathered here.)

Amazon.com is possibly operating on some magical alternate plane that the rest of us don't understand, one where the fact of someone's life is explicit material, even if they're baking bread or mowing the lawn or farting or something. To Amazon, GLBT people are only allowed that one label, and that label always equals inappropriate. That's hateful and absurd. So.

I'm going to stop buying through Amazon, which I have done a lot over the years, and I sent them a note: their executive customer service email is ecr@amazon.com, and their phone number is 1-800-201-7575. (The blog post where I got this information also has an email template up that mentions that you can still search for -- and find -- materials on dogfighting.)

It's been a while since I felt this good about the recession kicking various businesses in the nuts. Smart move, Amazon; I'm sure you didn't need the business of GLBT people and their friends and families.

Coddling

2009-04-10T18:06:00.002-04:00

Sorry there was no update last Sunday -- I did something wretched to my back and spent the next several days making grumbling noises and chewing ibuprofen like Perry Smith or somebody.

I continue to bash away at this new play; I'm up to 80 pages, which I have to keep reminding myself is pretty fucking good. This one has taken so much longer to write (three of the four previous plays took about six weeks; one was six hours) that I'm crazy blind sick of it, and trying to rush forward to the part where people read it and (I hope) give me compliments, because that is way more rewarding. I'm inching along, nudging different scenes into formation, identifying gaps -- I keep trying to coddle myself: you don't have to solve all the problems today, you don't have to write all the missing pieces.

When I'm writing, I often have to be very cautious and gentle with myself in order to stay in a mindset where I can write freely and unselfconsciously. I'm very controlling about who gets to see what I'm writing and what they get to say -- inspiration is very tenuous for everybody, but I find that I'm the same way with enthusiasm, which can get tripped up at any stage and ruin everything. I have to convince myself that, if another person is skeptical of my idea or my work, they are incredibly wrong and have no idea how wrong they are.

When I was writing We Three and explaining it to people, sometimes I got "uh huh..." and a doubtful face, but I was confident in my belief that I could make it all work -- and I did, fortunately. I'm having a little more doubt this time around, probably because I'm doing something so out of my comfort zone -- it's much bigger and wider in scope than I usually go. Last time I was considering keeping a journal of my writing process, so I could look at it during future projects and feel better if I was having a shitty day, but I was lazy and didn't. I think having a blog will help fill this need the next time around.

Cliches I'll never be sick of

2009-03-30T01:01:00.002-04:00

- The Gentle Giant (especially if the GG is later pushed to the point of violence, which I think is a pretty standard narrative for the character). I'm a small guy, but I know some very big people, and the way they have to try to control their bigness (to not hurt other people by accident, to appear less threatening, to fit places) is really interesting to me. I read somewhere (possibly Esquire) that somebody asked Yao Ming what it was like to be 7'6" (aaaagh) and he said that everything seemed dirty, because he could see into places that were too high to clean. Poor Yao Ming.
Delicious examples: The Iron Giant, City of Lost Children.

- Rag-Tag Team of Misfits Barrelling Across the Galaxy (where "galaxy" can mean the Wild West, or an unnamed city pulsing with corruption, or whatever; some lawless place). There's nothing I don't love about this concept. I love "chosen families," and the ensemble of misfits often sidesteps the blandness you can sometimes get when you have a Hero Protagonist with some wacky friends. If everyone's kind of a weird lameass, they're all much more fun, I think.
Delicious examples: Ocean's 11, The Usual Suspects, Firefly. Butch and Sundance are almost weird enough in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to qualify, even though there's only two of them.

- The Law-Enforcement Dude Going Rogue. Regrettably almost always a dude (though not in Criminal Minds, because it does awesome things with gender roles, including having the Damsel in Distress be this guy). I love stories about very skilled people, and I love watching crimefighting techniques get twisted for shadowy purposes. This usually involves a lot of improvisation and ingenuity, because the Rogue has no backup, and using everyday objects and concepts in new brilliant ways. It's a cool way to have the spy thriller world interact with our recognizable one.
Delicious examples: The Bourne movies. You can't beat a guy facing a knife-wielding opponent with a rolled-up magazine, you just can't. There's nothing more awesome. Also Spy Game, even though it kind of sucks otherwise: CIA Robert Redford on his last day at the agency tripping up his dickish younger colleagues with old-school machinations.

- You Must Solve These Puzzles. It's hard for me to walk away from any narrative once it's going, but You Must Solve These Puzzles pretty much ensures I will stick around, no matter how bad the source material. I read The Da Vinci Code to the bitter, warty end because they had not yet solved the puzzles.
Delicious examples: The Da Vinci Code, ergh. Also Seven. And a stupid new movie called 12 Rounds [of puzzles] that I suspect I will see.

- We Gotta Make This Fit into This. Also known as: any montage about thinking. I love montages, but the ones that visually demonstrate the development of thought are extra-interesting, because I struggle with how to dynamically portray someone's thought process on stage. Film has a major advantage over theater here, because cutting and close-ups and other techniques (like A Beautiful Mind making stuff light up) can draw audience focus to small pieces of a scene, but in theater you're mostly stuck with the whole picture the whole time. If I figure out a solution to this enduring problem, you'll be the first to know. Then I will make my millions.
Delicious examples: Apollo 13 (from which the title comes), A Beautiful Mind, Pollock, The Prestige.

Oh, beloved cliches, I try to reinvent you in my work, but I'm just hoping to find excuses to write The Tired Thief Aiming for One Last Score Versus the Grizzled Cop Who'll Stop at Nothing. That's great literature, right?

Cliches I'm sick of

2009-03-22T16:49:00.004-04:00

There are a lot of cliches I'm very fond of, but that's going to be another post. These cliches are my pet-peevy ones. I've tried not to include too much stuff that's based on stereotype or is outright offensive, because "sick of" doesn't really do it justice, but I've included a couple that show up so often that they're cliches in addition to being ignorant and stupid. When I can think of some, I've listed some media that sidestep this phenomenon, and some that fail at it.

- Troubled female character with a history of sexual abuse/assault. What, you can't think of anything else that might be bothering your female character? Similarly, plot cliche: strong female character is captured by the enemy -- part of her torture/fear for her safety is sexual assault or the threat thereof. Happens too much to female characters, never to male characters.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds, Red Dragon (it's my weirdo opinion that a male character's stabbing is set up to be similar to rape, and you can't talk me out of it). Firefly almost succeeds. Freaks and Geeks, and other shows with predominantly teen casts. Oz subverted this by creating an environment where essentially all the female characters had power over the majority of the male ones, since the former worked in the prison and the latter were incarcerated there. Though the show still has sexual violence against women, there's more against men, perpetrated by both sexes.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: Deadwood.

- Characters only dating people of their same race. Not really a cliche, just a stupid thing that shows up all the time, but god is it stupid. This was also a notable theme of the posters advertising prom dresses that my high school was routinely papered with.
Notably avoided: House, The Wire, Criminal Minds (also, bonus points for having mixed-race characters played by mixed-race actors), The West Wing.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: If I'm not mistaken, Queer as Folk (at least with the main characters). The show had characters of various genders, classes, sexualities, and abilities, but not so much racial diversity.

- The misanthropic genius (especially the misanthropic secretly tormented genius). I think House was the last character I actually liked who did this, but my patience with him is in little scraps all over my desk. It's such a lazy character template and one of the most frequently used on network TV, after "sad sad pretty boy." Fringe also had one of these, and he made me want to put out my eyes. Nice (or "nice") geniuses are way more interesting. Or geniuses with more than two dimensions, even.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds has a deceptively sweet genius; if you count Willow, which you probably can, so does Buffy. The West Wing has a handful of characters who can be considered geniuses, some crankier than others, but I can't think of any whose primary character trait is that they're dickholes. Even if Bartlett insists on obnoxiously quizzing people on Latin.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: I wrote one of these, but the play hasn't seen the light of day yet. I are hypocrite.

- Geeky stand-in for the writer. Or, really, any stand-in for the writer. You're not so special I'm watching this to learn about you. Abundant in House and all of Joss Whedon's work except maybe Toy Story.
Notably avoided: Liz Lemon on 30 Rock walks the line pretty nimbly between being Tina Fey's self-parody and her own person. Freaks and Geeks relied heavily on the writers' experiences but used them to build believable characters.
Not-at-all avoided: Juno, even though I liked it. Diablo Cody talks exactly like that. It works for Juno, but it's awful in United States of Tara.

- Trash-talking black man, esp. "the super crazy one on the team"/Sassy black woman, esp. "the sassy best friend." They're going in the same category because they seem to both say "here's how a white writer is going to take Traits that All Black People Have but make them friendly!" -- which: blech.
Notably avoided: Most shows where there are more than two major black characters, because then they get to be people. Firefly is worth its own mention because it fails at race in other sparkly ways, but it sidestepped this particular turd.

There are so many other wonderful ones, like "two characters with obvious chemistry who will never get together because they're the same sex," "good girl with no personality," and "OMG SLUT," but this is a long post already (and I wish I had more examples). Maybe I'll do more of these in the future. Next post, though, will be the ones I can't get enough of. Preview: most of them can be filed under "goes in a heist movie."

Stop telling me about yourself

2009-03-08T16:24:00.004-04:00

So I’ve been meaning to write about Criminal Minds, which I recently began watching totally legally. I love it. It’s about FBI profilers and it’s just a really good, solid procedural. I love procedurals because I love shows about a) cops b) criminals c) shooting d) thinking, but often they fail at a) race b) gender c) criminal justice policy d) writing, and that makes it really hard to enjoy them. (Notable exception: The Wire, but I am not exactly a revolutionary for saying that The Wire is phenomenal.)

Criminal Minds is especially wonderful to me right now because I recently had to stop watching House, which I liked when it wasn’t being As the House Turns and really couldn’t stand when it turned into Thirteen ‘n’ House Adventures. That is to say: it stopped being about thinking, and the writing quality went way down, especially in terms of character. New characters were brought in, and only one of them was “explored,” which unfortunately meant that we weren’t allowed to discover much about her – we had to be told, several times, how mysterious she was, how tortured, how special.

Criminal Minds is similar to House in that they’re both procedurals, but it succeeds magnificently where House fails: in developing characters calmly and organically. The show is set almost entirely at the characters’ workplace – the FBI building in Quantico, and wherever they need to go to save the day. Characters pretty much only go home (or on vacation) to be yanked away; we know almost nothing about them beyond what we need to watch them solve cases. As a consequence, I am desperate for information about them – every fact is a joy. And now that I’m at the beginning of the second season, I know very little about some characters I’ve been watching for 25 episodes.

This isn’t to say that they don’t have personalities and characteristics – the acting is great, and there’s a lot of talking – but their backstories aren’t clear. And writers love backstory. Usually they love to tell you about it as soon as humanly possible, and in explicit detail. Criminal Minds mostly eschews those all-too-common monologues about Tragic Things That Happened to Me When I Was a Child, instead featuring people who don’t talk much to each other about their experiences, much less reveal things to the audience. (Recently I watched an episode where they had to Investigate One of Their Own, and someone said “Okay, what do we know about X?” Someone else said “…actually, I don’t really know anything about X.”) Then you get layers of secret-keeping comparable to some of the tensest parts of The West Wing in its heyday.

In my limited acting experience (and the reading I've done about acting), one of the most interesting things an actor can do is walk onstage with a secret. It doesn't need to be alluded to, revealed, or illustrated -- the fact of a secret lights an actor from within. We watch that actor. We don't know why, but we want to know what they're hiding. Meryl Streep does this, I believe, and she's one of the most fascinating actors currently living. A play or TV show where the writer keeps a secret operates in a similar way: there's a quiet extra dimension to the dialogue, and (because I think an actor should know the background of his or her character when the writer does, for god's sake) hopefully to the acting.

Making room

2009-02-19T12:28:00.004-05:00

Accomplishment is mine this week, because I made a Big Huge Outline for the first act of Tongues. It's a huge teacher-easel-sized piece of paper, and it's color-coded. (Do not mistake me for someone who had different highlighters for history and trig in high school, because I am not organized, and also I took a weird kind of math that was all word problems and trig got mixed in there with everything else.)

I usually hack out the structure of a play by writing huge chunks of it and then making all-caps notes between scenes like "SOMETHING HAPPY BEFORE IT ALL GOES TO SHIT RIGHT HERE." Tongues is so complicated, though, that I really haven't been able to do that. The major things I need to keep track of:

1) the actual scenes the audience will see

2) the progression of events as a whole, for reference purposes

3) the emotional state of my main character, since we spend a lot of time away from her, but she still has to be the anchor of the play and make good sense.

In order to understand how those three factors interact with each other (and check for problems), I really need to see them side-by-side. And the mosaic-y nature of the structure means I'm a lot more susceptible to holes, and structure is not my strong point anyway. So. Outline! Even putting it together helped me clarify problems that I have with the emotional arc of the first act (namely that it sucked), so I feel I have a better grasp on what the second needs to be.

As I pare down the plot and clarify the major threads, however, I'm facing a problem I was trying to ignore before. I'm writing a play (sort of) about religion. (The play is less about God than how people react to God.) It's important to me to portray religion and religious people respectfully, and to make sure many different faiths are represented. Since the play focuses on American culture, and I think Christianity influences American culture more than any other religion, the opinions of Christians are significant to the plot. And I've been struggling to figure out how to integrate other faiths into the plot without making the play look like a Parade of World Religions.

But then it became clear to me how much this "problem" had to do with my own ingrained prejudices. Why is it Christian people with the most influential opinions? Why did I make Character X a priest and not a rabbi? Why is it "easier" to make room in my play for Christians and not for Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and others? I'm not even Christian myself, but I've been taught to think this way: this is who stories are about. And, across the nation, this is who the discourse is about.

It might not be my fault that I've been taught to think this way, but it's certainly my responsibility to fix it in my writing and my brain. I have a lot more to say about the responsibilities of the writer with regard to his/her prejudices (with examples from the sci-fi/fantasy blogosphere explosion that happened recently), so that's going to have to be a later post.

New Year's resolution: write as though you actually hope to make a living at it

2009-01-14T18:12:00.003-05:00

Shame on me, really. I have been slacking both on Tongues and (obviously) this blog -- I've been working long hours at my job, which is not theater-related and not terribly exciting, and so when I get home I'm kind of resentful and burned out. But more Theater Stuff is developing, so I hope that will get me doing enough creative and creative-related work to further my career and have more enthusiasm for my private projects. Theater Stuff is as follows:

- The Element New Plays Festival (We Three and the rough first act of Tongues were read there in October) is gearing up for its second year, and I plan to actually help this time, not just pull my hair in terror and burn my fingers horribly on a pot. Everything is still in the very early planning stages (no official jobs have been filled yet except producer), but I'm excited.

- I'm talking with my friend Suzie (a fellow NTI-er) about putting Tongues up at the New York International Fringe Festival this summer, which would be great both because I would love some serious New York attention and because then I would definitely have to stop dragging my feet about writing it. I sent her some snippets a little while ago so she could get a feel for the tone and shape (rhombus), and when I looked them over, I discovered that I don't hate them (for now).

When I'm writing I swing wildly between "I love this, it's the best thing I've ever done! These characters are adorable even with their horrible stupid faults!" and "This is so bad that I need to cut off my hands, so that I can never inflict anything of its caliber on the public again." On the days where the latter is true, I don't look at my work, because I know I'm not really seeing it. Enjoying the parts that are good -- or could be, with editing -- is a sign that I'm in a frame of mind where I can write productively, which is my major task at this stage. (My uncle, who is a poet, says "Write when you're manic, edit when you're depressive.")

- I'm taking a class on theater design at Loyola. Because I look so young, my classmates have no idea that I am not actually in college, so I am pretty sure I look like the weird kid with no friends who shows up in various classes, sits in the back, and draws planes on the front of his notebook. We're doing set design right now, which is not my particular area of interest (I like costume design a lot) but is helping me understand the dozens of factors that determine the shape of a production and how smoothly it runs -- stagehand considerations, types of cloth used for flats, how things are laid out, etc. Since I was not actually a theater major (though I definitely should have been), I need the background.

Publicity is a weird and terrifying cave that I sometimes visit

2008-12-12T17:16:00.002-05:00

So I had my radio interview About William Goldbergs yesterday, and it was a disappointment -- they said they were going to ask about my writing and let me shamelessly plug the blog, and they did neither, so I woke up early and was all nervous for naught. That's okay, though; I will entertain myself with my fantasies about agents coming up to me on the train with bushels of money and a puppy under each arm.

Also, in my (equally shameless) googling to try to come up with this blog, I found that actually the first hit when you google "Will Goldberg playwright" is this, which is a compendium of all produced plays in English and also has very little of my actual information, but kind of boggles my mind anyway. The way to find this blog, incidentally, is to google "Will Goldberg fluffhead."

16 pages into Act 2

2008-12-04T19:52:00.002-05:00

Which is pretty good, really, as long as I keep chugging away.

More importantly, my blog title has come true by accident, because I broke my glasses a while ago and have been wearing very old contacts, and yesterday my eyes got very angry about that and today they were red and trying to make a break for it. So it's all been very exciting.

Five more people have expressed interest in this Sunday's playwriting mob, which is awesome except for the fact that my apartment has one desk chair, one armchair, and one couch, and that is all there is to sit on. For what appears to now be twelve people. I will craft them seating from cardboard boxes and things I find in the street.

As for actual thoughts on writing: I finally have the basic structure of Act 2 (but it's still kind of fragile and trembly and I can't tell you anything about it) in weird list form in a notebook. Because the play has so many characters, I also have some arcs plotted out for them, and I think I should make a big plot-map thing on my wall so that I can see how it all fits together and think of what scenes will express those developments. I'm not sure I want to stick the entire play on my wall, though, because at this point I need to not talk about it with anyone and let it take its own shape.

One thing I would really like to do, though (other than be finished) is be at the point where I get to choose an epigraph and act titles. They're some of the very few ways that I get to comment on the play from the outside, as myself, not any of the characters. (Bonus nerd fact: stuff like this outside the actual story in a work of literature is called "paratext.") I like being able to express, in my own cryptic way, how I feel about what I've made.

We Three, my last play, is very autobiographical, but not in the way people expect. It's about mental illness and how difficult it is to deal with a loved one who has it, and when I was touring with it this summer, audience members would come find me after performances and ask "Who is it?" -- they had family stories they wanted to tell me, and they wanted to hear mine. I do have some experience with mental illness, but the play is much more personal to me because of different family issues, many of which don't even happen onstage. I wrote the first scene a year before the rest of the play, while I was very upset -- but the characters and their story evolved so much that now those influences are practically invisible.

So the epigraph was this: He said true things, but called them by wrong names. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning.)

Act titles are a huge challenge for me, because I hate titles, as I have mumbled about before, but they do so much (even if an audience never knows what they are). One of my favorite examples is from Nicky Silver's Raised in Captivity, which I was in once. It's (on the simplest level) a black comedy about repairing a broken family. The title gives you a lot right there -- and then the two acts are called Bread and Water and Forty Dollars and A New Suit. Silver continues his motif, and also gives us an idea of what the emotional arc is in those two acts -- there's a happy ending, even if it comes from a place of loss.

People have unearned trust in me

2008-11-26T00:27:00.002-05:00

Which I guess is something I should take advantage of, before they realize their grievous error. And what I mean by that is: we had the first playwriting mob meeting doodly on Sunday, and I think actually it went well. Hooray!

I've written a little less than eleven pages of actual content for Act 2, have made some fairly mean decisions, and toyed with others (you know that character you like? well, he's going to DIE). I've been super tired lately, so I have been struggling to write and also to keep reading this awesome book I have about people stealing Lincoln's corpse and holding it for ransom. It is a nonfiction book and is obviously the pinnacle of western literature. But both writing and reading this insane book are so worth it that I must keep it up.

I sent out some (optional) prompts to the playwriting-mobbers, which are as follows:

1. A scene about a contest – past, present, or future.
2. An argument not between family members or people in a romantic relationship.
3. A scene set at a character's job – maybe in an office, maybe not. Someone has made a serious mistake that affects everyone.
4. A scene where one character never speaks.
5. A scene set in someplace empty, except for a pair of shoes thrown over a telephone wire.
6. The morning after one character has had an incredible, terrifying, or life-changing dream. Everything that was once familiar to the character seems new or different because of the dream. Don't describe the dream.

I tried to do some prompts that were very open-ended as well as some that were more challenging, and to have some that were more character/setting/dialogue-oriented. I think I will trick myself into writing more Tongues over the next couple of days by writing one or more of 'em.

Slowly, slowly

2008-11-18T19:32:00.002-05:00

So, I've accomplished some of what I promised in the last entry. That should count for something, but not much.

I think I have managed to rope people into coming to the playwriting thing, which will be this Sunday, and that's good. I am nervous about: everyone hating each other, everyone hating me, not having enough chairs, nobody participating, and looking like a giant dick who just wants people to pay attention to him. But other than that I am perfectly calm.

I had a good discussion with my friend Chris yesterday evening about some writing he's been doing, and where I'm going to go next with Tongues -- he was in the reading for Element and played a lot of my favorite characters (because all the actors are octuple-cast, basically), so he knows it about as well as anybody knows it in its current mangled state, and he helpfully kicked my ass about it. I've been very stuck on what the actual events of Act 2 should be to get the thing where I want it to get by the end, and I've been pretty much shying away from making concrete, mean decisions about it. Chris' position can be summed up, with spoilers redacted, as "You know, Ida would [camel] by this point, really" and "What if she [nematode] and then we watched [stripes]?" But replace all the awesome substitute words with very good pints.

Essentially, mean decisions must be made! The thing I was thinking about should definitely happen, but in a more horrible way! (I do not mind telling you: it was Ida's yearly checkup with her doctor.) I need to get off my ass and write five pages tonight. That is my goal. I will shame myself into updating this later with news of whether I have achieved it.

Not dead, just resting my eyes

2008-11-12T21:03:00.001-05:00

I owe my blog, and whatever poor souls read it, an apology for not updating. My life has been consumed with: moving, doing the Element festival, worrying that the movers had stolen all my possessions, frantically trying to get a job, getting a job selling hyper-realistic mutilated-face monster masks (I know!), having to leave it, getting a job doing research, and then being lazy and sucking, in that order. I have something handwritten that I wrote during the Element festival and never posted because I was too busy being incredibly anxious about stupid things, so later today or tomorrow I will post it and we can TRAVEL BACK IN TIME.

The blog, however deserted, seems to have gotten me the Most Hilarious Radio Interview Ever, though. Someone on Sirius Radio is doing a show hosted by Dr. Billy Goldberg and featuring several William Goldbergs, investigating how your name determines the course of your life. They contacted me – I can only assume through here – and asked me to do it, and obviously I have to, because it is awesome. I will post more detail about that when I have it. I wonder if we will all have some terrifying commonality due to being William Goldbergs. Maybe it's our love of grandpa sweaters.

Unfortunately, I have sucked as much at writing my play as I have writing here; I have notes for the second act, but really don't know enough yet about what the events of the plot should be in order to create the emotional arc I want. So what I need to do is just write a bunch of stuff, see what the really interesting parts of that are, and build the second act based on those, but I have not yet gotten off my ass and actually done it. Maybe by making it this public I can humiliate myself into doing it.

Another interesting thing I have failed to accomplish is the playwriting group I am slowly starting, which I hope will meet biweekly and have actual attendance. It's based on the structure of my favorite playwriting class and basically throws out the traditional workshop "this is good," "this is bad" format, which I mostly hate. Instead, people attempt to identify all the elements of a given scene, how they work, and what they accomplish – that way, you work toward understanding how something is put together, and is more of an in-depth understanding of your devices than an instant review given by someone who's probably very bored. It's open to anyone interested in playwriting (you don't even have to think of yourself as a writer), so if you live in the Chicago area, are not an axe-murderer, and would like to come, send an email.

I clearly need to get into a better routine if I am going to work a full-time job and accomplish my goals for playwriting (see also: stuffed elephant, plays I don't hate), so tonight I am going to try to write for an hour, and do that hereafter. I should also start putting a chunk of time aside for submitting scripts, talking to directors and other people I know, and investigating theaters and internships, because my job is pretty good, but I would prefer not to do it forever.

Reviews and all that

2008-08-14T12:08:00.002-04:00

There's that piece of advice mostly given to actors: "Don't read your reviews." I haven't acted in a production that's received a real review, but the professional debut of We Three in two cities means we've made press packets for, and frantically searched for, and enthusiastically read reviews. I'm lucky, in a way, because my work is done before the performances, and it's the same every night (mostly, which I'll address in a minute), so reading reviews is not going to affect my part in the show. That's not true for the actors.

So I've had the opportunity to learn from reviews without compromising myself, and I've learned things about the play that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own -- I read a review this morning and found that the writer had identified a plot hole that I'd never caught. And one character (an older woman played by a young woman) is confusing people, so I think I need to specify in the script that an older actress be cast, even though I like Sam a lot in the role. And someone else is reading more into a character than I put there, and judging my writing by his conclusions, and finding it lacking -- but there's nothing I can do about that, so I'm going to ignore it, as is my great power.

The judging part -- the actual reviewy part -- is interesting. It feels great to get positive feedback from someone who doesn't know me or care about my feelings, but it's hard to know that a reviewer's impression of my work is going to be colored by the actors' ability to present it. I write sparingly, and a lot goes unsaid, so if an actor doesn't fill in the spaces with Damn Good Acting, it can look like I didn't really write anything. On Monday I might have made a great point, but on Thursday, somebody's indigestion might mean that I shied away from addressing anything. And when you take on a specific, sensitive issue (and for We Three, it's mental illness), an inability to articulate ideas can look very douchey.

Names, new deadlines, and trying to pound it out

2008-08-09T14:39:00.003-04:00

So, the Element New Plays Festival (link forthcoming, I hope) is being put together by two friends of mine from NTI, with the hope of garnering some attention and starting to build a company in Chicago. It's going to be a week of readings, and We Three will be there, and originally I was hoping to have Ida in it as well, but I haven't finished it yet, obviously, so I gave that up. A friend of mine (based in DC) has just said that his slot should be given to someone who'll be living in Chicago and concentrating on playwriting, so I've been asked to step in. It's flattering, and I am excited about Ida, but urgh, it's still not done. So I'm hoping to finish the first act in the next three weeks, which is possible but nervewracking.

I hate presenting work that I'm not finished with, and I want to make a good impression on people who might see the play, not convince them that I Write Pretty Good for A Kid. I'm not interested in being Pretty Good for A Kid; I want to be judged alongside adults doing the same work, and if I'm not as good as they are, I don't want anybody to humor me. So. I'm determined to finish something genuinely worth watching by September, and that's a different kind of pressure than just pounding out twenty more pages. To keep myself from burning out, I'm trying to focus on little things I enjoy about the script, such as:

- Plastic surgery on your nose is not as funny as plastic surgery on your chin.
- I almost have an acronym for a parents' activist group, but it's a group centered around sad subject matter and so far the acronym spells COMIC.
- Matty is a good name for a writer on a sketch comedy TV show.
- Fat Mafiosi = fat cats with nine toes.

I have a lot of trouble naming characters, usually, so I tend to steal them from other places. Ida has tons of characters, so I've been grabbing ruthlessly, and thus far I have people named after: my gym teacher from elementary school, a hardware store my parents go to, a babysitter I had a crush on, and one of my automatic backup girl names (Ashley; this list also includes Amy, which is always the first female name I think of for some reason).

I also like to make sure that my writing includes names that determine that the character isn't white, because I've seen some ridiculously whitewashed casting and that sucks. If you've got a cast of 24 and everyone in it is white, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that you didn't find any suitable nonwhite actors. So I like to make it impossible for that to happen.

Other people have seen the show, not just me

2008-08-05T21:00:00.002-04:00

Man, when I figured that out, it was time to lie down for a bit. But people enjoyed We Three (at Capital Fringe in DC) very much, and that's cool, so we're trying to cajole several others into coming to see us in New York next week, and so better-looking and more sociable people than I have done some publicity stuff:

- A podcast reading and interview for nytheatre.com, with Mitch Conway, Julie Congress, and Erin Daley of No. 11 Productions, the company producing the show. I went to the National Theater Institute with Mitch; he is stupidly talented, and luckily everyone else involved is too, or maybe there would be a knife fight of some kind. (The section on We Three begins about 19 minutes in, and contains spoilers for the end of the first act.)
- An interview with Julie and her sister Sarah, our stage manager; they talk about how No. 11 came together, what the show's like, and Sarah says very nice but untrue things about me. I think the play's good and all, but I have never yet buttoned a shirt correctly on the first try.

There's nobody here but us chickens

2008-07-31T22:32:00.003-04:00

That title doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but I love how it sounds, and I hate titling things, so I'd rather put something useless but satisfying than try to sound smart or use song lyrics or whatever. If you're here for profundity, I'm sorry already. You might want to get a sandwich or something.

I'm rattling along on my new project right now, and I feel all accomplished, so I'm going to footle a bit about my writing process and come back to this post when I feel terrible and I'm not writing anything, just rolling around on the floor unhappily.

The new thing -- hereafter referred to as Ida because it used to have a title and now I'm pretty sure it's stupid -- is 35 pages long now, although a fair bit of that is notes. When I start a play (this is the fifth) I usually write the first scene and some scattered bits after that, which mostly don't change, because they define the tone of the piece for me. In order to start writing again later, I have to be in the same mood as I was when I began, so I go back to those early bits as much as I need to.

I love first scenes, mostly because I like making them odd and kind of unsuitable as introductions. Here's the opening monologue of the new play:

IDA
You can tell when God has been in my room because the air has been rearranged. When he hasn’t it fits together like Legos, but when he has it’s like a salad – all the molecules are thin and flat and fluffy with empty space between them. I don’t like the empty space. I don’t know what’s supposed to go in it.

The first time it happened I tried to push it all back into place with my hands, but it didn’t do anything, and then I tried turning my fan on because maybe moving it around would balance it all out, and then I told God to come back and fix my air but he didn’t. He doesn’t come when I want – he’s busy. Now I have to ignore it when the air gets all screwed up and then it sort of gently flows back into place after I leave it alone for a while. I don’t like to be in my room before it happens, though. I go somewhere else.

Yeah, that's what the play's about, sort of. Air! God! Monologues! I like making audience members wonder if possibly they are in the wrong place, or if they got hit on the head at some point and didn't notice.

I'm shooting for around 100 pages, which is longer than I've done before, and I'm also interested in making it funny, which isn't typical for me either. This bit is not that funny, I admit, but I like to think other parts are.

Having recently completed my first full-length play (We Three), I've become more forgiving of any practice that results in my having written, even if the actual writing is shit, because it can always be beaten into place later. The last time I decided to Just Fucking Write Something, regardless of whether it was of any use, the resulting monologue (a college interview) ended up defining the shape of the plot. So this weekend I'm aiming to get to 40 pages, even if it's FISH FISH FISH copied and pasted as many times as my little fingers will do it.

WOO BLOGGING

2008-07-30T14:10:00.000-04:00

And so it begins, not with a bang but with a honking noise like a clown hit with something heavy.

I recently had my first Actual Production at the Capital Fringe Festival in DC, and while I was there, a few people asked why I didn't have a website. The answer is: I didn't want to look like a self-important asshole; but apparently people are actually interested in looking at a website, so I guess it's worth doing. For now, there'll just be BLOGGING, but my friend Erin has offered to help me put something together, and she makes very pretty pixelbits, so I am grateful. I made my own website when I was in middle school, and it was about a computer game, and it was as nonugly as I could make it with the free template they gave me, but, er, you would not want to spend any time there.

So, in brief, before I go look up how to make popcorn on a stovetop instead of in a microwave (I'm suitably ashamed, don't worry), here are some things about me:

I write plays, and one day hope to buy a stuffed elephant with my earnings.
I also act when people let me.
I attended the National Theater Institute in Fall 2006, where they did terrible but very helpful things to me and several of my friends.
The next performance of my work will be at the New York International Fringe Festival August 11-22, and I'll have to get more specific dates up soon.
I'm moving to Chicago in the fall, where I'll perform in a weeklong presentation of new plays by NTI alumni, and my plays will also appear, if I can smack this new one into some recognizable shape before August 8th.
It is 2:21, and today I have consumed: rock-hard pear, coffee, delicious brownie.