Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Capturing your angst...

At a Christmas party this past weekend I ran into a writer I know who has been having a rough time emotionally this fall, to the point that she can't really move forward in her creative life.  I suspect there are a lot of folks out there who are experiencing the same symptoms to one degree or another this election year.

What I suggested to this writer (and anyone who considers him/herself any kind of scribe in this predicament) is to put down on paper or pound out in a document all your raw feelings.  In other words, to journal your way through your angst and/or the thoughts that are bringing you down.


Journaling can do wonders to help you objectify what you're feeling, getting out in front of you what you're experiencing emotionally and what you suspect are the reasons for it.  And by journaling I mean really venting and letting loose and putting down in words exactly what comes to mind when you target the root causes of the dark mood you find yourself stuck in--describing the sadness, the depressing thoughts, and so on and making an attempt to articulate in detail the reasons for it.

No one will ever see this but you, but the dividends are often significant and long lasting.  On the short term, you'll find that it tends to help you process your way through the doldrums you're going through.  But also, what I've learned over the years with of this type of journaling, is that sometimes months or even years later I can go back to these entries and there staring back at me is a vividly captured emotion that I experienced in my past and that I can now use in my current work.  I'm still connected to it, but I now have the necessary distance from it to be able to fold it into my writing.

At times it's been exhilarating as a writer to have this documentation of my past emotional struggles available to me--my own private treasure trove.  And on occasion a past journal entry has unlocked a key I'd been searching for and that I needed to unwrap for a project I was currently in the middle of.

At any rate, it's always a good practice for a writer to use words--the raw material we work with day in and day out--to help guide us through the down times.  And you may find that down the line it will prove a bonanza.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran July 21-31, 2016 and we are still considering applications for starting the program with our January 2017 residency that runs January 6-15 or for starting with our June residency running from June 22-July 2.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process    


Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Honored to be one of the top 50 screenwriting blogs...

I'm claiming some bragging rights here and announcing that this blog has just been included in the top 50 screenwriting blogs by Feedspot.  Out of the thousands of blogs on the subject, that is sweet news indeed.
Feedspot lists all 50 selected blogs and annotates each with a brief description of the blog, the average frequency of postings, and other data.  The site is updated weekly.  

Needless to say, I'm happy to be included in their listing.  

Thanks, Feedspot--and thanks to all my loyal readers!

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran July 21-31, 2016 and we are still considering applications for starting the program with our January 2017 residency that runs January 6-15 or for starting with our June residency running from June 22-July 2.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process


Tuesday, December 6, 2016

More on fighting the negative voice...

Last week I shared some thoughts about how important it is to keep your cool when that first draft just doesn't seem to measure up.  How you have to realize that it's all process and peeling off the layers.

I thought it'd be useful to reinforce that thinking by sharing what some of our most successful writers have to say about encountering that negative voice.

Playwright Terrence McNally told me he has days when he asks himself: "Why can't I just get a job at a bank and be an honest worker?"  He related to me that one day while working on his first draft of a script he thought:  "I wanted to kill myself, burn the play, quite the Dramatists Guild, resign from being their vice president, quit teaching at Juilliard.  How can I teach playwriting?  I don't know what I'm doing."


Two-thirds of the way through writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'night Mother, Marsha Norman told me she heard an inner voice saying:  "I don't know what this is.  I'm in real trouble here.  I mean, nobody's going to want to do this, right?  It's going to be real embarrassing."

Emily Mann captured it nicely when she said:  "There are crazy days when you lose all belief."

Almost every successful writer that I asked about this in my extensive interview series I did at the Dramatists Guild several years ago and many writers since have related to me their own stories of temporary despair.

So when you hear such a voice yourself, it's imperative that you find some way to tune it out and push on--especially when you're writing your first draft.  You're in the most vulnerable phase of the work, when it's easy to get seduced into giving up.  First drafts are tough largely because they don't have that polished and professional authority you sense when reading successful produced and published scripts.  Your initial pages just aren't measuring up.  What's important is to keep reminding yourself that every one of these successful scripts were brought into existence in the same way your script is.  Any given play or screenplay on your bookshelf may be a fifth, or tenth, or twentieth reworking of a tentative first draft.  And it's possible that very little, if any, of the very first draft may still be contained in that script you admire the most.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran July 21-31, 2016 and we are still considering applications for starting the program with our January 2017 residency that runs January 6-15 or for starting with our June residency running from June 22-July 2.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process