Networking in our MFA Writing for Stage and Screen program, Part 2

Continuing with what we started last week, I'm happy to announce another important project that's been generated out of our MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen program.  This time it's a New York City venture that involves several faculty and actors who are part of our MFA family.

Next Monday, March 28th there will be a concert reading of playwright (and faculty member) Karen Sunde's intriguing play To Moscow at the Players Club in New York City.  It's being produced by our recent MFA graduate Steve Ashworth (from Edmonton, Canada) and stars, among others, our program's Casting Director and faculty member/actor Lisa Bostnar as well as Emmy-award winning actor Gordon Clapp, who works closely with us in readings of student scripts on a regular basis.  The play is being directed by Robert Lawson, who also is on our faculty.

You can check out all aspects of the project and how it's breaking new ground at tomoscowtheplay.com.

For me, however, what makes this project unique (and others like it) is that it's a direct result of our MFA program and the creative energy emanating from it.  Our faculty, alums, and current students are bursting with creativity and are talented working professionals (emerging and established) who are building an expansive network from coast to coast and beyond.

I feel privileged to be the Director of this program that we launched three years ago.   And I'm increasingly excited and proud of our "family" and the good work that's radiating from it.

If you're in NYC next Monday, March 28th, I urge you to join us.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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 Playwrights Process.

Networking in our MFA Writing for Stage and Screen program, Part 1...

I'm thrilled to announce the national premiere of a new play written by one of our recent MFA graduates and produced by a soon-to-be graduate of the program.  The play is called Cleave, the work of  Los Angeles writer Vicki Peterson who graduated with her MFA degree last June.  Owen Robertson, who will be graduating from our program this coming July, is producing the play in Tampa, Florida in a co-production of Lab Theater Project and Stageworks Theatre Company.  The production will run from this Thursday, March 17 through Sunday, April 3rd.

Cleave tells the moving tale of a self-proclaimed prophet's wife, who gives birth to her child on the very day her husband has prophesied the world will end.  As they prepare for the end, a teenager stumbles upon their homestead, bringing with her conflict, doubt and perhaps hope.  The play explores the nature of spiritual abuse and the moral and spiritual cost of making idols out of men.

Playwright Vicki Peterson wrote the play along with several other scripts while in our MFA program. Her work has received considerable recognition, including her screenplay Zoe and the Zebra, which won Best Screenplay at the Irvine International Film Festival and the California Independent Film Festival.  She is also co-author of Notes to Screenwriters, a recently published book on screenwriting, and for many years has been partner in the script consulting firm Catharsis, based in Hollywood.

Owen Robertson is an established professional in the Tampa-based theatre scene and founder of the Lab Theater Project.  A well known local actor, Owen is also a teacher and emerging playwright himself.  Owen has flown Vicki to Tampa for the final week of rehearsals and says "Vicki is helping and watching the show grow--my dream of a safe place for playwrights to see their shows come to life and to feel they have a voice in that process."

Needless to say, I'm proud of these two members of our MFA "family."  It bodes well for our program's future as more and more projects we've had a hand in generating are being given professional recognition and life throughout the country.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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 Playwrights Process.  

Writing in your sleep..or the muse within us

The other day an MFA student of mine got in touch and said that her husband just got a new job hundreds of miles from where they were living, that the job started in a couple of weeks, and that she'd have to suddenly focus on the move and have to take a hiatus from her work on her major script project for the semester.  She was worried that she'd get behind schedule and her project would get derailed.

I told her not to worry.

And I said this with some confidence because this student had been stirring the pot of her story for over a month and a half already, doing extensive research, completing multiple character exploration exercises and making a number of preliminary jottings regarding aspects of her plot.

But what was really going on unaware was that she was pouring ideas and story questions into her subconscious, the dwelling place of the writer's muse.  "Feeding" her subconscious with rich material and energizing her inner mind to sort out the issues involved and when ready to send solutions and the keys to locked doors back up into the conscious mind.  I told her to trust that was happening, that work was continuing on her project even though she was packing boxes, making to-do lists, saying goodbye to friends, closing down her apartment and on and on for the next three weeks.

Ray Bradbury, in his excellent and classic collection of essays on creativity called Zen in the Art of Writing has a wonderful piece on this called "How to Keep and Feed a Muse."  He, too, thinks that your subconscious is your muse and that you have to play this game with yourself.  He writes:  "What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.  They are two names for one thing."  And, "...I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice.  When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh.  How strange--we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in." He goes on to suggest the "diet" we need to feed this inner muse.

Of course, this only works if you indeed do feed your muse, have patience, and trust that she'll come through when you need her.  So I told my student to enjoy her move, celebrate the new job and the setting up of their new life, and visualize that muse working away and ready to deliver the goods upon a return to the writing desk.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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 Playwrights Process.

Musings on story structure...

The other week I was talking with a writer friend about why solid story structure is always present if a script is going to work.

In trying to explain why this is so I said to imagine a hundred people standing in front of you in a long row.  And you're directed to walk by them slowly, engage in a short conversation with each person, and observe how strikingly unique every individual is in terms of physical appearance, personality, and general "presence."  Without question, you'd conclude when you finished the assignment that no two people were the same and that you'd just experienced one hundred different versions of what it means to be a unique one-of-a-kind human being.

Now imagine that all clothing, flesh, and life suddenly was removed from those hundred people and all you were left with was a long row of parched white skeletons lying on the ground in front of you.

Would you be able to see any difference between them?  Oh, variations in height, perhaps, and general size.  But what about personality, sex, unique physical features?  None--at least to the untrained eye.  The bone structure would look basically identical for all one hundred.

My writer friend laughed and understood.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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 Playwrights Process.

Script submission and living in the real world...

Some years ago when I was the Artistic Director of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey (now called Writers Theatre of New Jersey), I was deeply involved with a project that changed the way I thought about script writing in this country. Here's the story and what I learned from it:

A large foundation approached us and asked if the theatre would be interested in sponsoring a major national playwriting contest.  What was being proposed was a competition to find the two best new American plays, award two $10,000 cash prizes to the winners (at the time the biggest cash awards ever offered in this country), and give each of the two winning plays a week-long professional workshop with an established director and dramaturg assigned to each script and actors cast in New York City.  In addition, the project involved identifying the top high school theatre teachers in the state and invite them to be a part of our development week with the winning plays.  The total budget for the project was over $200,000.  Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity, daunting as it was for our fledgling theatre company.

So we set out to find the two best new American plays.  We advertised the competition in every conceivable publication and avenue available for getting the word out.  We hired a literary manager to handle submissions and signed up a small army of trusted theatre professionals as readers of the scripts as they came in.  And then we waited to see what would happen.

I'll never forget that as the submission deadline approached, our local postman started bringing into our offices a trickle of scripts at first and then in the last couple of weeks he started dragging in large canvas bags full.  It was unbelievable the stacks of scripts that poured in--it was like a dam had burst. In total, by the deadline we had 1,007 full-length plays submitted.

As they came in, each script was entered into the system and sent out to two different readers to evaluate thoroughly.  If even one reader liked a script, it was sent to a third reader.  In this way we were eventually able to narrow down the mountain of scripts to a stack of 33 semi-finalists.  Then these 33 plays were read by myself and two other close colleagues whom I trusted completely.  And out of these semi-finalists, we finally chose seven finalists that we felt were actually deserving of winning the competition.  The winners were then selected from these seven by a nationally recognized team of theatre professionals.

That's seven finalists out of 1,007 submissions!  That's well under one percent!  It staggered me. How could there be so few scripts that were worthy of our prize?  For me, it was an eye-opener, for sure--that so many writers would think their faulty script, usually due to basic story structure issues, was ready to be seriously considered.  So many well-meaning people were deluding themselves.  So many out there who didn't know their craft, especially when it came to actually telling a story that lifted off the page.

The moral of this story:  Learn everything there is to know about the art form and don't bother submitting your script anywhere until you are absolutely convinced that it's as good as it can possibly be on a professional level. Otherwise you're living in a fantasy world and submitting your work may be an exercise in frustration.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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 Playwrights Process.

The keys to story development...

In prepping for my talk this Saturday, Feb. 20 at the Monadnock Writers' Group in Peterborough, NH (see my last post), I find myself focusing once again on the importance of pre-draft analysis and exploration.  To me, there is nothing more important than to do your due diligence while developing your story idea before you shift into draft mode.

There are several initial and progressive steps:

First, make a quick analysis of the idea to see if it has the potential to contain the four basic ingredients all good scripts possess:
     1.  One central pivotal character
     2. A strong, conscious, external want of this character and a compelling and subconscious inner need that has to be made evident as the story progresses
     3. Formidable obstacles represented by other characters and/or the central character him/herself that prevent the external want from being fulfilled and the inner need from being recognized--setting up conflict
     4.  A resolution to the story, leaving the central character a changed person

Second, think about what you're leaving with the audience by resolving the central characters main dilemma in a certain way.  And ask yourself if you believe that premise passionately.  If you don't, rework your resolution.

Third, invent possible other characters that enter the story and begin your character explorations on all of them in addition to your central character.  This should start with trying on for size such characteristics as aspects of physical appearance, their external world (family situation, place in their community, etc.) and their internal world (personality type, sexuality, spiritual life, sense of morality, etc.)  In other words, create an initial sketch for each of your major characters.

Fourth, dig deep into the backstory of your central character and the central dilemma your story hinges on.  Think about milestone events in the past that have shaped who the character is who first walks into your actual script.  And then have the character who enters your script monologue about the most significant of these events from the past and listen carefully to the voice that emerges.

Fifth, tackle your expanded and detailed plot outline using the discoveries made so far in your story development process.

Too many writers are in much too much of a hurry to start turning out pages before they're ready.  As a result they get lost in a sea of pages they've fallen in love with, while in reality those pages are just initial explorations.  By taking the time to do your pre-draft work first you're way ahead in the game.

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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 January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  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.

Speaking at Monadnock Writers' Group Feb 20th

For those of you within striking distance, you might be interested in joining me and a large group of New England writers at the Monadnock Writers' Group's monthly meeting on Saturday morning, February 20 starting at 9:45 am at the Peterborough Town Library in downtown Peterborough.  I'll be speaking on the process of story development--how to analyze and develop initial ideas as they float into your consciousness and begin to take on shape and size.

Over the years I've developed a series of tests and exercises that I think are beneficial to apply to your initial story ideas to see if they hold the basic ingredients necessary to bring your tales fully to life. And I've found that the same basic approach serves playwrights, screenwriters, and all fiction writers. I'll be talking about this pre-draft exploratory work and sharing some of the results achieved by my script clients and MFA writing students.

Now that the New Hampshire primary is finally history, you might find it interesting to join us if you're in the area.  Again, it's the Monadnock Writers' Group's monthly gathering from 9:45 am till noon on Saturday, February 20, 2016 at the Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord Street in downtown Peterborough.  This is the same village where I hold my MFA residencies and there are a number of lovely restaurants nearby if you decide to make a day of it.  Peterborough is a very special place for many reasons, not the least of which is its New England charm and its cultural history and awareness.  After all, legend has it that Thorton Wilder wrote his classic Our Town in a downtown office a stone's throw from the library.

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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 next residency runs January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 18-28.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), and a professional script consultant