While God and good art are in the details, I’m actually going to be vague here because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, although I wouldn’t mind if this posting got people to think.

Over the past several months I’ve seen some evenings of short plays that were pretty lacking on all fronts – writing, directing, and acting. I went to support dear friends (whose talent in these shows was quite evident) but at the end of the evening I was questioning why the producers were doing this type of showcase.

Was it in the name of giving writers, actors and directors some experience? I suppose I should’ve polled the participants at the time to ask THEM if they thought it was worth their time and effort. Did the producers feel proud of the work? Did they hope things were going to turn out better? Where they disappointed? Or did they set the bar low and were perfectly happy with the shows?

This isn’t college or even grad school – where frankly, the artistic level at my venues of higher learning was higher than in these productions. If you’re going to charge an audience money, and perform at one of our equity waiver houses, please don’t waive the artistry. Even if you think you’re doing writers and actors a favor by offering them a couple of weekends for their short plays, if the audience gets burned by shallow, obvious plays and hammy acting, they won’t come back.

I said to someone recently regarding my film I’m putting together that, “I’m not just slapping particle board together.”

Less particle board, please.

I gave a film script of mine to a young director some weeks ago. She read it and liked it but had an interesting observation I’ve never heard from a reader before: “All of the characters are gay.”

Technically this is not true, the other people populating the office scenes, the mountain resort scenes, the main-drag-in-the-little town scenes, the restaurant scenes… they are not gay. But those people don’t have lines except for a few of them and the lines are small in number.

The director went on to say it seemed a little odd and an amazing coincidence, as if she, a Pittsburgh native, had gone on vacation to a mountain resort and run into three people from Pittsburgh. Mmm, sort’ve but not really. The focus of the script is a lesbian on vacation and to move the story forward, she needs to run into these other lesbians. There are other people in the background but the story isn’t going in their direction. They’re providing local color.

Am I going to change the script to reflect a more, ah, balanced view? No, I am not.

If this straight director were to visit Outfest or any other queer film festival, she would see that many of the offerings have gay folk front and center and the straight troops are relegated to the spear carrier roles.

The reason I’m making this film (and probably the motivating factor for a lot of other lesbians walking around in my [comfy Merrill hiking] shoes) is to get to see our stories on screen. It doesn’t happen often enough in the mainstream and if we’re hogging all the lines in our scripts, so be it.

Pass the popcorn.

This reminded me of moments onstage when someone says something that changes the temperature in the room.

I want to remember the expressions of their faces as they talked about this on camera.

I want to remember how powerful a personal truth is – even as it has its detractors.

http://www.urbancusp.com/newspost/viola-davis-and-octavia-spencers-mustsee-debate-with-tavis-smiley-video/

The Interview with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/06/146362798/meryl-streep-the-fresh-air-interview

This interview reminds me of what an inspiration Meryl Streep is to me:  how she has forged her own way through middle age in the limelight of celebrity and movie making.  Even though I wasn’t offered the role of “witches” when I was in my forties – I remember the feeling that the only thing left for me was getting old.  And that didn’t seem very powerful.  Now I know better.  (At least I’m trying to know better.)

On the roles she was offered in her 40s and 50s

 “I remember when I turned 40, I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. To play three different witches in three different contexts. It was almost like the world was saying or the studios were saying, ‘We don’t know what to do with you.’ … I think there was, for a long time in the movie business, a period of — when a woman was attractive and marriageable or f- – -able, that was it. And then they didn’t know what to do with you until you were the lioness in winter, until you were 70, and then it was OK to do Driving Miss Daisy … [and] things like that. But that middle period — the most vibrant of a woman’s life, arguably, from 40 to 60, no one knew what to do with them. That really has changed, not completely, not for everybody, but for me it has changed. Part of it has to do with, I wasn’t that word that I just said that you bleeped before; when I was a younger actress, that wasn’t the first thing about me.”

Visual images are part of my creative process.  Unless I get obsessed with the visual images and they get in the way.

Research. Gathering. Hunting.  I’m in a collecting mindspace as I’m trying to reshape/re-image some of my writings.  Unfortunately, I was sent an invitation to Pinterest.  Now I have a place to create bulletin boards of images online – rather than in my multiple file folders crammed with torn out pictures from magazines.  And like a squirrel jamming nuts in my cheeks, I’ve gone over board with my “collections”. 

http://pinterest.com/magicwands/my-love-of-very-large-and-overwrought-hats/

This article about Paula Vogel in today’s New York Times reminded me of a bad landing I once had at the Burbank airport.  Bumpy, breathless, frightening, annoying, and ultimately , I was just grateful I got through it.  Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.  (Or “embroidering” as we like to say in my family).

I thought it was wonderful that this successful playwright was such a champion of big ideas/actions/visuals for plays.  But then, this is Paula Vogel.  Who”… led the playwriting program at Brown University, and since 2008 she has been head of playwriting at Yale. ”  So when she says ” Why are we in theater if we’re not forming something collaboratively?”    – it has a bit more punch, than say, when I say advise my cats in the office.  “No, put your claws in and really shred that paper napkin in the third act.”

And then I thought –  wait a minute.  These weren’t just playwrights at this boot camp. These were:   “playwrights for a day, many of whom were donors to Second Stage. (Invitations were extended to those who had given $3,500 or more to that nonprofit theater company.)”  Oh.  So they had to come up with $3,500 as a fundraiser to participate in this exercise.  That’s when the reading of the article became a little bumpy for me. ($3,500!  $3,500? Really? Oh. But it’s not really for playwrights – its for donors.)  So it wasn’t really a boot camp for playwrights.  It was a boot camp for donors.

And here’s the part of the article that made me annoyed, frightened and breathless, not necessarily in that order:

“Ms. Vogel explained that silence can be a stage direction of enormous power, not only to heighten tension among characters but also to provide a cathartic moment for audiences. She encouraged her writers, in their scripts, to consider leaving half a page blank to underscore the importance of wordlessness to directors and actors.

Such a heavy authorial hand drew heated complaints, however, from Nicholas Gray, a young theater director who had been invited by an associate. Mr. Gray railed against lengthy stage directions, saying he crossed them out in scripts before he would begin rehearsals with his actors.

“It’s the playwright being tyrannical over all of the other artists who will ever work on the play,” Mr. Gray said, adding that even “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” would not escape his pen.”

Well, at least I know that some young theater director, like the Mr. Nicholas Gray, wouldn’t hesitate to cross out any stage directions in a script of mine.  Even if my name was Eugene O’Neill.

I’ve been working on a novel for the past several years – and this is a piece of fiction based on family stories. In this novel I have many kinds of characters: children, men, women, grandparents, dogs, a Maine Coon Cat. And a female slave trying to get to Canada in the maze of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. I’ve just recently started re-writes on this – and in the past few weeks the universe (or the online writing community) has had some amazing articles by writers dealing with the issue of writing in different voices.  I have lots of thinking to do…

http://www.howlround.com/why-am-i-afraid-to-write-african-american-characters-by-marshall-botvinick/

http://www.howlround.com/the-benefits-of-slavery-by-timothy-douglas/

 http://www.howlround.com/a-response-to-timothy-douglas-by-winter-miller/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HowlRound+%28HowlRound.com%27s+Journal%2C+Blog%2C+&+Podcasts%29

I’d learned that as an actor in my theatre  life, when a director asks you to stop doing something on stage, there should be room to do something else instead. (“Stop making that face. ”  “Don’t give him that book.” ) This is usually an immediate gratification director – or more rarely – a director that will trust you will be able to come up with something else instead of just showing that you’re not doing that thing that you were doing.  A request to cease some activity in the creation of the character should lead to another discovery/addition to the process.  At least that was my idea.

RecentlyI’ve read a series of “Don’t Do This” online articles, with advice about how to stop sabotaging behaviors.  I can’t barely read them for all the “Don’t Do This” verbs.  Stop. Don’t. Quit. 

But this article by Chuck Wendig  is something I wanted to share here.  I’ve printed this out and I want to follow it.  Even if it has a lot of stops and don’ts.  And this time I’ve included the whole article here.  Because I didn’t want to stop seeing the whole messge.

Cynthia

****************************************************

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing

by Chuck Wendig

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/03/25-things-writers-should-stop-doing/

I read this cool article last week — “30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself” — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that’s interesting. Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I’m sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost.

That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. If you take away something from it, though?

Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth.

Onto the list.

1.StopRunningAway

Right here is your story. Your manuscript. Your career. So why the fuck are you running in the other direction? Your writing will never chase you — you need to chase your writing. If it’s what you want, then pursue it. This isn’t just true of your overall writing career, either. It’s true of individual components. You want one thing but then constantly work to achieve its opposite. You say you want to write a novel but then go and write a bunch of short stories. You say you’re going to write This script but then try to write That script instead. Pick a thing and work toward that thing.

2.StopStopping

Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping. That story isn’t going to unfuck itself.

3.StopWritingInSomeoneElse’sVoice

You have a voice. It’s yours. Nobody else can claim it, and any attempts to mimic it will be fumbling and clumsy like two tweens trying to make out in a darkened broom closet. That’s on you, too — don’t try to write in somebody else’s voice. Yes, okay, maybe you do this in the beginning. But strive past it. Stretch your muscles. Find your voice. This is going to be a big theme at the start of 2012 — discover those elements that comprise your voice, that put the author in your authority. Write in a way that only you can write.

4.StopWorrying

Worry is some useless shit. It does nothing. It has no basis in reality. It’s a vestigial emotion, useless as — as my father was wont to say — “tits on a boar hog.” We worry about things that are well beyond our control. We worry about publishing trends or future advances or whether or not Barnes & Noble is going to shove a hand grenade up its own ass and go kablooey. That’s not to say you can’t identify future trouble spots and try to work around them — but that’s not worrying. You recognize a roadblock and arrange a path around it — you don’t chew your fingernails bloody worrying about it. Shut up. Calm down. Worry, begone.

5.StopHurrying

The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. As if we’re all rushing forward to squat out as huge a litter of squalling word-babies as our fragile penmonkey uteruses (uteri?) can handle. Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn’t a hot dog eating contest. You’re not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there’s a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs. Put differently: don’t have a freak out, man.

6.StopWaiting

I said “stop hurrying,” not “stand still and fall asleep.” Life rewards action, not inertia. What the fuck are you waiting for? To reap the rewards of the future, you must take action in the present. Do so now.

7.StopThinkingItShouldBeEasier

It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn’t really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don’t just expect hard work — be happy that it’s a hard row to hoe and that you’re just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don’t look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.

8.StopDeprioritizingYourWordsmithy

You don’t get to be a proper storyteller by putting it so far down your list it’s nestled between “Complete the Iditarod (but with squirrels instead of dogs)” and “Two words: Merkin, Macrame.” You want to do this shit, it better be some Top Five Shiznit, son. You know you’re a writer because it’s not just what you do, but rather, it’s who you are. So why deprioritize that thing which forms part of your very identity?

9.StopTreatingYourBodyLikeADumpster

The mind is the writer’s best weapon. It is equal parts bullwhip, sniper rifle, and stiletto. If you treat your body like it’s the sticky concrete floor in a porno theater (that’s not a spilled milkshake) then all you’re doing is dulling your most powerful weapon. The body fuels the mind. It should be “crap out,” not “crap in.” Stop bloating your body with awfulness. Eat well. Exercise. Elsewise you’ll find your bullwhip’s tied in knots, your stiletto’s so dull it couldn’t cut through a glob of canned pumpkin, and someone left peanut-butter-and-jelly in the barrel of your sniper rifle.

10.StopTheMopingAndTheWhining

Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it’ll make the toast darker — does nothing. (Doubly useless: complaining about complaining, which is what I’m doing here.) Blah blah blah, publishing, blah blah blah, Amazon, blah blah blah Hollywood. Stop boo-hooing. Don’t like something? Fix it or forgive it. And move on to the next thing.

11.StopBlamingEveryoneElse

You hear a lot of blame going around — something-something gatekeepers, something-something too many self-published authors, something-something agency model. You’re going to own your successes, and that means you’re also going to need to own your errors. This career is yours. Yes, sometimes external factors will step in your way, but it’s up to you how to react. Fuck blame. Roll around in responsibility like a dog rolling around in an elk miscarriage. Which, for the record, is something I’ve had a dog do, sooooo. Yeah. It was, uhhh, pretty nasty. Also: “Elk Miscarriage” is the name of my indie band.

12.StopTheShame

Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won’t get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We’re just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.

13.StopLamentingYourMistakes

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you fucked up somewhere along the way. Who gives a donkey’s duodenum? Shit happens. Shit washes off. Don’t dwell. Don’t sing lamentations to your errors. Repeat after me: learn and move on. Very few mistakes will haunt you till your end of days unless you let it haunt you. That is, unless your error was so egregious it can never be forgotten (“I wore a Hitler outfit as I went to every major publishing house in New York City and took a poop in every editor’s desk drawer over the holiday. Also, I may have put it on Youtube and sent it to Galleycat. So… there’s that”).

14.StopPlayingItSafe

Let 2012 be the year of the risk. Nobody knows what’s going on in the publishing industry, but we can be damn sure that what’s going on with authors is that we’re finding new ways to be empowered in this New Media Future, Motherfuckers (hereby known as NMFMF). What that means is, it’s time to forget the old rules. Time to start questioning preconceived notions and established conventions. It’s time to start taking some risks both in your career and in your storytelling. Throw open the doors. Kick down the walls of your uncomfortable box. Carpet bomb the Comfort Zone so that none other may dwell there.

15.StopTryingToControlShitYouCan’tControl

ALL THAT out there? All the industry shit and the reviews and the Amazonian business practices? The economy? The readers? You can’t control any of that. You can respond to it. You can try to get ahead of it. But you can’t control it. Control what you can, which is your writing and the management of your career.

16.StopDoingOneThing

Diversification is the name of survival for all creatures: genetics relies on diversification. (Says the guy with no science background and little interest in Googling that idea to see if it holds any water at all.) Things are changing big in these next few years, from the rise of e-books to the collapse of traditional markets to the the galactic threat of Mecha-Gaiman. Diversity of form, format and genre will help ensure you stay alive in the coming entirely-made-up Pubpocalypse.

17.StopWritingFor“TheMarket”

To be clear, I don’t mean, “stop writing for specific markets.” That’s silly advice. If you want to write for the Ladies’ Home Journal, well, that’s writing for a specific market. What I mean is, stop writing for The Market, capital T-M. The Market is an unknowable entity based on sales trends and educated guess-work and some kind of publishing haruspicy (at Penguin, they sacrifice actual penguins — true story!). Writing a novel takes long enough that writing for the market is a doomed mission, a leap into a dark chasm with the hopes that someone will build a bridge there before you fall through empty space. Which leads me to –

18.StopChasingTrends

Set the trends. Don’t chase them like a dog chasing a Buick. Trends offer artists a series of diminishing returns — every iteration of a trend after the first is weaker than the last, as if each repetition is another ice cube plunked into a once strong glass of Scotch. You’re just watering it down, man. Don’t be a knock-off purse, a serial killer copycat, or just another fantasy echo of Tolkien. Do your own thing.

19.StopCaringAboutWhatOtherWritersAreDoing

They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You’re not them. You don’t want to be them and they don’t want to be you. Why do what everyone else is doing? Let me reiterate: do your own thing.

20.StopCaringSoMuchAboutThePublishingIndustry

Know the industry, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. The mortal man cannot change the weave and weft of cosmic forces; they are outside you. Examine the publishing industry too closely and it will ejaculate its demon ichor in your eye. And then you’ll have to go to the eye doctor and he’ll be all like, “You were staring too long at the publishing industry again, weren’t you?” And you’re like, “YES, fine,” and he’s like, “Well, I have drops for that, but they’ll cost you,” and you get out your checkbook and ask him how many zeroes you should fill in because you’re a writer and don’t have health care. *sob*

21.StopListeningToWhatWon’tSell

You’ll hear that. “I don’t think this can sell.” And shit, you know what? That might be right. Just the same — I’d bet that all the stories you remember, all the tales that came out of nowhere and kicked you in the junk drawer with their sheer possibility and potential, were stories that were once flagged with the “this won’t sell” moniker. You’ll always find someone to tell you what you can’t do. What you shouldn’t do. That’s your job as a writer to prove them wrong. By sticking your fountain pen in their neck and drinking their blood. …uhh. I mean, “by writing the best damn story you can write.” That’s what I mean. That other thing was, you know. It was just metaphor. Totally. *hides inkwell filled with human blood*

22.StopOverpromisingAndOvershooting

We want to do everything all at once. Grand plans! Sweeping gestures! Epic 23-book fantasy cycles! Don’t overreach. Concentrate on what you can complete. Temper risk with reality.

23.StopLeavingYourselfOffThePage

You are your stories and your stories are you. Who you are matters. Your experiences and feelings and opinions count. Put yourself on every page: a smear of heartsblood. If we cannot connect with our own stories, how can we expect anybody else to find that connection?

24.StopDreaming

Fuck dreaming. Start doing. Dreams are great — uh, for children. Dreams are intangible and uncertain looks into the future. Dreams are fanciful flights of improbability — pegasus wishes and the hopes of lonely robots. You’re an adult, now. It’s time to shit or get off the pot. It’s time to wake up or stay dreaming. Let me say it again because I am nothing if not a fan of repetition: Fuck dreaming. Start doing.

25.StopBeingAfraid

Fear will kill you dead. You’ve nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill. Everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn’t become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid. Let’s take for granted you’re not lazy. That means you’re afraid. Fear is nonsense. What do you think is going to happen? You’re going to be eaten by tigers? Life will afford you lots of reasons to be afraid: bees, kidnappers, terrorism, being chewed apart by an escalator, Republicans, Snooki. But being a writer is nothing worthy of fear. It’s worthy of praise. And triumph. And fireworks. And shotguns. And a box of wine. So shove fear aside — let fear be gnawed upon by escalators and tigers. Step up to the plate. Let this be your year.

* *

A couple clambered up to sit not far behind me at the recent staged reading of Water Closet and revealed not only their disdain for the title of my play, but that they were only in attendance to be “supportive” after having read an early draft. “Supposedly it has been revised,” the lady added. They knew I was in the room, but not my connection to the play.

After overhearing their conversation, I grinned. Suddenly all of my anxiety and fear dissipated, as I realized I had nowhere to go but up. During the course of the reading I listened with love in my heart for my characters and their painful stories. I remembered the words of the artistic director who wrote me to “listen to the words” in his kind effort to alleviate my abject terror. I laughed and glowed, as the student actors discovered fresh moments in front of an audience for the first time. I actually had a great time!

Apparently so did much of the audience. For at the talk back afterward I received lots of wonderful feedback, as well as some questions about its emotional linearity. That couple? They did not talk back. They didn’t offer one word to the discussion. And it’s okay. I am really cool with it. Really 🙂

In November 2011 Water Closet was read inNew York at a Dramatists Guild Friday Night Footlights event by the White Horse Theater Company. It was a wonderful experience both working with Cyndy Marion and her company, and receiving theNew York audience comments. Both were critical in my reshaping of the play in December in preparation for a January 2012 workshop and staged reading by the Fullerton College New Play Festival. The FC workshop included an intense (challenging without being destructive) dramaturgical session with festival Artistic Director William Mittler that caused me to take yet another scalpel to the play in an effort to make my apparently sub-conscious intentions more clearly understood on the printed page.

I am only beginning to realize my first writing of a play is one that I do not necessarily consciously control. – Usually when I sit down in front of my computer to write – after the initial spark of inspiration and contemplation about how I might articulate it – I feel like “I” step aside, open a door into my sub-conscious, and wait to see who walks out and starts expressing themselves. In my meditation I do actually “hear” them (not in a pathological sense), although I do not always understand their intentions upfront. It was recently pointed out to me that my work has a sort of dream logic and is not linearly realistic.

This then is my greatest challenge when it comes to rewriting: How do I make the seemingly illogical connections (dreams) I’ve made in a text accessible (art) to a listening or reading audience, so my play might actually find a production? Fortunately I do enjoy the process of rewriting, although the experience of rewriting is completely different.

I am beginning to research and write a new play, We Don’t Serve White Bread Here. However I do hope to return to the topic of what is the source of imagination, as I am curious to discover if there is a sort of communion among playwrights… Today I stumbled upon Dr. Lance Owens Tolkien lectures; fascinating… I would be curious to know what your mind “feels” as you write, if you would care to comment!