Tag Archives: Breaking Cycles

Reflection: From Words to Stage a Journey

It’s a little bit funny… This feeling inside…

Playwright's FestivalStill trying to decipher it, but nonetheless there is something to be said about seeing something that one has nurtured from a speck of an idea in one’s imagination to words on paper. Then to trust another party to take those words that you have already cut up, broken, chopped, sewn together, simmer, percolate, etc until it is ripe for someone to then cast actors and have them act those same words out for others to see…

There is just something incredibly profound about the process and I had the chance to see that happen on stage last night during the tech rehearsal prior to opening weekend.

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UPDATE: NaNoWriMo Day 21

Wow, this was a rather strong writing day. Didn’t expect that. I kind of just sat down, reworked a few scenes, redistributed a bunch of lines and expanded on Scene Six. Now I am done with Scene Six and am looking into my research to see what I have to do next…

Total Word Count: 6,010

Yup, that is a pretty decent jump.

Granted I have been doing a little bit of editing other stuff… so really is this any surprise? I also added an Afterword to the script to gives additional information about inspiration and how the idea came about… which added to the over all word count.

When looking at the “research” for the series of vignettes… I ended up breaking down approximately how many other scenes I most likely have and I counted at minimum around eight and at most? Ha I don’t want to think about that yet… yeeeeaaaah I am not even halfway done. Go figure.

So what else do I have in the queue should I be so lucky as to finish writing the vignettes? Well there is the first ten-minute play formally named “Cycles”, I also have another ten-minute that is going to undergo heavy revisions if not a full out rewrite called “Moments”. Another script that needs to go through heavy revisions is based off of Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man”.

Then of course there is the full show that I have to streamline called “Arrangements”… if I do this right I would be able to whittle the character list from ten to six and possibly even five… but I am unsure if I could even do that! Ugh.

Of course I have all these prose projects that have been on back burner… in the end I am just glad to have gotten started on anything at all… hopefully this motivation lasts into the next month or so. We’ll see.

UPDATE: NaNoWriMo Days 18 and 19

So during a rehearsal line read through over the weekend I went through a couple of ten minute plays of mine and reworked and continued to edit them. I have completed the editing process for one and once I have implemented the changes will go through it again one more time before sending it off to a couple of close friends for their opinions on the changes.

As for the other? Well it needs work. I like the concept and the idea and the whys, but since a lot of the dialogue is based off of conversations I had many moons ago what works in real life doesn’t necessarily work on stage. So I have two choices I could rework from the script what I want or I could scrap the whole thing and just start from scratch. Now that I have a better idea of what I want to do and how to shape it, the latter might be more to my liking, who knows.

What is on the agenda? Other than the above I still have the series of vignettes to continue working on. I am tempted to just go back and start formatting the sucker for my sanity and so others could start reading (or I could start editing) but I don’t know if that would help or hinder the process… Meh, does it really matter? I am getting stuff done… that’s all that counts. 😉

Overall I have gotten… or have been getting a lot more done editing-wise than I had initially anticipated, and it is a good feeling. Moreso now that I have a couple half an hour or so just sitting down and focusing on editing during rehearsals. Multi-tasking is a beautiful thing.

UPDATE NaNoWriMo Days 4 and 15

Yup, you read that right… I didn’t do any writing between days 4 and 15… and it is rather depressing, but what can one do?

So why am I updating? Because I have managed to go through and reproduce three of the five scenes that I lost in the deletion of one script… so that word count is up to around 5,000… but not only that I started expanding and adding in pieces here and there to fill out the scenes already written.

Needless to say I am a bit excited because the next two scenes aren’t not aspects just thrown together, but rather actual events with lots of information that could stand alone. Once I have these last two scenes rewritten I would be golden and after that it is all new material… in the matter of speaking.

Take that a step further and I spent some time earlier today editing the first ten-minute play I ever wrote. I purposely placed the piece on back burner because I wanted a fair amount of time to pass before looking at it again and most likely heavily editing it. Which is what ended up happening.

I deleted a character… rearranged a few lines… changed the mentality of one of the characters so there is more of a punch / conflict and I am happy with what I have.

With some time over the weekend… in between everything else going on, mayhaps I will find time for additional writing?