Category: Read/Write

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 28 – Art

Hi playwrights, did you enjoy our last play of the challenge? Art, by Yasmina Reza, is about an argument between two friends, Serge and Marc, in which each of them tries to drag in their third friend, Ivan, to take sides and settle things. With only three characters, a very spare setting, and a focused dispute over the purchase of an all-white painting, the play is a good example of Reza’s style, which has been called “little-black-dress theater.” I saw a production of this play years ago at the Steppenwolf theater in Chicago. I remember how funny it was, in that late-90s Seinfeld sort of way, where the characters get into an endless debate over something ridiculously trivial. But underlying the humor are serious feelings of insecurity and resentment that have infiltrated the friends’ once easy relationship.

One Thing I Noticed: The characters sometimes stop in the middle of their conversation or argument and face the audience to deliver a monologue that is like a commentary on what is going on in the scene. We get the sense that we are reliving the scene as an instant replay, with the character as our guide.

One Idea: Write a play in which two friends disagree about something–some physical object, where it came from, what it’s worth, what to do about it–and drag a third and very reluctant person into their argument.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 21 – Look Back In Anger

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Hi playwrights! Today we’re going to talk about the third play on our monthly reading list, Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne. A three-act play that premiered in 1956, “Look Back In Anger” features a young married couple, Alison and Jimmy, the lodger who shares their cramped attic apartment, Cliff, and, at the end of the first act, Alison’s friend Helena, who has come to visit. Jimmy is presented as a volatile, almost manic character (indeed, the play is famous for his tirades). Described as “strongly autobiographical,” the play is based in large part on Osborne’s failing marriage. It centers on the social gulf between upper-middle-class Alison and firmly working class Jimmy.

One Thing I Noticed: The character descriptions. Oh my god, the character descriptions! They are works of art. Just read these:

“Jimmy is a tall, thin young man about twenty-five, wearing a very worn tweed jacket and flannels. Clouds of smoke fill the room from the pipe he is smoking. He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.”
* * *
“Cliff is the same age, short, dark, big boned, wearing a pullover and grey, new, but very creased trousers. He is easy and relaxed, almost to lethargy, with the rather sad, natural intelligence of the self-taught. If Jimmy alienates love, Cliff seems to exact it –demonstrations of it, at least, even from the cautious. He is a soothing, natural counterpoint to Jimmy.”
* * *
“Standing L, below the food cupboard, is Alison. She is leaning over an ironing board. Beside her is a pile of clothes. Hers is the most elusive personality to catch in the uneasy polyphony of these three people. She is turned in a different key, a key of well-bred malaise that is often drowned in the robust orchestration of the other two. Hanging over the grubby, but expensive, skirt she is wearing is a cherry red shirt of Jimmy’s, but she manages somehow to look quite elegant in it. She is roughly the same age as the men. Somehow, their combined physical oddity makes her beauty more striking than it really is. She is tall, slim, dark. The bones of her face are long and delicate. There is a surprising reservation about her eyes, which are so large and deep they should make equivocation impossible.”
* * *
“Helena enters. She is the same age as Alison, medium height, carefully and expensively dressed. Now and again, when she allows her rather judicial expression of alertness to soften, she is very attractive. Her sense of matriarchal authority makes most men who meet her anxious, not only to please but impress, as if she were the gracious representative of visiting royalty. In this case, the royalty of that middle-class womanhood, which is so eminently secure in its divine rights, that it can afford to tolerate the parliament, and reasonably free assembly of its menfolk. Even from other young women, like Alison, she receives her due of respect and admiration. In Jimmy, as one would expect, she arouses all the rabble-rousing instincts of his spirit. And she is not accustomed to having to defend herself against catcalls. However, her sense of modestly exalted responsibility enables her to behave with an impressive show of strength and dignity, although the strain of this is beginning to tell on her a little. She is carrying a large salad colander.”
* * *

The descriptions are so full of detail and heavy with meaning that at first they may seem difficult to penetrate. They describe such specific characters that I had trouble at first conjuring them up in my mind. But the dialogue of the play matches them perfectly. That is how we really get to know the characters. Then we come back to the descriptions and say “Ah yes! That’s exactly what Jimmy is like.” Now, you may remember my earlier post on character descriptions, and the advice to keep them simple, leaving room for theater folks you will collaborate with if the play is performed to have some say in things, and to make it so that many different types of actors can play a role. Well, I think that is all sound advice, but rules are made to be broken, right? And when they’re broken so masterfully, then you have art.

One Idea: Write a scene or a play in which a musical instrument plays a significant role–is almost its own character–like Jimmy’s trumpet. Let the other characters react to the music and have the music emphasize the mounting tension of the play or contrast with the narrative arc in some noticeable way.

One More Idea: Write a play in which a later scene references a previous one. In the third act of Look Back In Anger, for example, Helena stands at the ironing board ironing, wearing Jimmy’s red shirt, just as Alison did in the first scene.

Thanks playwrights! I hope you enjoy reading our last play, Art, by Yasmina Reza, next week. Join me tomorrow to move past exercises, as we round out the month working on a cohesive play in multiple scenes.

[Also, stay tuned for a preview of next month’s challenge: Experience Journaling.]

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 14 – Topdog/Underdog

Sorry for the late post playwrights! I was on the road yesterday and returned home to find my Internet was down.

It’s time to talk about the second play on our reading list for the month, Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for this play in 2002. The committee described the play as follows:

“A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, Topdog/Underdog tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names, given to them as a joke, foretell a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by their past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.”

The play takes place in Booth’s cramped apartment, where Lincoln has come to live because his wife kicked him out for cheating. Lincoln, an ex-card sharp who “swore off thuh cards,” dons white face makeup to take a job as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, where tourists pay money to shoot him. Booth, determined to learn his brother’s former trade, doesn’t seem to have what it takes to be a hustler and instead resorts to shoplifting to survive. The two reminisce about their childhood and share their memories of when, as teenagers, their parents left them to find their own way in the world. One minute they give each other heartfelt career advice, the next they insult each other as only brothers can. The tensions between them build to a tragic climax.

The play is about what it means to be family and what it means to be a black man in America. It is about struggling through life, but with someone else, not alone. Parks has also said it is about “who the world thinks you’re going to be, and how you struggle with that.”

One Thing (Okay, Two Things) I Noticed: Parks uses the simple stage direction “(rest),” to indicate a pause in a character’s speech, but she also quite often will just list the character’s names, one after the other, as if they are going to give a line of dialogue but then don’t. It’s almost as if the characters are tossing the awkward silence back and forth between them like a ball. She also sometimes has the characters deliver a shared line together. As she explains in this great interview in The Interval–which is chock full of insights on the craft of playwriting and the author’s creative process—she sometimes makes the decision to do this when she is revising a play for a new production.

One Idea: Write a play in which two or more characters come and go from a central “home base”: roommates coming and going from their apartment, co-workers with back-to-back shifts, a courier making daily deliveries. Have the story unfold as the characters relate to each other what has taken place in the outside world since their last meeting. Let what they choose to reveal and how they reveal it expose the nature of their relationship.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 7 – Death of a Salesman

Hi writers, we’ve reached the end of Week 1 of our playwriting workshop! As we worked on writing the component parts of a play, I hope you also enjoyed reading the first of four plays we’ll discuss this month, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. This is of course the classic, award-winning play about Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman. In a series of flashbacks, Willy looks back on his life, in which he has always just managed to scrape by but has never achieved the sort of success he imagined he would, and tries to determine where and why everything went wrong. The play is in two acts (plus a requiem) and has only a handful of main characters. It is about success, failure, and the American dream. It is also about the relationship between fathers and sons, the way fathers graft their unrealized dreams onto their sons, and what happens when sons become disillusioned when they discover their fathers’ faults.

Many, many people have analyzed this play over the years. If the version you read has a good introduction, then you already have some understanding of its themes and innovations. As I did with the short stories we read last month, I’m going to make only a couple of points: one thing I noticed and one idea the play gave me for my own future writing.

One Thing I Noticed: Miller really plays with time here. It’s what the play is famous for. Time collapses as Willy’s worries coalesce. This is primarily achieved through set design and stage direction. When the scene is in the present, the characters respect the wall lines of the house. When it is in the past, they are free to step through the walls to the forestage, which also doubles as the house’s back yard. With this simple trick the past and the present seem to coexist, as if everything has already played out and we are right there with Willy, sifting through the layers of sediment to figure out what happened to his life.

I recently saw a production of Macbeth in which the normal subdued lighting was switched (I think a little chime also sounded) to a glaring overhead light each time the audience was meant to understand that the words Macbeth spoke were not heard by the other characters onstage but were his own internal thoughts. This was pretty effective. Under that glaring light the audience saw Macbeth for who he really was, a man driven by ruthless ambition.

One Idea: Play with the idea of causation. Write a scene in two ways (three? four?), exploring two very different outcomes. See if, through set design, lighting, costumes, or how the characters interact with each other or move on the stage, you can present both versions simultaneously. Maybe the same exact thing is happening in the different versions until one moment, when something happens that makes the stories split off from each other and triggers the different outcomes. Are the versions alternate realities? Do they exist only in the mind of one of your characters, who is wondering “what if?” Do the versions stray from each other but then come back, so that the outcomes are essentially the same? Does this say something about fate or inevitability in your character lives?

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Read/Write Challenge – Recap

Hi writers! So how did you fare during our June Read/Write Challenge?

I had a few goals in mind when I began this challenge. First, I wanted to practice reading like a writer without getting too bogged down and forgetting to enjoy what I was reading. The formula I arrived at–(1) notice one thing the author does and (2) jot down one idea to try in my future writing–seems to work pretty well and I hope to continue using it.

Second, I wanted to continue to cultivate a daily writing habit. I have to admit that on many days it was difficult for me to find even 20 minutes of uninterrupted time to write. My brain doesn’t really start to function until halfway through my second cup of coffee and, by that point, my kids are usually stumbling downstairs and asking me for things. And at the end of a long day, I just want to collapse.

I guessed that 20 minutes of writing generally got me one page, front and back, in the notebook I carry around with me, so I used that as a guide instead and collected sentences throughout the day. One while waiting for the train, one at my desk before turning my computer on, a few at lunch, one in the parking lot before heading into the grocery store, one in the parking lot again before driving home. It is possible to write this way. I promise. It is even possible to write something good this way. I read once that Toni Morrison wrote her first novel a few minutes at a time, getting up at 4 a.m., before her long days as a single working mother of two young children began. Persist, writers!

I also wanted to explore a new source of writing prompts. And writing from random lines in the books on my shelves was pretty fun. Talk about an endless source of ideas! Some of the lines I chose took me in places I would not have otherwise gone with my writing. Sci-fi, historic fiction, different tones. And now I see writing prompts in everything I read. Do you know what I mean? Those cryptic lines of text you run across that belong to one story but hint at many more. I missed a couple of days but I’m pretty satisfied overall. On Day 28 I even got so carried away with what I was writing that I continued it on Day 29, instead of starting with a new prompt.

So what do you do if you used this method and wrote something spectacular that you want to submit for publication (congratulations, btw)? Plagiarism is of course not an option. First, see if you can just omit your prompt line. It got you started, sure, but is it essential? Leaving it out may actually improve your piece, by throwing the reader right into the action. And if you simply can’t do without it, consider make it an epigraph, giving the author full attribution.

Whatever you do, hang onto the story starters and ideas you came up with this month. For one of our upcoming challenges I hope to do a whole month turning writing “scraps” like these into finished pieces.

And now, on to the next challenge!

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 30

Hi readers! We’ve come to the last day of our challenge. And our last short story, “A Visit of Charity,” by Eudora Welty. The story is about a young girl who has to visit an elderly person in order to earn points as a campfire girl and sets off on the bus with a potted plant to visit some old ladies in a nursing home. It is a humorous encounter between youth and age. The two bickering old ladies the girl visits descend upon her, questioning her, drawing her into their ongoing feud, and, even as she’s leaving, begging her for money. The girl is repulsed by everything about the experience. She is doing it only because she has to and can’t wait to escape. 

One Thing I Noticed: The story is written in the third person limited point of view. We are privy to the girl Marian’s thoughts, but no one else’s. In a lot of ways, this can be the best of both worlds.  The reader is not trapped in the head of a single character but can roam about and observe things independently. But there is continuity in following the experience of one character that you lose if you write from the third person omniscient point of view, which gives the reader access to the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters.

One Idea: Play with genre. Try writing one kind of story in the style of another. “A Visit of Charity,” for example, is a humorous little drama that unfolds like a horror story. The old ladies have animal and plant qualities; when they laugh they sound like bleating sheep and their hands feel like clinging petunia leaves. The place feels damp and “smells like the interior of a clock.” We see the terror rising in the main character, until she finally breaks free, pursued, asked to stay for dinner, as if the place itself wants to consume her. Try writing a suspenseful love scene, a mystery in the form of a fairy tale (or vice versa), a ghost story that unfolds as a romantic comedy, or a sci-fi story as political satire.

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 29

[continued from Day 28]

Fenton “Fen,” Jr., a lanky boy of 13, with closely trimmed hair, took the stand, swore on a bible, said “yes ma’am,” and “yes, sir,” and did a pretty good job of appearing to be what he was, a kid from a tough neighborhood who had somehow managed to stay out of trouble. Until now.

“Fen, is your father Fenton Walker, Sr., the defendant in this case?”

“Yeah, that’s my dad.”

“And the victim, Tanya Walker, that was your sister?”

“Yeah.” Fen’s eyes dropped to his lap, where his hands lay clasped in his lap.

“Fen, would you please take a look at this photo, marked as People’s Exhibit No. 25. Can you tell the jury what you see there?”

“A blue hat. It’s a Fila baseball hat.”

“Fen, did you and your father live together?”

“Yeah, we all did. Me, Tanya, my dad, my mom.”

“And you saw your father often?”

“Objection, Your Honor.” The ASA was losing her patience.

“Overruled.” Judge Kilwin gave me a look that could wilt lettuce. “Counsel, lay your foundation and get to the point.” To Fen, he said “Son, you can answer.”

“I saw him every day.” 

“Would you say you are familiar with your father’s clothing, then?” I said, eyeing the judge.

“Yeah, I’m familiar. We ain’t rich, okay? My dad don’t got a lot of different clothes.”

And so I got right to the point. “Fen, did your father own a blue Fila baseball hat like the one in People’s Exhibit 25?”

“No.” Fen shook his head twice. “He ain’t never had a hat like that.”

I could have stopped here. I thought about it. But that wasn’t the plan. So I asked my last question.

“You’re sure about that, Fen?”

“I’m positive.” And he did look positive. Damn. The kid had done great.

“No further questions, Your Honor.” The Judge narrowed his eyes at me. He knew I was up to something but wasn’t sure what. I got the impression that the judge didn’t think too highly of my skills as a litigator. And that was fine. I wasn’t here to win an award. I was here to get my client acquitted. I returned to counsel’s table wearing my best poker face. I pretended to look through a file, watching the ASA from the corner of my eye.

She was thinking, tapping her pen on her lower lip. Maybe she smelled a trap. But that bait … those two words–I’m positive–dangling there in the space of the courtroom. One thing you have to understand about lawyers, certainty in an adverse witness is like blood in the water. It triggers something primitive.

“Counsel?” Judge Kilwin was eager to wrap things up.

The ASA stopped her tapping and stood. She’d decided. “Just a few questions, your honor.” Atta girl.

She took her time approaching the witness stand, pacing back and forth as if she was debating something serious. You had to admire the theatrics. Finally she asked, “Mr. Walker …,” and then, as if it had just occurred to her, “May I call you Fen?”

“Most do.” He was being nice, just like I’d told him.

“Fen, have you memorized every article of clothing in your father’s closet?”

“I wouldn’t say memorized.”

“You wouldn’t?” The ASA raised her eyebrows about as high as they would go.

“No.”

“Well I’m a little confused, then. When you say you’re positive that your father didn’t have a blue hat like that, isn’t that what you’re really saying?”

“No.” Fen looked a little indignant. I couldn’t blame him.

“Well, let me put it this way. Is it possible your father bought a new hat and wore it once or twice before you knew about it?”

“I guess.”

“Does your dad own a lot of hats?”

“Some.” Now Fen was looking at her like she was a complete idiot. Keep cool, kid, I thought.

“How many would you say. More than five?”

“Yeah.”

“More than ten?”

“Sure.”

“More than ten!” The ASA’s eyebrows appeared ready to take flight from her face. “More than 15?”

“Nah, not that many.” The eyebrows settled back down to earth.

“Ten to fifteen hats.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Sitting here today, Fen, could you describe each one of those hats to us?”

“No ma’am.”

“Fen, are you still willing to tell this jury–and I want to remind you that you are under oath–are you still willing to tell them you are positive that is not your father’s blue hat?

Fen didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

The ASA was smirking now. She should stop. But I could already see she wouldn’t. “But how can you be so certain?” I stopped breathing. That was it. She’d stepped into the trap. And just like that, it slammed shut on her.

“Because that’s my hat, ma’am. Ain’t nobody wearing it that night but me.”

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 28

” ‘There is one more thing, Your Honor,’ I said.” From Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Traver, p. 259.

* * *

“There is one more thing, Your Honor,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Turling?”

“Your Honor, the defense calls Fenton Walker, Jr.”

Judge Kilwin looked up from the papers he was shuffling and peered sternly at me over his glasses, one eyebrow raised. “Approach.”

I strode to the podium, the assistant state’s attorney clacking behind me in her high heels. She’d been flipping through notes for her closing argument. She thought we were done. We weren’t done.

The ASA pushed a piece of hair behind her ear and glared at me before starting in. “Your Honor, this witness was not disclosed. And frankly, I’m not sure what he could possibly offer. The defendant himself told the police that his son was not at home on the night of June 8, 2009, and the neighbor, Mrs. … Mrs. …”

“Fairview,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

“Mrs. Fairview. She testified that Fenton Jr., “Fen,” I think she called him, was sleeping over at her house that night. He was in the basement with her son Carl, playing video games. She checked on them at 9 p.m. and again just after midnight. Your honor, this is a pretty transparent effort, in my view, to garner sympathy from the jury–to say, hey, look at this poor boy who will grow up without a father if you find the defendant guilty. The time for that is at sentencing, not at a jury trial for first degree murder. I would ask …”

Judge Kilwin had heard enough. “Mr. Turling? Your response?”

“Rebuttal witness, Your Honor.”

“And what, exactly, will the young Mr. Walker be rebutting?”

“Your Honor, Officer May, the forensic evidence tech, testified that he found a blue Fila hat at the scene of the crime. Fen is gong to testify that his father owned no such hat.”

“That’s it?” The judge seemed confused.

“That’s it.”

“Fine. Get him up there, get your answer and get him down. We’re not parading family members around now. This trial is almost over with.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The ASA looked disgusted.

[To be continued …]

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 27

“It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.” The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 96

* * *

It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord. The boy’s thick brown hair, standing up in crests, was dented in the front from the rim of the baseball hat he held in one hand. He had mischievous eyes, cheeks still flushed from the game, a broad smile, and a dimpled chin. Claire stared at him. And then she chided herself. She could be his mother.

Standing next to the boy was a smaller version of himself–same smile, same hair, the ears sticking out a bit from under his hat—what the boy looked like two years ago, Claire guessed. And then he’d grown into the ears, shot up a foot, and adopted a grown person’s manners. “Hi ma’am, I’m Joe, and this is my brother Paul. We’re looking to do some yardwork around the neighborhood this summer. Mowing and weeding, mostly. We can do leaves in the fall too.”

Claire recognized him then: Joey Granger. Theresa Granger’s oldest child. How was that possible? She remembered him, at four or five years old, pedaling around the block on a little blue tricycle. The Granger’s had that massive dog. A Saint Bernard, maybe? And they’d let little Joey have the reign of the neighborhood, knowing the dog would never leave his side. Claire had a vision of the dog’s massive paw pressing on the front fender of the tricycle, stopping the boy from pedaling out into the street.

“Joey, my god, I’m Claire Forster, I used to be friends with your mother.” His face underwent some barely perceptible transformation. “But that was so long ago. Didn’t you all move out to Fox Hills?”

“We did ma’am.” He shifted the duffel bag full of baseball equipment from one shoulder to the other. The younger boy bit his lip and studied the tip of his shoe, grinding it into the pavement in a rocking motion.

“We moved back here a few months ago, though,”  the boy explained.

“Not into the same house?” Claire remembered with a tinge of jealousy the beautiful old timber and stone Craftsman with the eyebrow dormers.

“No, but it’s the same street.”

“Oh, your mother must be so pleased! She always loved that block.” The boys stared at her, as if she’d suggested something obscene. Claire felt herself smiling stiffly, a twinge of uncertainty now playing at the corner of her mouth.

“No, ma’am.”

“No?” She felt something inside her sink and then settle again.

“Our mom is … she died. Last year. She got cancer.” The boy blinked, pretended to look down the block.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Joey.” She hadn’t meant to call him that. It was too familiar, a little boy’s name.

He turned and looked her right in the eye. “So do you need some help with your yard, ma’am? I mean, Mrs. Forster?”

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 26

“He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him.” From Stories of the Knights of the Round Table, by Henry Gilbert, p. 106.

* * *

He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him. With a tug of the reigns the horse reared up and whinnied, eyes bulging and nostrils flaring. Faldo scanned the courtyard’s perimeter, shaded by the massive timber balconies above. Matching his movement, the horse turned in a slow, wary circle. Something was wrong.

The last time Faldo had set foot in this courtyard it had been bursting with noise, on the first market day of spring. People from the surrounding towns had flung off the stinking furs of a long, dark winter, scrubbed themselves pink in the brooks and streams, and donned clean linen breaches and tight-laced kirtles. They’d traveled for days, then waited in long queues to gain entry to the massive courtyard. Once inside the near-circular enclosure, goods were arrayed by type, in baskets and barrels, on makeshift tables, and in the backs of wagons. There were spring vegetables and herbs, mounds of cut flowers, wood carvings and ironworks toiled over in the cold months, embroidery, skeins of wool, beeswax candles, pies and cakes, gleaming jars of new honey, and baskets of speckled blue and brown eggs.

Children chased each other between the wagons and stalls, tossing hoops and balls, or clattering together in mock battle with rough wooden swords. Performers were generally relegated to the grounds outside the castle, but the odd juggler or stilt-walker still made his way through the crowd, knowing that folks were more apt to part with their coins before they’d buried them in their pockets than after.

A sudden motion made Faldo spin in his saddle. He squinted, peering into the heaps of discarded wood and moldering bales of hay stacked in the shadow of the far stone wall. A cat, piebald, with one ice-blue eye, sat on an old barrel, twitching its tail seductively. It was thin, half-starved probably, but he recognized it all the same. It was the seer’s cat.

He could picture her now, the old woman with the gnarled fingers full of rings, gold filigree and blood-red rubies stacked next to bands of braided wheatgrass and twine–totemic looking things. He remembered how her eyes, so like those of her cat, had given him such a start in the dim candlelight of her smoke-filled tent. It was just there, he thought, at the edge of the courtyard, that she’d taken his own hand in hers and told him. Told him everything. That this would come to pass. that he would live to see this place hushed, full of ghosts. And now he had.