Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Water Wings

Water Wings

If you wonder where I have been on my blog the past few days it has been outside. Winter is a much better time for blogging than Springtime. The farm here looks like a salvage yard and Linda is raising Hell that I get things cleaned up. Then there are my automotive projects which get more fatiguing as the years rush by.

Still I have kept my eye on the Course I am teaching and answering promptly and with encouragement the progress of my students. I don’t intend to let that one fall and in fact it has not proven to be as time consuming as I anticipated. It’s the students after all who have to write the plays and I am amazed and fascinated by the direction the individual writers are taking.

I think many writers just pick up a pen and start writing. Following the keys to see where this or that idea is going to lead. In a smaller work that might work but in one of greater complexity that approach is asking for trouble. It is so easy for a larger work….like a larger fish, to get away from the writer.

I don’t care how brilliant a writer is or how powerful a memory they possess they are still human beings and while I concede that some are more capable than others everybody’s brain capacity, in my opinion, gets exceeded at anything beyond 2500 words. If you are venturing into deep water you need something to help keep you afloat and I am not referring to “Water Wings.” I am referring to an OUTLINE.

The reason so many writers fail is because there is no structure, no front end packaging of fundamentals, a central character who is anything but central, and bite sized chunks that lead consistently from one crises to the next and culminates in the big bad tsunami that rises and falls coming ever closer as the end draws near.

This One Act Play Course offers a huge benefit to an aspiring writer that I didn’t fully realize when I got into teaching it. A One Act Play is the Flash fiction of Drama and if you can write one properly it will have huge spin-off benefits to anyone working at improving their writing skills.