Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

On Line Classes

On line Classes

Teaching an Online class is quite different from any other form of instruction. Since the class can’t see the instructor, the materials are more analogous to a novel that a stage play. This is to say that all you have to go by is the written word, although I am sure innovations are on the way that will expand that horizon. After looking around I feel that New Horizons offers better on line courses and instruction than other on line schools. There are Course pages and lesson plans and instructors that show up more frequently providing more feedback than is commonly the case. The problem is that the student doesn’t have that one on one visual interface with the instructor that happens in a more traditional classroom.

There is no mean old teacher to exhort and threaten if the assignments are not handed in on time, and the threat of having to face a real person each day if you don’t go to class or show up unprepared. To further complicate my problem teaching the One Act Play is the fact that WDC is oriented to short stories, vignettes, novels and poetry and is not exactly a Mecca for screen plays and stage plays. The way a staged production is written is quite different from the way a novel is written. The reason is obviously because there is a stage. I submit that half of our communications with one another is verbal while the other half is reading body language, nuance, inflection and the actions of those reacting to our words. On a stage you can show this to an extent, not to the degree of a screen play, but with some, albeit less resolution. So here I am in a site with expository writers when I am more accustomed to staged productions.

The way this develops is that with a novel or short story the reader needs more words to compensate for what can’t be seen on the stage. The expository writer must illuminate the stage of a reader's imagination and this takes more words than if the stage is already illuminated by the genre. The stage is a big help in conveying sensory and emotional inputs performed by the actors.

In a sense a monologue in a stage drama is like exposition in a novel. In a monologue an actor stands on the stage and tells the audience what the character is thinking, and feeling emotionally and the two big senses, sight and sound can be directly observed. Thus the monologue/dialogue does not need to convey as much as it does in a novel. When I first started writing here I got continuously hammered because I had difficulty grasping this point. I saw my dialogue supplemented by actions of the actors and the set on the stage. My crisp banter did not need to show and tell as much as it would in a short story. Thus when I wrote in some of the classes I took the instructors responded that my writing was sterile and clinical and they were right from the perspective of a novel writer. Now hold that thought.

So when I see monologues or dialogs written by a novel writer for a stage play they contain much more information, information that is necessary in a book or essay but that’s overkill in a play.

When I was in school the material was always slow to sink in. The minions of my mind took their time sorting and filing the information I was learning and I was often only able to access it after it had been percolating and digestion and being processed for several months in the caverns of my psyche. The only thing that could speed the process up was my fear that I would flunk out of college… When the minions got the drift of that message they went to plan “B”…. actually it was plan “C” which translates to the grade I needed to keep from getting booted out on my butt. So when I began taking writing courses at WDC I wrote like I did writing stage plays and that tended to leave the reader nonplused. After a year here I am beginning to get the hang of exposition in a short story or novel. I am beginning to figure out that I can show the mind of the Central Character and need to use this more effectively. Concurrently I need to explain the emotional response of the other characters whose minds I can’t plumb Omni potently. Then there are the senses and emotions, that need to be considered and developed.

So on the one hand I have students who take the need for exposition more for granted and try and say too much, contrasted by my understanding of how a set and actors allow the dramatist a greater economy of words. Sometimes we have trouble getting on the same wavelength.