Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Pain and Anguish

Pain

One of my students came in with a One Act Play that was surprisingly well done. There has been a tension between us and I have kept trying to get her to follow the model rather than her own light. Well I guess we both bent a little and what she wrote turned out exceeding well, exceeding all my expectations. I am very happy for her. I wrote a piece a while back that dealt with an art exhibit. A banker was sponsoring the exhibit and asked an art teacher to bring him up to speed on judging art. She told him that the most important aspect of judging was the “Wow! Factor.” That is where you stand back and look at the work and if it dazzles and excites your passion you say wow!

That is how I felt last night reading this student’s work and despite the fact that she went off on something of a tangent and didn’t really follow the model as closely as I wanted, when I finished reading her work, I said “WOW!“ When I get close with a magnifying glass there are things I could comment on but that would seem like sour grapes. Instead I backed off and simply gave her the credit and praise she deserved.

I have two more students that have also struggled applying the model and at times the frustration level between us has also been strained. Still I see real progress in their work even though at times I know they have wanted to tell me to take a hike. I suppose that nothing in life is ever achieved without some pain.

Yesterday I wrote a blog that might not have made a whole lot of sense. What I was trying to express was not exactly self evident to Karen, my boss and mentor but it was an important revelation to me. It was an attempt to explain why my writing has been fraught with struggle here at WDC. The reason, it finally dawned is because my dialogue is written to be spoken on a stage rather than read in a novel or short story. Dialogue is not simply dialogue. If you can see the conversation taking place that is one thing as in real life or watching a stage or screen play. There is so much more to conversation than just the words… there is the body language, inflection, tone of voice, movement that supplements the words and seeing and adjusting to the effect they are having on another person. In a novel, or short story that stage has to be illuminated in the mind of the reader. It takes more words and hence the importance of the effect the words are having in a genre where the players are not actually seen. I am going back now and rewriting some of the material I got hammered on in some of the courses I have taken in the past year and trying to add that missing exposition in. That is what I was trying to express yesterday.

On the other hand my students come from a short story or novel frame of reference. When they write dialogue they are not thinking concurrently about their words and the backdrop of the stage. They are thinking about a novel where they have to explain more to create the necessary imagery in the minds eye of the reader. Duh! This is so simple to see in retrospect but the cause of so much frustration and anguish in going from one genre to the other.

Good dialogue is hard enough to write without having to transition from one to the other . We need a course on writing dialogue, exposition and monologues. These are huge and deserve more treatment that I can provide in one class session. Still we learn as writers by doing and my students have been “doing” a lot of that. And I still have 5 that are continuing in the chase to writing their dramas. In pain there is progress and I have to think regardless of how little or much I can impart, that all my students will understand the Story Telling Model before the class ends.

They will leave with an understanding that a drama centers around a Central Character (CC), that the audience must quickly latch onto… that this character gets a before, during and after snapshot, that this character has a want need or desire and faces a life changing event, and decides to do something about the direction their life is taking. That there are a series of crisis that develop as a consequence where the audience sees the CC’s change and these crisis build on one another each more daunting than the last until the big tsunami sweeps over them changing their lives forever. Then the audience is brought to closure and leave the theater wrung out by the catharsis that has been wrought, be it tragedy of Comedy, tears or laughter and have something to talk about on the ride home.