Influence

A few years ago I saw a play my sister was in, "The Dining Room". I really didn't remember anything about that show, other than one detail that I now am going to incorporate into the script that I'm writing. In "The Dining Room" before a scene ends, the next one starts. This is a huge deal for me because I haven't been able to think of any real influences so far that really impacted what I was doing. I found a copy of the play in my sister's room that she never returned to the library. I'm going to be reading this weekend. I hope by the time next week comes I can be able to fully incorporate this idea.

Fixing a Monologue

So today I spent most of my time fixing a monologue. What the monologue is about is a girl who is at her father's grave and is taking out her grievances toward him and how him being an alcoholic has ruined her life, but realizes that she will actually miss him and is upset because she had dreamed of this for her a long time. I want to show how tarnished the relationship is and how much of a right she has to be upset with him but also show that she can't hate him because he had an addiction. What I most enjoyed was how this idea I had at the beginning for this changed. I first just wanted the daughter to be happy, nothing but joy at her father's death to show how messed up she was. As I was writing it I realized that making her look happy about her father's death would make her personality seem foul and unlikeable and I want people to sympathise with her because of what she has gone through. If in the end she loves he father, after all he had done to her, then her personality is much more likeable.

My Plan

What I am doing this quarter is writing a one act and then directing it. My idea for the script is a girl with an alcoholic father. The script will be divided into three parts, each part a different stage of the girls life and how her father's problem effects her. What I am really interested is how a child sees a drunk person vs. an adult in the same situation. The child is confused and scared while the adult would be more concealed and more used to the situation. I also am interested in the effects of growing up with an alcoholic family member, and how that changes a person mentally. Today I am writing a draft for this and tomorrow I plan to edit. Megan is the girl and Jei said he could do the father. I don't plan to be done with the script for a few days and then after I will start to rehearse.

Individual Written

I have never actually written a script before STAC. The idea just never came up because I never really had to. Usually for me someone has to force you to do something for you to find that you actually enjoy it, and that’s what happened with scripts.

The first script that I enjoyed writing was the fighting script. Fights are easier to write than act, as I noticed in the cold readings. When you write a fight, there is a clear conflict. Rather that writing some deep, intellectual scene a fight is pretty straight forward, people yelling at each other. What made this even easier was the fact that these people and the conflict was based off of what had actually happened in life. Creativity was dumbed down to almost none, and all you had to do was document what happened. A huge scare was presented to me when I walked into class and found out that everyone was going to see my work in cold readings. Making the readings anonymous was a good call, based on the fact that I was giving up very personal secrets, but even with that, my face turned red when the actors went to read it. The learning experience that came from this was one I could not do without. Thinking that scripts are meant for people to read, rather than to be read is a huge help when you’re writing. Phrases should be clear because the audience can’t go back and reread something if they are confused, and make sure that things don’t get too slow, especially in the fight scene.

The second script I worked on a lot was the play where we planned to have preformed. This piece basically changed completely and became better. When I started it I hated what I was writing. I was writing too much for one scene and saw it as an entire show rather than a piece. I approach these small works now as segments, to much larger pieces, but still can stand on their own and make sense. This idea helps because it eliminated the want to have complete closure and explaining everything that happened.  I ended up changing this play from a piece about two siblings meeting and the sister giving bad news, and the brother being homeless, to something more simple, a brother and sister, meeting up after a while and discussing their past and what have been doing, to find out that they are very different from each other. I had planned in the end a fight a clear “winner” and “loser” to the scene. This fight ended up being diluted, the brother was supposed to be young and sort of “living in the moment” kind of guy, but rather was played as a shy and mean brother, that acts like a bitch to his sister. When I read it over in my head this brother was a pretty cool dude to me, and I envisioned that Alex was going to play him, because he is the actor I choose at the beginning of the week because he has this confidence when acting that seems to come natural. When Danny was given to me, I got a little disappointed. I remembered from the cold readings, that Danny played all his characters shy, because he is scared while acting. And when we started to rehearse, I saw that very vividly in him. He shuddered and paused, scratched his head and turned his lines into questions. Danny is one of my best friends but I was writing this for Alex, not Danny. If I knew that Danny was reading this I would have made a character that mirrored Danny’s shy style of cold reading.

My third piece I’ll write about is the one based off of a song that we only had a day to write. I got the song Whizz Kid to write a play about. I started working on it in school, and got well into it. Almost three pages and there was still another period left. The other STAC kids and I were kicked out of the computer lab last period and had to go to another lab, were Celtx was not downloaded. That meant we had to use Word. I wrote more the next 45 minutes and then went home. At 4 I open my script and the word document doesn’t work on my computer. I got really upset but then decided I would have to write it anyway and there would be no way to fix it. I started to reread the script from Celtx and realize I hated it, so I restarted completely. The song really never screamed any real story to me, just the life of a person. The song gave me a character, just one. I built a story around that character, one that seemed probable. By the end I was tired of writing, I had taken breaks and done my other homework and just had to finish the script. So I did. I didn’t like the end, but realized it was probably better than the other story I had built in school. Somehow I don’t see those three periods of writing something I would throw out as a waste of time, because I know that I will have failures and there is nothing I can really do about most of them, but me finding my failure and dealing with it before anyone notices made me feel good that I fixed my mistake.

Overall I feel like I’ve learned a lot, this intensive was defiantly as intense as had Luke promised. I am sure that I will be using the things I’ve learned for the rest of my life, and improve on what I already know. Now that I have to write a script for English class I feel overly prepared and super excited .