Purple Prose

Hi, anyone who's out there. I've been away a long time, but thought I'd try to get back on track here. I'm reading a book called "Spunk and Bite." It spins off from, and in places challenges, the old "bible" of writing style, "Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. Having been schooled on Strunk and White, I tend towards the sparse and streamlined approach, but I fear I have essentially stripped my writing of life and originality. So, I'm trying to shake it up, and have now begun overcompensating, falling prey to an overabundance of "Purple Prose." So, I am dancing the line. I guess I need to give myself permission to experiment and fail many times in order to find my voice and grow as a writer.

What kind of experiments have you tried? Successes? Failures? How did you determine which they were? What did you learn from them?

Angel On the Shoulder

I may have written about this in the past. Virginia Woolf writes about the "angel" on her shoulder, that nice, proper and well-behaved Victorian lady who whispers in her ear that she shouldn't say certain things because they might upset or offend. She describes her process of murdering the angel on her shoulder so that she could write and write honestly.

Today, in the WOW monthly group, we talked about this a bit, too. Everyone's angel takes different forms. Can I share this piece with the group, or will it offend someone? Is my piece too nice, not offensive enough to be cool? My piece is fiction, but what if someone in my family sees parts of themselves in it and takes offense? If I get too political, will it keep people from hearing what I'm really trying to say? Is it possible to write without being political?

Who or what is the poisonous angel on your shoulder? How is she affecting your writing? Have you killed her? How will you kill her? Do you keep trying to kill her long after she is dead?

Writers On-the-air Final Thoughts

Reading Day was long, but a terrific success! We are so fortunate to have sucha talented group of actors willling to give their time and skills to bring the writers' words to life for the first time. After the full day of readings yesterday, the writers gathered one last time this morning for a debrief. We were all a little bleary, but once again the conversation flowed fruitfully. We talked about discoveries, surprises and reactions from the readings. For some of us, the flaws and holes in our scripts came into focus. Others reveled in finding the script sounded just as they hoped it would. We tossed around our reactions to audience feedback and our reactions to each others' scripts. Some of us will be working on revisions, others will put their pieces aside and others will tweak here and there but are basically satisfied with where things stand. I announced my plans for a monthly writers critique group born of WOW and collected some evaluations of the workshop process. Bigger space & more time to share what we write were among the requests for the future.

This blog is such a woefully inadequate encapsulation of the WOW experience. I come to it feeling lazy and spent and inadequate to the task of re-creating the workshop experience. Perhaps that's as it should be. The writing workshop experience is so much a function of the interaction among participants. I repeat again, find a community of writers with whom to share and discuss your work. It is motivating and exhilarating at its best, and it can save you from the vortex that solitude can create. It is the great paradox of writing - you must have chunks of solitary time in which to create, but you must have chunks of communal time to feed that solitude and counteract it and interact with it.

So, we close another year of Writers On-the-air. But the Writers' Wavelength blog continues sporadically all year. As should the writing itself.

Writers On-the-air Day 8

Our final check-in before Reading Day. After a day of juggling schedules and casting, I was a little foggy-headed, but the evening went smoothly. All scripts are in and finished - bravo, writers!

When we checked in tonight, several of us talked about those last-minute tweaks and changes and the temptation to keep tweaking and changing. This is the liberating part of knowing it's a first draft. It's a little easier to stop tweaking. Still,the discussion raised that question that plagues many a creative artist - "How do you know when to stop?" One participant pointed out the quote "Art is never finished, only abandoned." Luckily, with a first draft reading like we have with WOW, you can just stop changing and see how it reads as is. That may help make the decision about changes, and save you some time if the changes weren't necessary.

One of the writers found that this last push to finish the script really kicked in her creative drive to complete another piece as well. A testament, I think, to the wisdom of those who tell you to write every day. When those muscles are in use, they get a lot done.

Those folks working on series discussed the ups and downs of that experience. It's somewhat comforting, if you have to cut, to know you can always put things back in to future episodes.

We tossed around the idea of "burning questions," which we will pose to our audience/actors. What makes a good burning question? Sometimes, you want to zero in on a particular moment, but often you want the question to look for that problem spot without putting undue focus on it before the audience hears the piece. Some recommendations: Ask yourself what you think the major strength & weakness of the piece is and formulate your questions from there. Build the questions as more open-ended. For example, say you're worried that certain parts are too short and others too long. You might ask: Which parts would you like more time on? Which parts feel unnecessary? You can also ask general questions such as: What is your impression of this character? What do you see as the greatest strength of this piece? What is its greatest weakness? what questions were you left with?

Guideliens and expectations for reading day:
What it is: A cold reading. A chance to hear your words read aloud by actors, see what works and what needs changing, hear specific reactions from a variety of listeners. A celebration of what you've accomplished during the workshop process.

What it is NOT: A fully rehearsed performance, final production, promise of production or future casting, opportunity for you or others to scorn or condemn your hard work, time to critique actor performances or casting choices. It does not determine your worth as a person or an artist.

In addition to logistics, we took a moment to do a "quickwrite" (write without stopping under time pressure) about our hopes and fears for Saturday's Reading Day. We hope the balance we are seeking between humor and authenticity will succeed and we fear laughter where we don't want it and silence when we want laughter. We hope genre will work for us and fear the preconceptions that some folks have about genre lacking depth. We hope we have created an effective degree of tension in a piece, we fear actors' tendency to go for the laughs in a cold reading. Generally speaking, we hope the audience will enjoy our work and fear that they won't.

Reading Day is always an adventure. I can't wait! With 10-20 actors plus writers and invited guests, 12 scripts and 6 hours of readings, it's certainly an event.