Building Up

Boy howdy, I seem to spend a lot of my time on trains these days; though would imagine that's the lot of the New Yorker. Or Londoner. Or, you get the idea.

Today, I'm going to talk a little about writing. Sometimes, the easiest way to begin writing something is to, as I call it, "Build it Up". This refers to a process of ever increasing blips of information. This is going to be a little hard to just describe, so I'm going to try my best to illustrate with a few ideas of my own here and there. Feel free to follow along at home. Or wherever you read this...

You start with an idea, a single sentence or a paragraph, maybe even just a collection of words or images or a theme you're interested in. I was listening to my iPhone the other day on shuffle, and there was a happy accident in the song order, and there were a number of rock songs sung by women in a row, and I thought, "I'd like to write a rock musical with female leads." That's my starting point, a rock musical for ladies.

I build that up by asking what the story is. In this case, this is also hitting me at a point where I'm still exploring adaptation and culturally relevant ideas from the past. I wanted to attach rock music and modern ideas to the story of something from ages past. So, I sat down and started reading fairytales, especially ones that have a female protagonist or have a high number of females as major characters. I came back with a little list, "Rapunzel", "Rumplestiltskin", "the twelve dancing princesses" and so on. All three of the stories mentioned really resonated with me, but I whittled the first two ou because they just didn't feel quite right. Rapunzel is an incredibly epic and disturbing tale, involving rape, pedophilia and kidnapping (at least the original version does) and while I'm intrigued, I didn't feel the music I was listening to (P!nk, Kelly Clarkson, et al) fit that tale.

I did, however, establish a connection with the twelve dancing princesses, especially after speaking to my comrade, Aub. I decided I would focus on contemporizing this tale. First, I had to find a modern analogy to a princess. While one can find a princess these days, it's difficult to find multiples, and they don't have the same cultural significance they had in the Grimm times. These days, I'd be more inclined to look at the girls you see on MTV's "My Sweet Sixteen," the eloi girls entrenched amongst the hyper-wealthy. Then, 12 is a pretty big number, and a tough place to start a cast size. 5. 5 dancing eloi perhaps. Or the five dancing socialites. Five sisters, the daughters of an exceptionally wealthy and right wing conservative father.

So then, we have a bit more of a concrete structure. It's not just a theme, I've expresssed some ideas, I've got notions of character, and in this case, an easy frame to build out from, the original fairytale itself. A little tweaking here and there and I have the foundation and the building can begin.

The next step is writing out the story, just the quick two page version, writing down all the elements that occur, but in a general way, not covering all the emotional aspects, just the facts Dragnet style. Jack confronts Lisa about her drinking.

From there, you put together a list of scenes, going through the whole play and writing what happens where and between whom. Jack and Lisa have an altercation in Lisa's living room.

Expand on the scene list, writing each beat that transpires in each scene. Jack enters, Lisa is already there. Small talk gives way to Jack berating Lisa about drinking. Lisa doesn't defend herself, until Jack makes a particularly biting insult. Lisa accuses Jack of irrational outbursts. Jack counters and we discover Jack's family has a history of alcoholism. And so on... Until the scene is completed in beats. Once that's done for the whole play, it's relatively easy to just fill in the dialogue.

Each step is just an incremental build from the last one, so it really never feels as difficult as trying to just sit down and crank out an entire script from the get go.

As I said, I don't write the same way for each project, sometimes I build it up, others it's just a perpetual blank page. For me it depends wholly on the story in question.

On a completely different note, here's where I ate lunch:



And here's what I had:



And this is right now:



A-Train.