Creative Starvation; Woe is me!

Well, you can probably guess from the title where this one is going.

I have reached something of an irritating temporary hiatus in my play writing escapades. Which, frankly, isn't saying much, as I have only been escapading these past not-even-two weeks, so I have disappointed myself. I seem to have hit something of a wall. I shall ramble some thoughts out into this post and see if it makes things any easier for myself. Perhaps removing some of the thoughts will allow my brain to function more clearly? I'm sure that's how Dumbledore uses the big bowl of swishy thoughts he keeps in a cupboard in his office that Harry Potter falls into...

 I started in the middle you see; I'm writing about a magician, so, logically, I started with the magic show. Apparently its advisable to start wherever you fancy, so that's ok. Then, going backwards chronologically, I wrote the scene where local children are given tickets to the magic show, by said magician. Then, defying sense, I decided to write the opening scene, so I did, and the opening scene decided it would end with three parallel monologues, which were exhausting to write. I'm trying to keep the whole play down to four actors (three men and one woman)and this involves a good deal of doubling between parts, but the monologues were for what I consider to be the 'primary' characters each actor would be playing, and so were important in terms of back history and character development. I found it strangely difficult to try and 'get inside the heads of' three different characters in such a short space of time, and found I was naturally inclined towards the female character, which is interesting. I wonder if this is through an inseparable curiosity as an actor about playing the (as yet unwritten) part. I also found that persuading the three monologues in question to mirror each other was strangely satisfying, though I had no idea why I was doing it. Is that a good reason for doing something? A lecturer earlier this year said that as long as you have a reason for doing something, you can do it, and I suppose this reason would be symmetrical pleasure. I also have found it interesting the speed at which different bits of writing progress - with the aforementioned monologues, it took the best part of two whole days to get two pages done, but with a dialogue scene between three smaller characters, half an hour put four pages on paper.

The problem I seem to be facing now is a sort of brick wall affair every time I try and sit down to write. I have written out in detail everything that will happen in the first half of the play, at least, so that the scenes I have written will have a framework to fall into, but my brain seems unwilling to cooperate all of a sudden. It also seems daunted by the prospect of the end of the play; I know how the play ends and it is how the play must end, but the second half of the play remains entirely untouched, not a single word written down yet. All of this, and a mere nine days left to go until 'First Draft' hand in. Back to York tomorrow, to spend my Sunday in a dark corner of the library.

Ah, woe is me...

Shakespeare's Sister

I have decided that the fitting return to blogging for me is definitely an exploration of my Dissertation this year - that is, the somewhat self-imposed task to write a whole play. It sounds like fun, and to an extent it is, but I think recording the experience as I go along, for posterity, and because I have the terrible ability to forget important details of things, is the way forwards. The title of my chosen MA is 'Theatre: Writing,Directing,and Performance' - my sole aim when I started the course was to get more experience in Directing, and so naturally one would be led to assume that when presented with the option choices for Dissertation - which were, er, Writing, Directing, or Performance... - I should have gone with the Directing option. However, it's been a tough old year in the Oliver household, and frankly, the course wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of support and camaraderie, so I opted for something which would allow more freedom and let me work on my own - writing a play. The course gave us some limited experience of play writing, in the first term - we were set plays to read every week, then discussed these in seminars, before being given small writing tasks, culminating writing in a half-hour play. Unfortunately mine didn't go particularly well in the academic sense, due to me laboring under the extreme misapprehension that being funny is a good thing. Not so. Theatre is a serious place don't you know. Not a place for mad old ladies on buses. I passed, with a moderate mark, but that was me told. Undeterred, I swaggered into the main arena, armed with false confidence and the knowledge that 'Funny is not ok' - so my dissertation piece is about as far away from 'funny' as you can possibly imagine. I won't go into what it is about today, as I have now been sat in the study room in the library for the best part of an hour having not even opened the play document yet (Procrastinaton - 1, Kayleigh - 0) but rest assured, I will fill you in, dear reader, on that, and the odd problems I find I am facing as I try and put some semblance of order into 50 to 100 pages of mind boggling confusion. Til then, adieu.