Onward

My current project is actually an old project, a play I've been working on for several years in fits and starts. I love the source material, a sprawling and delicately wrought 19th-century novel. But the beautiful language is also my hang-up. How can I turn 720 pages of novel into about 120 pages of script? My inclination is always to make the dialogue more terse, and in many ways, it needs to be. But how can I keep the flavor of the original? How much of the dialogue should be the original author's words, and how much should be my own?

I'm working from the following basic outline:
120 pages total, 3 acts.
Act 1, pages 1-29. BIG EVENT occurs on page 30, heralding the beginning of
Act 2, pages 30-89, with another BIG EVENT on page 90, beginning
Act 3, pages 90-120.
And there should also be plot shifts at pages 10, 30, 50, and 75.

See, I like this kind of structure, although it's very different from how I approached the novel this fall. My past stabs at this play have involved poring over pages of dialogue and trying to write scenes, but without any sense of overall structure. I think I got up to 45 pages of dialogue from 200 pages of novel, and I wasn't even into the really meaty parts. I think there will be some dropping of sub-plots, some tightening of focus. We shall see. It's fun to have a new project, at least.

Miracle of Miracles

In a rush to finish our 1,000 Christmas projects, I was linking from the Christmas letter on our family website to lots of pictures we took this year. And of course I got sucked in to looking at ALL the pictures, the ones of me hugely pregnant this time last year, and of Edythe when she was born. It’s such a miraculous concept, this baby business. Yes, I understand the biological, but there’s a wondrous component that defies complete comprehension. I will never forget the feeling I had when Edythe was born, and the nurse placed her on my chest. We were one, and then we were two. It’s the most ordinary, everyday occurrence, and yet the most amazing experience of my life.

The Christmas story has new meaning for me this year. God chose to send His Son in this ordinary, humble, and miraculous way. He didn’t appear on the palace steps in a puff of smoke, all bedazzled and heralded by a brass band. He was born, the same way any of us were born, or the animals in the stable were born. It’s so normal, and yet so incredible a way to begin.

So many miracles, great and small, surround us. My Christmas wish for you, dear reader, is that you are given the gift of realization of life as you live it; that you are blessed with the senses to experience the world, and a heart open enough to really feel it.

Merry Christmas.

Love,

Ruby

Happy Holly Daze!

We are all in a tither at Chez Blue finishing approximately 1,000 Christmas projects, so this blog will likely go dark until the new year. But fear not, more writing projects are on the horizon, along with more kvetching! I have recently resurrected a play I've been working on, an adaptation of a 19th-century novel that I love. And my goal is to finish it before ScriptFrenzy in April, when I want to work on something original. More on that later.

But for now, happy holidays to you! I hope you're enjoying lots of excellent cookies!

So Sayeth the Cookie

Christopher and I had a (brief, but blissful) dinner sans baby tonight. My fortune:

Joy comes from adventure today. Time to shake the world up.

I liked that.

A Good Story, Well Told

That’s what it’s all about, this writing thing.

Lately I’ve been stuck on the good story aspect. I hear so many stories at work, but of course I can’t use those. And besides, there’s a difference between hearing an interesting story and really understanding it in your soul. Good writing makes you feel the latter. I’m always afraid of not getting the details right and having my stories come across as inauthentic.

Sigh.

Christopher even set aside time for me to write last night, offering to do all the dishes, and I felt awful because my mind was a total blank. How boring.

Maybe I need to stop trying to write something serious or meaningful, and write something funny and vapid.

Criticism, Contd.

Given yesterday's topic, I had to share this quote from Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, which I'm reading and really enjoying. Note that I say reading; it takes several weeks (or even months) to get through a book now. I used to read most novels in a day. Sigh. Anyway, I thought this was great:

"Stinging words! You're critical of everyone," observes Iris.
"Oh, not everyone," says Clara in an offhand manner. "Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born."

Now don't you be critical of the formatting of the quote. For some reason when I include tabs they don't translate to the published post. :P

On Criticism

Someone—I will not say who—has lately been accusing moi of being overly critical. Me? Critical? Never!

Okay, maybe a little.

It’s good to be critical sometimes, like if there’s a document to be edited for work. I’ll never forget the day I discovered that a former boss, rather critical herself, had sent out a letter to tens of thousands of subscribers likening a character in the current stage production to the children’s game of "Hungry Hungry Hippies".* For some reason, she was not appreciative when I pointed out the mistake. I think she was just bummed that she’d been out-criticized.

When writing a first draft, it’s necessary but hard to turn off that internal editor, or superego, or whatever one wants to call it. That little voice that says, “You don’t know anything about writing fiction. You should get a degree in it before you even start this project!” or “Even really good writers who have worked at this for years and years can’t get their novels published! What gives you the right to waste everybody’s time?” or “What you wrote tonight is crap. You’d have made better use of the last hour of your life if you had done the dishes like you were supposed to. Now you’ve wasted everybody’s time and let your family down.”

My internal editor speaks in italics a lot.

One should note that I chose to spend my lunch break writing this blog entry about being critical, rather than actually working on the novel. It’s much easier to write critically than creatively. Which is probably why we all do the former so much more often than the latter.

*Details of the incident changed slightly, to protect the critical, but the gist is the same. Wouldn’t Hungry Hungry Hippies be a good game, though? Picture the little plastic bearded and dreadlocked heads munching on organic granola, or, in a pinch, Ho-hos and Doritos. Give ‘em some snacks, man!