A Room With a View

Some tone deaf children are singing the Sound of Music outside my door. I live in a church converted to a performance studio.

My motto in life, live somewhere interesting.

It's nice when the International Club does its blow out Halloween party at this place. I can leave, lay down in my room, check my email, take a nap, go on the internet (sometimes all at the same time), and return to the party refreshed, revived, with a new sense of joive de vere, or whatever that is. Whatever it is, at those moments, I have it in spades.

They used to do dance benefits here, and the basement/kitchen area was a changing room. I was down there eating toast once when a semi-dressed young woman ordered me out. I considered stating my right to eat toast in the dressing room of my choice, but I skeedaddled when she looked at me cross-eyed.

I'm now off to a Willamette Writers meeting. A month ago a young man arrived at the Old Church where the meeting is held (that's the name of the place, and it also happens TO BE an old church) and asked a book seller in the basement if he could help the young man find a literary agent. When the old guy said selling used books had nothing to do with literary agents, the kid whaled on him, bloodying his face and head. The police caught the kid and I'm told his trial is today, so my hope is to get through the meeting without a need to call in some muscle.

When I was young in a bad neighborhood, I was never been beaten up by a single person. I was always beaten up by gangs when I went in to rescue friends who by the time I arrived to help them had usually grown wings and flown away. Small wings, not big enough to take me with them.

Ah, well, being hit on the back of the head isn't too bad, compared to being hit in the nose. That hurts.

I'm all over here, so I should leave and be all over somewhere else.

Bill

Deep Characterization

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Bill Johnson, author of A Story is a Promise, speaks about a process he calls Deep Characterization, where someone writing a novel makes the main character an extension of themself without understanding the pitfalls.

A Writers Weekend

I've set up a writers weekend for the end of this month. Several playwrights will attend, gathering at a house near the Oregon Coast on Friday afternoon. After dinner there's a writing session, where everyone goes off to write. On Saturday, there are three more sessions of just writing. During breakfast and lunch and after dinner a scene or two might be read out loud. After breakfast on Sunday, another writing session. After that, people generally are taking off.

These writing weekends are great for focusing just on writing and getting a lot of work done. The conversations are also wonderful.

I generally take a lap top and laser jet printer and end up printing for people. I can write on a computer, but I really need to see something on the page to rewite.

My first drafts are generally quite rough. I generally know the direction I'm going, but I find out what happens when I get there. And what happens can be different than what I expected. In a writing class I would call this heading North, because I know that by going North a character will find something like redemption, etc. But what that redemption looks like, how it plays out, I have to go North to find out.

I've also written ten minute plays based just on an idea and a set up (two characters in the afterlife in conflict about X), but I've found if I don't have an underlying story to go with the idea and set up, no amount of tinkering will fix that lack of direction and purpose. I've tinkered with some ten minute plays up to a year before I finally got a deeper fix.

Deep meditation is another way I get to that deeper place of what a story is about. I try to lead at least one three hour meditation a month to get to a place of quiet, peaceful mind.

Bill

A Check in the Mail

I received a check today for Betting the Karmic House being published in The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Three or More Actors (2005) by Smith and Kraus, edited by D. L. Lepidus. I'm always happy to get a check for anything theater related.

Intro to A Story is a Promise Blog

This is the very first post in my new blog. I welcome a discussion about storytelling. I'm the author of a Story is a Promise. When I came up with these ideas about how a story functions as a promise and wrote the book, I thought if new and struggling writers could be taught the mechanics of storytelling, their writing would automatically improve. These principles have helped many writers, but I'm now exploring why so many people fail to learn storytelling (not just from me; I've worked with people who've taken writing workshops for 20 years from several dozen teachers and knew just about zero about storytelling). I'm actively seeking writers who would like to participate in a process I call Deep Characterization. Contact me for details.