the genesis of this project happened back when I was in college and it went like:
I was in a fiction workshop and wrote a Kingy short story called “Barker’s” about a suicidal sentient diner. My professor liked it because I made obvious some little literary techniques I had figured out by then. And because it wasn’t “about young love.” College fiction writing professors get exhausted by the accumulation of stories featuring the angsty love of twenty-one year-olds.
So okay. He said to me, “Have you ever written a play?” And I said no, I’ve never written a play, why? “There’s a festival and I want to enter this story in it, but rewritten as a ten minute play.”
Not a bad idea. I was up for anything. I wrote it as a ten minute play and won a first prize, because back then my critical faculties hadn’t hit that point where they overwhelmed my ability to just power through anything that involved putting a sentence after another sentence.
That play is pretty bad, though. It’s evolving, years later, into a bigger play. Some problems that existed in the old one are:
Gee-whiz dialogue straight out of a particularly bad thriller off the rack at a Wal-Mart
Flat, one-note characters, half of whom didn’t actually do anything
Weak conflict because the protag and antag wanted the same thing, really
Terrible college white boy representation issues
Here’s what I did back then re the last (and worst) one: The characters were all white people, three of whom were white men and the fourth of whom was a white woman whose only story purpose is to help avoid exposition about the three white men. There was no reason for them to be white, per se. I just defaulted to it. Unthinking. Not wonderful.
Anyway. In the new version, I’m correcting that representation issue some. It’s not hard (Oscar voters, please take note) -- you just pay attention and make some effort, and ensure that the parts going to under-represented people aren’t bit parts, side parts -- now, a lead is female, and I’m trying to expand the other female role so that she is a character and not just a sounding board, etc etc.
These have been some thoughts.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
pixelskylines
areudirty
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
