Cavendish, Prince Edward Island
Wow! Not a word on here since the night we closed the show last year. Almost 8 months ago! Well, admittedly, I was more burned out on the whole thing than I'd ever been before. It's not like I didn't think about the show at all, but I wasn't about to address it any time soon. I knew another rewrite was in store - although audiences were quite complimentary, the consensus still said it was "too long and too dark" despite my best efforts - and I needed some time off before I could even attempt it. Creativity is one thing when you're coming up with something from scratch - but when you keep having to rewrite the same thing over and over (and over and over!), it kind of takes the joy out of the whole proceeding.
Which is why I'm glad I waited. Leo and I have talked about some ideas and I'd taken lots of my own notes over the last several months...and somehow I find myself in a different place about this material than I ever have before. One of the things that was agreed was that there were still too many details about Maud's life. Hey, my intentions were honourable - I wanted the show to be an accurate depiction, after all. And it still will be. But when I started looking at stripping out some of the details, and thinking of things from that perspective, it was like it set off a chain reaction of other things would benefit from changes. I also revisited a playwriting book I'd read when preparing for the '08 show - and, like most books, you get something different out of it the second time. I became more attuned to conflict and motivation and throughline and being even less expositional still. I knew that Act II needed most of the changes, but I have to go through the script in order to make sense out of it, and to maintain (and create new) continuity. Still, I didn't expect to make many changes to Act I.
Which is what made it so surprising when unexpected changes started presenting themselves! I've been at it now at least 2 weeks...I guess closer to three. (Obviously I'm not chronicling this stuff as voraciously as I did in '06!) One thing I'd realized from the show last year is that we spent way too long on Maud's childhood - 25 minutes - and that it was the first section that needed a major reinvention. So that's kind of the mindset I started with, and it's persisted all the way through so far. Tonight I've been working on the top of Act II, and I'm just finding myself thinking about altering things that hadn't even occurred to me before. Nothing's written in stone, of course - it's all kind of an experiment and Leo hasn't seen any of it yet (even if he were in town, which he hasn't been for over a month, I wouldn't show it to him until I was finished anyway!). The changes might not necessarily work. But I'm all for heightening connections, heightening emotions, stressing throughline, letting the script be more self-referential in spots. All this while trying to address the too long/too dark conundrum. Look, I'm still proud of the show we put on last year - unlike all previous versions of the script, at least I can stand to look at that one still! But I'm in a very...mercenary place. If it doesn't need to be there, it goes. And if I have to add something new to solidify something or change the energy, then I try to do it sparingly.
There's going to be some changes to the web site, too, that follows that same philosophy. When we first started it felt important to document absolutely everything. Every picture, every article. Now that I'm feeling mercenary I'm desperately wanting to reinvent the site, too - especially because (for you technophiles), I've been doing it up using HTML all along since that's the only code I knew how to do, but it seems so early 2000s now, especially since so many sites are using CSS in combination with it. I'd been dying to learn CSS so I could pretty up my own site as well - but my brain fries so easily these days that I didn't know if I'd be able to make sense out of it. When this year started I finally figured out how to use a "lightbox" effect so that pictures would pop up and I wouldn't have to create a whole separate pages for them. And that's what the "Nine Lives" site needs, too. I'm happy to say that just in the last couple of days I'm starting to get this CSS thing, and I've worked it into a dummy page which is pretty much 95% what I want things to look like. So, in addition to the rewrite, I will slowly be reinventing the web site to look better, be more efficient, drop some of the unnecessary stuff but add some new goodies as well. Which is pretty much what's happening to the script! My plan is to have it done by the end of April, but it could easily be May before I get a chance to get it all done. Famous last words, of course. :)
So, what's up for summer 2010? There is something in the works but it's not confirmed and I can't talk about it yet. But it's been part of the triptych of my activities these days - rewrite, web site, and...well, this. "All in good time, my pretty...all in good time." I hope to make an announcement sometime soon!
Well, that's it for now...I just wanted to blog while I was actually thinking about it and inspired to - I've been in that place many times over the last few weeks but didn't just go ahead and do it. So I thought I would before another 8 months went by. This rewrite is going to be the one, y'all - third time's the charm! (And hey, lots of my favourite TV shows didn't hit their stride 'til 3rd season, either. So I feel like I'm in good company!)
Wow! Not a word on here since the night we closed the show last year. Almost 8 months ago! Well, admittedly, I was more burned out on the whole thing than I'd ever been before. It's not like I didn't think about the show at all, but I wasn't about to address it any time soon. I knew another rewrite was in store - although audiences were quite complimentary, the consensus still said it was "too long and too dark" despite my best efforts - and I needed some time off before I could even attempt it. Creativity is one thing when you're coming up with something from scratch - but when you keep having to rewrite the same thing over and over (and over and over!), it kind of takes the joy out of the whole proceeding.
Which is why I'm glad I waited. Leo and I have talked about some ideas and I'd taken lots of my own notes over the last several months...and somehow I find myself in a different place about this material than I ever have before. One of the things that was agreed was that there were still too many details about Maud's life. Hey, my intentions were honourable - I wanted the show to be an accurate depiction, after all. And it still will be. But when I started looking at stripping out some of the details, and thinking of things from that perspective, it was like it set off a chain reaction of other things would benefit from changes. I also revisited a playwriting book I'd read when preparing for the '08 show - and, like most books, you get something different out of it the second time. I became more attuned to conflict and motivation and throughline and being even less expositional still. I knew that Act II needed most of the changes, but I have to go through the script in order to make sense out of it, and to maintain (and create new) continuity. Still, I didn't expect to make many changes to Act I.
Which is what made it so surprising when unexpected changes started presenting themselves! I've been at it now at least 2 weeks...I guess closer to three. (Obviously I'm not chronicling this stuff as voraciously as I did in '06!) One thing I'd realized from the show last year is that we spent way too long on Maud's childhood - 25 minutes - and that it was the first section that needed a major reinvention. So that's kind of the mindset I started with, and it's persisted all the way through so far. Tonight I've been working on the top of Act II, and I'm just finding myself thinking about altering things that hadn't even occurred to me before. Nothing's written in stone, of course - it's all kind of an experiment and Leo hasn't seen any of it yet (even if he were in town, which he hasn't been for over a month, I wouldn't show it to him until I was finished anyway!). The changes might not necessarily work. But I'm all for heightening connections, heightening emotions, stressing throughline, letting the script be more self-referential in spots. All this while trying to address the too long/too dark conundrum. Look, I'm still proud of the show we put on last year - unlike all previous versions of the script, at least I can stand to look at that one still! But I'm in a very...mercenary place. If it doesn't need to be there, it goes. And if I have to add something new to solidify something or change the energy, then I try to do it sparingly.
There's going to be some changes to the web site, too, that follows that same philosophy. When we first started it felt important to document absolutely everything. Every picture, every article. Now that I'm feeling mercenary I'm desperately wanting to reinvent the site, too - especially because (for you technophiles), I've been doing it up using HTML all along since that's the only code I knew how to do, but it seems so early 2000s now, especially since so many sites are using CSS in combination with it. I'd been dying to learn CSS so I could pretty up my own site as well - but my brain fries so easily these days that I didn't know if I'd be able to make sense out of it. When this year started I finally figured out how to use a "lightbox" effect so that pictures would pop up and I wouldn't have to create a whole separate pages for them. And that's what the "Nine Lives" site needs, too. I'm happy to say that just in the last couple of days I'm starting to get this CSS thing, and I've worked it into a dummy page which is pretty much 95% what I want things to look like. So, in addition to the rewrite, I will slowly be reinventing the web site to look better, be more efficient, drop some of the unnecessary stuff but add some new goodies as well. Which is pretty much what's happening to the script! My plan is to have it done by the end of April, but it could easily be May before I get a chance to get it all done. Famous last words, of course. :)
So, what's up for summer 2010? There is something in the works but it's not confirmed and I can't talk about it yet. But it's been part of the triptych of my activities these days - rewrite, web site, and...well, this. "All in good time, my pretty...all in good time." I hope to make an announcement sometime soon!
Well, that's it for now...I just wanted to blog while I was actually thinking about it and inspired to - I've been in that place many times over the last few weeks but didn't just go ahead and do it. So I thought I would before another 8 months went by. This rewrite is going to be the one, y'all - third time's the charm! (And hey, lots of my favourite TV shows didn't hit their stride 'til 3rd season, either. So I feel like I'm in good company!)
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