Definitely Long, Maybe Interesting - My Individual Written

Individual Written: Writing Intensive

The intensive was, for me, a very important milestone. It jump started a flow that had not yet been fiddled with and revealed a hidden interest in playwriting. Before the intensive even started, we had to send Luke scripts of what we wanted to do, and, well, I fell deeply and undeservedly in love with mine. Now that I look back, I see that it wasn’t as great as it seemed in the moment. But I still love it.

Luke emailed me back with an added scene, and I immediately got frightened. This would lead to an extended period where if I got an email from Luke, I wouldn’t look at it for an hour or so until I finished an entire episode of Law and Order: SVU just to calm myself before the storm, which never actually came. I finished the added scene like he asked (I still haven’t emailed the script back first out of pure forgetfulness and then out of the fact that it seemed like he didn’t want it anymore.) and when I got to school the next day, he explained the scene he added because I had been clueless in the meaning behind it. Without my exact knowledge, I had written mini-play which was unbelievably angry. Not at anyone in particular, but it had a sense of pessimism and anger at the world. I read it again. I saw it. The scene he added where I was a boxer getting coached by midgets and fought in a ring alone where he (“taller than usual, skinnier and more muscular than usual.” His words, not mine.) comes in, beats me up for totally understandable reasons and then cuts off my gloves and has a seemingly meaningful talk with me, suddenly made more sense than ever. I had to stop fighting everything around me. It also made me realize that I had made up this Luke character in my head while the real Luke couldn’t have been more different. And there were more characters in my head. Years of watching shoddy television programs had shown me all types of people, and putting my own spin on them only made it an even more positive experience for me. And I loved it. And then intensives began.

The first day when we had timed script writing while artists had timed portraits and photographers got tied to a door to take pictures, was probably the hardest day for me. We had to write scripts. In under five minutes or so. Sometimes, it took me fifteen minutes to come up with a retort in normal, flowing writing. I felt it was absolutely impossible. My breathing got a little funny. And then I did it. I wrote a mini-script. And then we wrote another. And then we took someone else’s and rewrote theirs. It gave me the idea that it didn't have to be absolutely perfect, it just had to get done. And sometimes that's the exact slap in the face that you need. And that, my dears, is just the beginning.

The first day of actual intensives, we had to write three scripts. A six-page, a three-page, and a one-page, and they had to center around the latest fight you’d had with someone. This ended up becoming difficult for me because I didn’t want to tell the truth. I didn’t want to be the problem and I didn’t want it to sound all, “Oh, woe is me!” I had to get over myself. Sure, I then had to shrink my scripts which is definitely uncomfortable when you’re trying to make it sound like what actually happened, but, then again, it was necessary. We had to find the root of the problem and see it straight on. Oh, but then, the next day, we had to write apologies. One direct, one indirect, and then fuse your favorite into your original favorite fight scene. I originally thought that I would prefer the indirect, but ended up choosing my direct apology to fuse. It was more fun and less beat around the bush, which I then realized was harder for me to write. Maybe it's the loss of theatricality. Maybe I thrive on exploding personalities.

When we started our first and only screenplay, I found out that I was really incompatible with writing screenplays. I was unfamiliar with shots and where to put things and, my goodness it was atrocious. The dialogue was good in my opinion, not perfect, but still. I was proud to have tried my hand at it. The thing is, Luke couldn’t just teach us how to write these things. It was mostly trial and error. And if we did something really bad, we got a cheat sheet of sorts, like a sample of how a screenplay is actually written and notes on where what goes, like time of day and what type of shot. Luke was there to help, sure, and he did (loads of help, actually) but it was more important to learn yourself than to have him put us through baby steps. Because, if this is what someone Really wants to do then you have to be able to do it and not get coddled incessantly.

Oh, and monologues! I hated writing them, but I love reading them back. Madeline and her Dog, my first out of the four written, is especially close to my heart. Although I have never been the victim of abuse or really seen it first hand, I did have a dog when I was little that I loved with all my heart, and he bit people and my parents had to give him back to the shelter. But of course, my creative side turned it into this dark soap opera of abuse and bum-biting shenanigans. The best thing I can say about this is that monologues can be really difficult to work with. You don’t want to bore people, and you don’t want to get out of hand, so you have to find this middle ground that is both entertaining and moderately-sane. Crazy monologues may seem fun, but, they have their challenging bits as well.

But do you know what was the hardest thing for me to comprehend while playwriting? That people would act it. Because, for me personally, I could see it all as it went through my head and that may seem all fine and dandy, but people surprise you. And people act differently in your mind than they do in real life. So, when we had to write scripts with certain actors in mind for the parts, it was hard. Because with people in mind, they weren’t just characters in my head. These had faces to them. And I couldn’t just write words for them to say and then I became weirdly self-conscious of whatever I wrote because it was a reflection of me, not them. That was another thing that I had to get over, being self-conscious of what I wrote. Especially when you have it stuck in your mind that this WILL get performed, it begins to lose some of its value in my mind. Over all, it ended up being quite strange and very much more of an inflection on my life than I intended while writing it, but hey, when it doubt, write what you know.

Then came Pinter Scripts, which were extremely hard because they had to be very indirect which I had not improved on since my first stab at it in the apologies. Looking back, I might have even dug my heels in because I had already thought I was bad at it and instead of trying to improve, which was the entire point of intensives, I was a big baby and I regret it because I look back at the scripts now and although they aren’t perfect, they aren’t the worst thing on the planet. The big thing with the Pinter Scripts was the imitation factor. Pinter used pauses and beating around the bush and frankly, even though I felt uncomfortable, it shows me that I have to get off my high horse and just knock stuff out. Or else, what's the point?

And lastly in the Script-writing came the ‘Contest’ pieces. We each got a song (I got ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’ by The Smiths, an absolutely gorgeous song and Morrissey is so important to me personally that it was exciting just to get.) and had to write a seven to ten minute script using three to five characters and get it emailed by midnight, which was the case with almost all of the scripts written. I read through the lyrics a bunch, listened to the song over twenty times in my opinion, and wrote a play where a man gets a brain tumor (okay not weird at all), has it removed, it comes back (bad luck but still not too weird), his wife gets pregnant (good for them) and… He drives them off a bridge and into a river in early March where they drown and he dies laughing. Later, I found out the song was about abortion. Now, I’m kind of glad I didn’t learn the true meaning of the lyrics until after it was all written because it’s more important to make your own connection and opinions about things than to just go along with whatever it is, even though you might write crazy homicidal plays. It’s all about the adventure.

Now, I’m not going to lie and say that I’m now an amazing playwright and that I am a good example to follow, because I am most certainly not. What I will say is that I now feel more comfortable with it and also, I feel like I am much better than where I started from with cornfields and false assumptions. But it’s also taught me that no matter how much I watch people and how they act and pretend that it’s giving me more inspiration to see how people interact, I need to stop watching and start doing. Because no matter how long I watch, I won’t get the perfect experience until I actually GET first-hand experience. So, I think it’s time for a more outgoing Jessica. One who doesn’t freeze in front of large crowds and instead feels comfortable with those around her because I need to find somewhere comfortable now that my mind has been outed as a pretty crazy place to get stuck in.