As I mentioned in a previous post, from January to March of this year I’ve been part of the New Vintage Theatre’s Playwright’s Hot House, a great workshop headed up by Bonnie Gratz. Along with Bonnie, an experienced writer and director, I was lucky enough to have Kim Fournier as a fellow workshopper. Kim’s an experienced actor, as well as an aspiring playwright like myself.
As valuable as it was to get feedback from the perspective of a director and an actor, most of the time we were just three writers hacking a way at a text, trying to get it to work. The thing about working with other writers is, they know how messy writing can be. They know that it can take a whole lot of bad writing to discover the good stuff. They know what it’s like when you just can’t make it work. In short, they know how the sausage is made.
Presenting your work can be stressful in any situation, but showing it to an audience is a different kind of stress than showing it to other writers. With an audience, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but there’s a certain level of polish that’s required.
With other writers, of course you want to impress them, but you also know that they’ll be able to fill in the blanks, see the potential, and understand what you’re going for, even if you haven’t gotten there yet. You can take chances, give things a try, and not be afraid of getting it wrong. And that freedom is an essential part of creating.
That beautifully expressive sentence you wrote around one a.m.? Read out loud with a group of other writers and you might find it’s a garbled mess. And so what? The group laughs if off and you do better next time. We’ve all had sentences that just didn’t make sense.
Aside from revealing your miatakes, when working with other writers you’ve also got to discuss your goals. Not just for the work as a whole, but for each section. What are you trying to accomplish with each block of text? If a passage isn’t working, they can’t help if they don’t know what you’re going for.
In some ways, a piece of writing is a machine with a series of moving parts. To get the help you need, you’ve got to throw open the good and let them see all the pieces. ‘I wanted this to connect here, pull on this, mix with these, and brilliant writing should immerge.’ It might be a mess now, but you’ve got to expose your process to get the help you need, and for that you need other writers.
What I’ve found over the past few months is that although you need feedback, and ideally from as many different angles as possible, there’s a freedom you get from sharing raw material with other writers that you can’t get any other way. It’s the freedom to let your writing be bad, because that’s how you find the good stuff.
Compact Shelving 