The Dotted Logline

Playwriting was one of the best workshops I took while working on my MFA at Emerson. It was also the most aggravating. I was focused primarily on screenwriting, which was all tight structure and tighter dialogue and plotting everything out down to the tiniest little detail in advance. Playwriting was all about letting things flow and meander where they wanted in the hopes that they would eventually come together into something beautiful, perhaps even coherent. It was a very organic process. Scary as hell, too.

But my playwriting professor, Betsy Carpenter, must have been doing something right. Her class swept the playwriting fellowship awards at least three years in a row, with the winners (myself included) receiving full productions from the very same theater department that vastly outnumbered us in number of entries. And this was despite a deadline that was increasingly pushed back to cripple the workshop and us sacrificing most of class one week for a “field trip” to the pub next door to watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Yankees game (a trip that was both completely dry and top secret, of course.)

Betsy ended up being my graduate thesis adviser. As my thesis was a screenplay and I was working on it long distance to avoid paying another year’s rent in Boston, I was a little concerned about how things would work out. Betsy was great, in an incredibly odd way, but she was rather unpredictable too, much like playwriting itself. It was a a bit of a scary prospect.

Scarier when I didn’t hear back from from her about my preliminary draft for a few months.

When I did finally hear from her, Betsy told me that the screenplay would certainly pass the thesis defense in its current state, but she thought that I could do better. It was tepid, as she put it.

She had two words of advice. “Watch Brazil.”

So I did. And she was right. Brazil showed me exactly what was wrong with my script and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In the end, there was very little “defense” needed for my thesis defense.

I was in Boston for two weeks to wrap up all of my thesis business. During that time, Betsy invited me to not only sit in on, but participate in two classes and three readings for her current playwriting workshop. She told me several times how great it was to have me back. It was great to be back.

I just received word from my friend Alex, a classmate and friend from the playwriting workshop, that Betsy Carpenter passed away this morning. She had been undergoing cancer treatment for several years. I don’t think I’d known that.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I finished my thesis. I kept meaning to e-mail her but I was waiting until I had some news to tell her about my play. I wish I had dropped her a note to say hello, to let her know that I did make it out to LA after all, to tell her that I have never gotten better advice crammed into two small words.

While in Boston, I’ve attended a number of Playwriting Workshop classes and readings. It’s been a lot of fun.  Some of my old friends are in the class, there have been some really interesting plays, and my old professor Betsy keeps telling me how wonderful it is that I’m back (nothing like feeling useful since I had minimal work to do on my thesis.)

Anyway, because I’m a sheep or very competitive (or a competitive sheep,) being around a bunch of playwrights again has inspired me to start working on a new play. It’s very rough at this point, but unlike Dolly, I’m not sticking with a straightforward linear story and instead am playing around more with elements of the stage. Should be a lot of fun (assuming I figure out the stuff I’m stuck on at the moment.)

It’s so hard to find anything truly unique and original in writing these days. Therefore, I must congratulate my friend Alexander Danner for writing a play that includes (what I assume is) the world’s first pornographic quadratic equation.

I can honestly say that I’ve certainly put characters through the ringer before, but I’ve never ever written anything comparable to what happened to me yesterday with my thesis.

First was the six hours I spent panicking about how to pad my script to make it longer… I’d been informed that it needed to be 120 pages long and it was more like 107. After spending the entire morning working (rather futilely) on that, I got official word that it only needed to be 100 pages and I was fine on length.

Then I figured out the margins were wrong on my signature page. For those who have never done a thesis before, the margins are far more important than the actual content of your thesis. Unfortunately, my committee had already signed, and my reader was flying out of town in less than two hours. I needed to reprint the page, run to the school from Cambridge, get it copied on the special magic thesis paper, and then rush to his house back in Cambridge and have him sign. Unfortunately, I couldn’t connect to my host’s printer, and by the time I got it printed, he had been gone for over an hour. And of course I’d forgotten my cell phone and wasn’t able to call him and let him know I wasn’t coming. Fortunately, the department chair was willing to forge his signature. Apparently, he thinks the graduate office is as insane as I do.

I won’t even get into the printing problems. Let’s just say it involved many building, even more computers, even more printing errors, and the use of all seven semesters worth of print credits I still had stocked up.

But now I am done. Done done done. And no more thesis. Unless I someday go get another degree. Don’t want to think about that right now.

The entire concept of the thesis defense has never really seemed scary to me. In fact, I was looking forward to my MFA defense. A chance to talk about a project with people who actually want to hear the background info and the details on how certain decisions were made. I was a little nervous about pitching the movie but managed to get some really good ideas down before.

I had no idea that the whole thing would go so amazingly well.

Both of the professors on my committee loved it. LOVED it. There are a few things they want to see tweaked and the ending needs to be rewritten, but overall, most of the “defense” was spent listening to two people I respect say really nice things about my screenplay. I’m glad I recorded it.

Even better, Chris Keane, whom I took three semesters of screenwriting workshops with while at Emerson, has a friend in L.A. with “connections up the wazoo” that he’s going to send it to. I hope she likes it.

I suspect this is going to become a regular feature…

Scalpeling (v): The stage of revision that entails making small, precise edits that may be indistinguishable to some readers but nonetheless have a very large impact on the work as a whole, bringing forward important story elements. One step above tweaking, two steps above proofing.

Yup, that’s pretty much what’s going on with my thesis right now.

I’ve started working on the fourth draft of my thesis and am trying out a new approach to revising. Previously, I would go through linearly and change things I didn’t like as I came across them. That only worked so well; the script moved about halfway in the direction I wanted.

So currently, I’m not even looking at the script.  I just run the current story in my mind, as well as the elements I want brought to the forefront and character elements that need to be explored farther. I keep doing that until the lightning strikes.

It sounds half-baked but it’s actually been working quite well. I’ve been making tons of changes that I feel are really shaping the script into what I want it to be.

In fact, it’s working a bit too well. I haven’t figured out how to shut it off. I’ve been up until 3 or 4 AM almost every night recently because I need to get all the changes down before I go to sleep, or else I risk losing them. The trials and tribulations of revising…

The final revision of my stage play, Goodbye Dolly, is now complete and will be submitted to Baker’s Plays for publication on my next trip to the post office. It’s a little unnerving, because it is both the largest and the most deserving project I have submitted for publication to date. And I have to wait six to eight months to hear back.

I’ve finally gotten word from my thesis director that my screenplay, while well-written and already good enough to qualify me for graduation, is currently not a marketable sample of my work. I knew that to a certain extent, and was expecting to do a number of rewrites, but it still depresses me that I sat on it for over two months while I was waiting for feedback and wasn’t able to see what the problem was myself. It is currently too “tepid”, which is apparently going to be the word/comment that I get hung up on. Unless it’s “oatmeal”, which is my own choice for describing its current status.

A lot of people see the completion of the first draft as the important landmark in a writing project. Until you reach that point, your footing’s unsure, the air is too hazy to see the finish line, and the ground beneath you could collapse at any point. Once you finish the first draft, the white tape has exploded across your chest and you’ve won.

I disagree.

There’s the saying that so-and-so large percentage of writing is rewriting. That I agree with. And that is why finishing the SECOND draft is the important point for me.  Most of the time, the first draft is crap. And unless I can actually work on it further and shape it into something more refined, it remains crap. It may be complete crap, but it’s still just crap.

I came to this realization when I finished the second draft of my screenplay for my thesis (current working title: Sherry Summers By Day.) I’ve spent about a year revising bits and pieces when I wasn’t busy with writing projects for my workshops at Emerson, and I fell into the trap of rewriting the same scenes over and over. In some ways, it was more work than draft one and I finally have a real feeling of accomplishment now that it’s done. Maybe because it’s finally reasonably presentable. Or because I’ve checked off the long list of scenes that needed to be rewritten because I cringed whenever I thought of them.

This summer, I took my last literature class (the one I’ve been waiting to take since I started the MFA program at Emerson), Novel Into Film. As the title suggests, it was a study of adapting books into films. My only experience in screenwriting had been original work, and with about half of movies being adaptations, I thought it a good skill to learn. My one attempt to adapt my own work back as an undergrad (from script to short story) had failed miserably.

There was one sentence that the professor said in the first class that was worth the price of admission for me: “The only obligation a screenwriter has when adapting a book is to make a good movie.”

While I would change “only” to “main” as a personal preference, this helped me break through whatever mental block I had about adaptation. If there is one thing I’ve learned throughout my screenwriting workshops, it’s how to construct a good story for film. The secret then is not to look at a book and try to figure out what parts you can streamline to fit into the condensed film medium, but to figure out what elements will work well in a film. Though that seems obvious, it can be a hard concept to focus on. Once you do, things are a whole lot easier.

As my first major adaptation project, I’ve decided to take a stab at writing a screenplay based off my stage play, Goodbye Dolly. It is still very much in the “fermenting” stage at this point, but once I get the two screenplays I have in progress of my plate, I think that will be my next big project.