News

My story Bonefish was recently picked up by Delivered, and I have a Twitter-fiction story upcoming with Nanoism.

I was also recently asked to join the Board for the Southern Humanities Council, and I am incredibly excited and honored to be doing this. If you are a lover of humanities, and would be interested in attending our conference next year, send me a message and I can give you more information. This is one of the most fun and engaging conferences I have ever attended. Check them out here:

http://southernhumanities.ning.com/

News

It has been a while since I posted, but here is what has been going on:

Flash Fiction The Woman In The Crystal Shop was published by Boston Literary Magazine

http://www.bostonliterarymagazine.com/sum09drabble.html#sum09crystal.html

Flash Fiction Greetings From Florida was published by Six Sentences.

http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2009/05/greetings-from-florida.html

Flash Fiction The Illuminated Stranger was published by Foundling Review.

http://www.foundlingreview.com/May14Issue1IlluminStrngrOdom.html

Flash Fiction Why He Got a Mustache was published by 50 to 1.

http://50-to-1.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-he-got-mustache-by-alex-odom.html

Micro Memoir What I am Trapped By is pending publication by Flashquake.

News

The Death of Margaret Thatcher was selected to be in The Avastama Play Festival. It’s going up Feb. 4, 2009.

More News

My play Louisville Swinger is now available for sale:

http://oneactplays.net/octopusride.html

Good News

Louisville Swinger was selected to be in the 2009 Acme New Works Winter Festival in Maynard, MA.

A Stone Face Killer is being produced by Spiritwood High School in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Exits Stage Left and Contemplates Action

I recently read a playwrighting blog about stage directions. This playwright believed it was a great idea to “spice up” stage directions, that stage directions like, “He drinks his tea and silently destroys the universe, in his head”, are a great way to develop characters. It’s the classic debate about whether or not stage directions should be as minimal as possible. Many people say no, that greats like O’Neill wrote lofty stage directions, but I say, yes, keep it concise. Before you disagree, consider your audience.
Ultimately, all writers should be writing to an audience– if you’re not, go get a journal. No writer will ever please everyone, but it is very important to please someone. As playwrights, you have to please your first reader, and nine times out of ten that first reader will be a director. Here is where stage directions really matter. Every director I have ever met is directing because they feel they have something to say, and they don’t want it said for them. Complex stage direction can be considered “directing from the page.” Since a director will probably be the first person to read your play, don’t insult them.
The most valuable thing I learned as a playwright, from a directing course was that directors are taught to ignore stage directions. Almost every stage or set design is unique, and the scene you envisioned in your head will probably look different– if you’re lucky enough to see it. Directors can’t begin to recycle old stage directions because most of the time they won’t work. You can save yourself a lot of time if you just worry about the essential actions. That’s all that will survive, anyway.
So maybe a director will love your witty stage directions and want to direct your play. You have only just started to run the gauntlet. The designer will not care what you think the set should look like because that’s his/her job. They aren’t concerned with custom tailoring the set to your specific instructions, so, once again, don’t waste your time. Okay, so you’re hardheaded. Guess what? Actors aren’t concerned with nuggets of contemplative thought either. It is their job to establish their own set of motivations for every word they say and move they make, and they won’t be looking for help within the stage directions.
The final audience the playwright writes for is the audience. Audience members don’t sit in the house and follow along with scripts in their hands, and ultimately, if the audience can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Eugene O’Neill is not considered a great playwright because of his stage directions, and no playwright ever will be– no matter what they think. If you can’t get over this fact, and you really want your stage directions to matter, learn to write for the screen.

Interview With Master Bookseller Bob Gray

I recently had the good fortune to be a part of an interview with Master Bookseller Bob Gray. Mr. Gray works for Northshire Books, an independent bookstore in Vermont where he also teaches, regularly contributes to Shelf Awareness with his column Fresh Eyes Now, and he is one of a small handful of people who have been named a Master Bookseller. Mr. Gray’s wealth of knowledge about the literary world is truly intimidating, but he was nothing but kind and generous with both his time and knowledge.

“Good books are what matters,” says Mr. Gray. While large publishers flood bookstores with advance copies, he says it can become difficult to pick out all of the good ones, especially from smaller presses. However, you are likely to find them at Northshire Books because Mr. Gray helped bring a display of independent presses into the store.

For any writers out there, make a note, Bob Gray could save your book from becoming an orphan– think of him as a literary Daddy Warbucks. Figuring out how to market books to individuals and pairing people with good books is Mr. Gray’s favorite part of his job at Northshire. This hands-on approach to selling is what makes independent bookstores great. It’s nice to hear that a book is good from a good reader rather than from a marketing executive. “Well written and poorly written books can have equal marketing,” says Mr. Gray. On the other hand, he also says marketing people are swamped, and sometimes they just have to send books out the door. Even if it is a great book, they don’t have time to make sure it will do well. He says it’s independent booksellers and devoted book groups that help save lesser known books from falling through the cracks.

So if you’re in Vermont, stop by Northshire Book Store and let Bob Gray set you up with a good book, but if not, stop by your local independent bookstore and introduce yourself– you might be fortunate enough to meet someone as knowledgable as Bob Gray.

Check out http://www.indiebound.org/indie-bookstore-finder to find your nearest independent book.

New Playwrights: Master the Short Form First

Before you start trying to write the next Tony Award Winning play, stop, and consider mastering something smaller first. I understand that the natural instinct for new playwrights is to jump right in head first, that’s great, but you can save yourself a whole lot of time and frustration if you try your hand at the short form first.

 

One acts and ten-minute plays are traditionally thought of as openers. A lot of theaters used to show them before full-length plays, as a warm-up for the main event. Now theaters are producing whole evenings of one acts or ten-minute plays, and with the way people’s attention spans are slowly becoming shorter, it’s no wonder playwrights like David Ives have made their entire careers writing ten-minute plays. 

 

That is not to say ten-minute plays are easier to write — they aren’t. In fact, many playwrights claim they are more difficult to write because they have less space to fit everything a full-length play needs — without the luxury of extra time to warm up. So why am I telling beginning playwrights to start with ten-minute plays? Because if you can squeeze everything a play needs into ten minutes, you will have no problem doing it in two hours. Not to mention the fact that full length plays can take months and years to write and edit. The first draft of a ten minute play can be written in one sitting. They can be edited and revised fifteen or twenty times over the course of a month. An industrious playwright could write and polish twelve ten-minute plays a year.

 

Let’s face it though, twelve plays a year is a bit of a stretch, and that is my whole point. As a beginning playwright, you may find it difficult to sit down and write for at least thirty minutes a day– much less the hours a day it would take to complete twelve ten-minute plays. Twelve ten-minute plays are the equivalent of one two hour play, and the odds of a new playwright putting in the amount of quality time it takes to produce that much work in one year is unlikely, but you can write four or five ten-minute plays a year. 

 

If you have just got to go out and write that full length play then do it – I did, and it’s bad. That idea for the full length play will serve you better if you put it on the back burner, develop the idea, and learn what it will take to see it realized.

Good News

I got news today that my ten minute play Louisville Swinger is going to be published in a volume with two other plays by One Act Play Depot.
One Act Play Depot is a small play press that is publishing a lot of new work. Check them out:

http://oneactplays.net/

Ten-Minute Play Festivals: Easier To Produce Than You Think

Last year marked the inaugural run of the Longwood Ten-Minute Play Festival. Over four hundred submissions reviewed, five winners picked, and three packed performances later, I can honestly say producing a ten-minute play festival is easier than you would probably think. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot of planning, a whole lot of reading, and just as much work as any theatrical endeavor, but ten-minute play festivals are a great way to cheaply produce a lot of new work.

 

When I started talking out the idea, for a play festival with fellow co-founders Mary Carroll-Hackett and Brett Hursey, I had some reservations. I wondered how we would get the money to build sets. I worried about the quality of the scripts we would receive, and I really wasn’t sure anyone would send anything in. We had a good idea, no money and endless reservations, but we did it anyway.

 

Now that the air has settled and plans are being made for the next festival, a number of people have approached me about starting their own festivals. My response has been the same: it’s easier than you think. So I’ve put together a plan for producing a ten-minute play festival.

 

• Hone the details of the festival. Will you have a special topic or theme? Will you offer a prize for the finalists? Will you charge a submission fee? With our festival we decided not to have a theme. We offered a DVD as a prize for the winners, and we did not charge a submission fee.

 

A note about submission fees: Many playwrights will not submit to your festival if you charge a fee, and many forums will not post a call for submissions with a fee attached.

 

• Write up a call for submissions. For an example go here:

 http://www.stageplays-forum.com/view_topic.php?id=1847&forum_id=10&highlight=Longwood

Post the call for submissions on various playwrighting forums. This is a cheap and very effective way to get your festival noticed. Here are some good forums:

 

 

http://www.stageplays-forum.com/

 

http://enavantplaywrights.yuku.com/

 

http://www.aact.org/cgi-bin/webdata_contests.pl?cgifunction=Search

 

• Make a list of the plays you receive and the dates they are received. Should a playwright call wondering if their script arrived, you can say “yes, it came on this date.”

 

• Establish readers who will reject or accept the scripts. This process is called slushing. The readers will eventually narrow the choices down to the best fifteen or twenty scripts. Give yourself at least a month to do this.

 

• A final judge narrows down the set number of winners. (In our case we choose five.)

 

• Cast the plays accordingly and rehearse them.

 

The Longwood Ten-Minute Play Festival ran all five plays back to back for three evenings. The production was a huge success. Some of the playwrights involved were extremely grateful, and many of the audience members commented that they did not know theatre like that existed.

 

In the end it took us four months, and three hundred dollars to produce five new plays – three of which were world premiers – and we filled roughly ninety percent of our seating capacity.