Rehearsals as a Strategy

Continuing on the themes of "patience and deadlines" from last time, I want to share one of the most useful and terrifying skills I've picked up over the last year: sharing.

I'm (over?) confident in my ability to do a short-burst draft of something. My instructor recently reminded me that I've just marked my two year anniversary of taking her evening classes, which are shaped as half-instructional, and half developmental. We're writing to an in-class prompt, producing a response or an outline, or possibly a brief scene, and then sharing. It's rough-and-raw writing, and the room is very accommodating: we've turned it out in fifteen minutes, it's not going to be great. It might not even be good. But it's a start.

Out of class, we have different forums for sharing, and that's been the most help to me, for skills growth. Preparing a passage for a five- to seven-minute reading and light, supportive critique is very different than attempting to get a whole scene done on the fly. Learning how to shape something for that time window and practicing that preparation work has polished up my "revision" skills in a way that only fixing-for-myself could not do. There's an audience now, and they're all going to hear how I use "seemed" twenty-three times in five minutes. Better clear this up. 

Trouble was the first piece that I'd treated this way, looking for whole moments that I could polish and improve to bring to a room. It's still staged, to a degree, since I'm picking passages out of the longer work that will either make sense as a standalone, or have a bit of dialogue or action that I want to show off or get feedback upon, or which I just wanted an excuse to polish. Here at revision time, the passages that I've previously shared out are noticeably stronger than those that have been revised without an audience in mind.

So, as I try to draw the curtain closed on this work, I'm also trying to get into the mindset of "how can I pretend there's an audience here?" and polish it up even more. I want the story to stand as a story, and be true to the characters and their goals and motivations. In that sense, my role as an author is to capture that story in as true and clear a voice as I can. I do believe that their stories come from another place, and we're relay towers to boost them. But we also have an obligation as producers, to make that sound as pure and enticing as we can.

Raw and ad-hoc writing has an exciting immediacy to it, and a warts-and-all openness that exposes the process beneath. Revising for an audience is the delicate walk between the excitement of immediacy and actual readability and interest. That's a muscle I am still working on.

🧩🦏