Open Wardrobes

After Kelly passed the 45,000 word mark yesterday I managed to distract her from her NaNoWriMo goals long enough to finish reading the first draft of the one-man show. Kelly is usually my first filter for any writing project, as she's not shy about telling me when something is quite simply not very good. I consider this a good thing, not everyone is willing to be so honest when it means also being critical. But so long as the criticism I receive (from anyone, really) is constructive, I'm all for it. How else can you really know where things are going wrong? Kelly was an English literature major in college and is very insightful when it comes to critiquing a piece of writing and analyzing the themes, structure, and so on. And if she can effectively analyze Dostoevsky... well, my stuff is a little easier.


I had had a bit of an existential crisis in the middle of the piece, unsure if the overall shape of it was going in a good direction. I felt better about that by the end of the first draft, but still wasn't 100% certain. After hearing Kelly's comments I fell that the concept is sound, though the piece still needs a lot of work! But a first draft is intended to bring out the rough shape of a piece (Kelly's analogy is that of carving a piece of wood with a chainsaw), to know what needs to happen and when. The detail work can come later. I've had plenty of instances where I've spent way too much time on a line or a piece of a scene, only to cut the whole chunk later on. I would love of course if each line in the first draft came out perfect, but I'm learning that worrying about that kind of perfection too early can stifle a new piece. Having the first draft complete makes a piece more real to me. It's no long just an idea, it's now something with a complete form, imperfect as it might be. And that initial sense of completion helps motivate me to keep working on it and bring it to perfection.


So, one draft down, and now with some feedback to work from. The working title of the piece is Schrodinger's Cat Must Die!, which gets at the physics theme, grabs the attention (I hope), and is right in line with the primary conflict of the play. I've be re-reading John Gribbin's In Search of Schrodinger's Cat which is a nice introduction to quantum theory and where it came from without getting too bogged down in all the math (there's the science geek in me coming out). Anyway, there are still about 8 months to go before the opening of Fringe 2009 and with a rough draft complete I'm ahead of the curve!