Writing the Rails

My little corner of the Internet has been abuzz all day with the news of the Amtrak Writers' Residency. The company will be giving 24 writers a round-trip ticket on one of their long distance routes to write ("room" only—you'll have to come  up with the "board..." and I'm okay with that). The competition is going to be fierce—almost every writer I know has already filled out the online application (and it was only announced two days ago). It's open to all disciplines—although a composer friend of mine wondered if he could be a viable candidate... in looking at the guidelines,* it would probably be difficult to provide the work sample (maybe a 10-page PDF from a score?).

As I've said before before in this blog, I'm a huge fan of train travel and this residency has given me the idea of creating a site specific piece for a train. I have no idea how it would work for the audience... or the actors, for that matter... or how to rehearse it... but I've never let that stop me in the past!

*It's important to point out that there is a lot of concern—and it is justified—about Amtrak's Official Terms and this point in particular:

6.   Grant of Rights: In submitting an Application, Applicant hereby grants Sponsor the absolute, worldwide, and irrevocable right to use, modify, publish, publicly display, distribute, and copy Applicant’s Application, in whole or in part, for any purpose... 

I decided to go ahead and agree to this point—although I'm sure the Dramatists Guild would slap me upside the head for it—and submit anyway. Legally, it's not very smart of me but since almost nothing I've written is very commercial, I weighed the experience I would gain with the potential "loss of income" and the experience won; I know that others will not agree with me on this point but it's how I feel. I hope that Amtrak will reconsider this point and make their rights request a little more reasonable.

Moron Writing

More accurately, of course, the title of this post is "More on Writing." It's not a particularly good pun (is it a pun?), I'll grant you, but it was prompted by something in this article in today's Times about the Royal Spanish Academy's "simplifying" of the Spanish alphabet. The Academy has decided that the letters "ch" (pronounced* "che") and "ll" ("ell-yay") are superfluous and will be omitted, bringing the total number of letters in the alphabet to 27—the additional letter being "ñ" ("en-yay"). It doesn't really change all that much: the ordinary Spanish-speaker will continue to put "c" and "h" together to make the "ch" sound—as we do in English—it just won't be part of the official alphabet.

What inspired me to write about this story is not that I have a problem with the removal of these two letters but this quote from Gabriel García Márquez:

At the first international congress of the Spanish language in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1997... Márquez declared, “Let’s retire spelling, the terror of all beings from the cradle.” But he admitted that his pleas were little more than “bottles flung to the sea in the hope that they would one day come to the god of all words.”

My first thought was: how beautiful—that man really is an amazing wordsmith! But his reference to spelling being "the terror of all beings" got me thinking about George Bernard Shaw's somewhat quixotic attempts to change English spelling to match the way words are pronounced (i.e., "ruf" instead of "rough") and, ultimately, to abandon the English alphabet entirely in favor of a purely phonetic one. I say it was only somewhat quixotic because his spelling reforms were merely 50 or so years ahead of their time: today, we call that texting. The phonetic alphabet, on the hand, seems destined to remain an amusing curiosity for those few people who are even familiar with it.

However much I admire these men, I must, respectfully, disagree with them. Perhaps, as my mother often says, it's because my first and second grade teachers in Odessa, TX, used phonics to teach us spelling—this was in 1969-70, over a decade before "Hooked on Phonics" exploded in the '80s—but I'm a pretty good speller. Of course, I have to look up words all the time—dictionary.com and thesaurus.com are always open when I'm writing—and the spell check corrects me much more often than I'd like, but most of my mistakes are due to my laziness as a proofreader: I'll get to typing fast and put down a homophone (most often, the ubiquitous "it's" for "its") and don't read over it again very carefully when I'm done. But one of the things I enjoy about writing is using the right word and spelling it correctly: for me, there's something intensely satisfying about knowing when to use "stationary" or "stationery," and "though" is simply more aesthetically pleasing than "tho."

Returning to the title of this post: no, I don't think that poor spellers are morons. There are plenty of times when I will opt for a phonetic spelling, especially when writing a play—there, how a word sounds and what it conveys are paramount and I will often write phonetically because I hope that gives the actor more information about the character or my intention for a line. It's important to know when and why to break the rules (Finnegan's Wake springs to mind as a good example of this and I know there are plenty of others) but that presumes that the author knows the rules. This really just reinforces my belief that spelling counts.

*If you're really interested in these pronunciations, there's a handy little website that has a child pronouncing the alphabet for you. You'll notice that the website also includes "rr" ("air-ray" with a rolled "r"), which is commonly included in the alphabet, but is not recognized by the Academy.

(Re)Writing

Too much has been happening since my last post in August. When I haven't been in rehearsals and performances for Wake, an exceptional new play by Bryn Manion, I've been trying to keep up with the deluge of survival work (at the moment, it pays so badly that it's actually barely-survival work) and keeping up with the absolute minimum of my PWP work (Catherine, Ralph and I have been teaching our workshop for Trinity/LaMaMa and doing photo research for our video project that we must finish soon). The Interlude may have appeared fallow but I've actually created dozens of blog posts every day over the past few months... it's just that they only exist in my mind and come to me at times that I can't write them down: like when I wake up at 4am and am struggling to get back to sleep. Regardless, I hope I'll be able to be more diligent about getting something down here in the coming days, weeks and months.

For a few weeks now, I've had an idea for a multi-tasking post. First, it would announce my return to acting for the first time in 17 years (see above)... which also just happens to be the first opportunity my lovely wife, Catherine, and I have ever had to perform together (in over 25 years as friends and almost 21 years as a couple). Second, it would get the word out about the upcoming production of Immortal: the Gilgamesh Variations by The Forge in January, of which I'm very pleased to be a part. But foremost, it would provide a little snapshot into the process of writing by focusing on how I have contributed to Immortal by adapting Tablet 11 of the Gilgamesh epic.

A quick overview: Gabriel Shanks and Kay Mitchell asked eleven playwrights to each adapt one of the tablets into a 10-minute play, the idea being that this would reflect the surviving fragments of the story that have been discovered so far which were pretty much all written by different authors at different times. Tablet 11, in addition to being the end of the story (and so requiring me to "wrap it all up" for the audience) is also quite dense: there's a full account of the Sumerian version of The Flood, Gilgamesh is given a 7-day test by Utnapishtim (the equivalent of Noah) and another task to perform once he fails that test, and finally he travels back to his home in Uruk (retracing an outgoing journey that required the three prior tablets to accomplish).

In 10 minutes. Right...

So I thought I would post my various drafts of the script, along with a few short notes on the changes I made. Some of the rewrites were in response to the length of the piece (my first full draft clocked in at over 15 minutes), some were in response to work that other writers had done that I could reference in my tablet, and some were based on dramaturgical suggestions from Gabriel and Kay as the project leaders. There were a few minor drafts in between each of these but I've decided to focus on the more significant rewrites (in the interest of time and... well, interest: I don't know if it's entertaining for the layman but I think it's somewhat intriguing for those of us who write).

• My first draft was fairly faithful: I tried to cram it all in. Like I said, this one was WAY too long. Let the rewrites begin.
• The next version was the result of several drafts that whittled away more of the details from the original and focused on the bigger picture items: the Flood, the realization by Gilgamesh that immortality is not possible and the journey home. It's significantly shorter. I had the idea to begin it with Gilgamesh having reverted almost to the state of an animal and then rebuilding himself into a human being over the course of the tablet. I've also removed the supernatural beings almost entirely: this is in part due to the fact that there were just too damned many Sumerian gods and we all decided that the audience would never be able to keep track of who they were and what they did, but also because we all felt that one aspect of Gilgamesh's journey is that he discovers that his destiny relies more on his personal actions than on divine intervention. I also added a hymn to Uruk that I thought captured the last lines of the tablet pretty well and an epilogue: at the time, I didn't know who was going to speak it but I've tried it a couple of different ways since this draft.
• By August, several of the elements had begun to be set in the script: the beginning has changed very little but the ending is still not working. I tried splitting up the Epilogue to all of the actors and the flood story is dramatically shorter. However, by the next month, the bathing ritual has been moved to later in the play (over a series of rewrites to follow, it would be removed entirely and then ultimately returned to a few different places to see if it could be salvaged). I made an attempt to bring Enkidu back into the story (he had died several tablet earlier and the rule was—essentially—that "dead is dead" and he couldn't be brought back into the story) by having Gilgamesh see his statue come to life in a vision: that didn't fly.
• A new year, a new draft. The changes are smaller except that I tried to merge Enkidu with the snake in the vision and make the scene a duet with the people of Uruk in which they admonish Gilgamesh to return home (an interesting idea, but it was not to be). The bathing ritual has been integrated into the homecoming at Uruk, which I really like and hope it will stay here. Ishtar has the epilogue now in an attempt to bookend the production (Juanita Rockwell's Tablet 1 begins with Ishtar addressing the audience); I didn't love it and neither did anyone else.
• The current draft. The vision is gone entirely; now it is very much the way it is in the source material: a snake steals the last hope of immortality from Gilgamesh—period. The journey home has been dramatically truncated and the epilogue has been returned to Gilgamesh. I am, for the most part, pleased with where it is now.

There will be more changes but I think they'll be more tweaks than rewrites.

Sampling or Stealing?

Lionel Trilling famously said, "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."

Not so in Germany this week—17-year-old writer Helene Hegemann has admitted that she lifted entire passages from a young Berliner's blog about his hedonistic life in the techno club scene for her debut novel, Axolotl Roadkill. I first read the story earlier this week in Spiegel Online (the English edition, I don't read German). In today's Times, I found another article that attempted to put the story into a broader context with opinions from a variety of industry professionals.

I know that plenty of my writer friends will disagree with me on this, but I'm not a purist when it comes to copyright laws and fair use. The majority of the changes that have been made to these laws in the past half century were done to protect corporate copyrights, not artists: The Walt Disney Company couldn't have cared less that George Bernard Shaw's plays were due to become public domain this year but they couldn't let that happen to Mickey Mouse! Nevertheless, I firmly believe that an artist should control how and in what context their work is presented and that no one should be allowed to profit from the fruits of someone else's labors.

I've used appropriated texts on a number of occasions in my plays. In my first one, Before I Wake, a doctor offers the audience several facts about the blood and circulation (the play is an adaptation of Dracula); the speeches are all reworked from a book I found on the subject. While I believe my changes to the original text are significant, I would never dream of publishing the play without getting permission or approval from the copyright holder; and even if the original material was in the public domain, I would still offer some sort of attribution or acknowledgment of the source material—it's not like I could have done the job without that contribution!

I don't think that any use of copyrighted material in the creation of a new work is evil or bad—unless it's being done without permission or with the intention of deceiving others about the actual authorship. Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, for example, fails the first test (even if you believe that he had not intended for the album to reach the public, he did do all of the work without permission) but passes the second—the entire point of the album was that the songs were recognizable as remixes of work created by others. Helene Hegemann, on the other hand, fails on both counts; sure, she and her publisher are "attributing" her appropriated text—now that they've been caught—but if they truly felt all along that she had done nothing wrong, why not have that attribution in place in the first edition? It seems pretty clear that Hegemann, at the very least, is more than a tad disingenuous when she says, "I can't understand what all the fuss is about."

On Writing

5:50 pm

After spending the better part of the afternoon sitting at my computer working on my play, I decided to give myself a break and take a walk around the East Village. As I made my way through Tompkins Square Park, I started thinking about the process of writing: how I'd spent several hours working but really had relatively little to show for it: one new scene and two or three fairly significant revisions. Now, while I'm sitting at Cafe Pick Me Up, having a cup of coffee and a piece of nutbread, I thought I'd try to put my thoughts into this post.

No, I didn't bring my computer on my break—I brought my PDA and keyboard... it's a subtle distinction, I'll grant you...

When I was in college, I couldn't compose at the typewriter because I only typed 30 wpm (I attribute my lack of speed to the fact that my typewriter was an old Remington manual... and the fact that I didn't practice typing much), so I always wrote my papers out in longhand and then typed them once I'd finished. It wasn't at all efficient, but it was the only way I was comfortable getting my thoughts down. I don't think I was a very good writer then because I had a tendency to do my revisions during the typing phase—and, as I've said, I was a lousy typist on an old typewriter. As a result, I would start revising a thought, get about halfway done when I'd realize a better way to say the thought, but have to continue along the path I'd started because, at that point, revising the revision would mean retyping the entire page.

Today, since I write on a computer, I always revise as I go: I can start an idea one way, change my mind, go back and take a new tack immediately. It somehow suits the way my mind works. And I think it's allowed me to be a better writer than I ever imagined I'd be, or at least a clearer writer. If my only option was pencil and paper, I know I'd only be writing letters to friends—and that very rarely. Maybe it's the anal retentive in me: when I write on a computer, no matter how many times I revise, the "paper" (read my ideas) always looks crisp and clean.

What we lose, of course, is a record of the process of writing. My partner, Ralph, has bemoaned this fact to me several times; I know he often keeps drafts of scripts and stuff, and that he will compare later revisions to the earlier drafts. For me, though, I don't think my process is anywhere near as interesting as the results, so I don't feel the world will be any poorer for the loss of my "drafts," quite frankly.

I've read of (and even met a few) writers who won't work on a computer—they could, but they choose not to; I seem to remember reading that Edward Albee still uses a typewriter. I'm sure that there are still some who write only in longhand. And I wouldn't be surprised if, in a few years, I'll be the old-fashioned guy still using a keyboard (I don't see myself switching to a microphone, no matter how cool they make it look on Star Trek). The one thing that stays constant, regardless of of how the words are put on the paper, is the amount of time the writer spends sitting with the work not writing—in my case, at last half the time I devote to the project.

6:50 pm

Floydada

So I was googling Floydada, Texas yesterday for the play I'm writing (which will have it's 'debut' at Dixon Place on the 28th of this month) and got this link to the Floyd County Museum. You'll notice there's a contact link on the site, so I thought, "What the hey: I'll drop them a line and see if I can get some help with my research." I'm not going to bother anyone with every little question that occurs to me, but its great to have this resource for information on the town and it's history that I can't readily find in the New York libraries or online. And, of course, the folks there have already gone out of their way to help me: Frank Potts responded to my query within a few hours (and after hours, I might add) to send me a series of photos taken by a panoramic camera of the town square in 1926 (the above photo is one of them, which I got from their website).

I have a lot of work to do in the next 25 days: I still have a few scenes to write that I think must be in the play, and rehearsals to work out, of course, but I'm anxious to hear how people respond to the play. I'm meeting tonight with Kriota Willberg, who's going to be choreographing the dances I wrote in for Catherine; just based on her off-the-cuff ideas she e-mailed me, I can already tell she really gets it (as I knew she would). And I've gotten lots of e-mails from Richard Galgano, a director here in NYC who also has an amazing wealth of knowledge about music history, with music to consider for the piece! More on this as it develops....