Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Mon, 30 Nov 2009
Normally, in November, I would be feverishly typing away on a novel. For instance, in 2006, I came up with my first novel, Troublesome Cargo. The next year, I came up with my favorite long-form project so far, Hybrids. In 2008, I was ridiculously busy, and did NaNoWriMo, but I really phoned it in with The Curious Adventures of Heinrich von Klausheim. Definitely not my best effort.
This year, perhaps soured by the effort of 2008, I decided to try something different. My first novel hit the requisite 50,000 word mark in 12 days. My second in 14 days, and it ended up being 85,000 words. Clearly I was capable of the task. So this year, I decided to try writing a play.
Enter NaPlWriMo (pronounced "napple-rai-mo"). The goal is similar to that of NaNoWriMo: write X amount of text in 30 days. Since a play is obviously different from a novel, the requrement is different too. Instead of writing to 50,000 words, the goal is 75 pages of 12 point Courier text.
I started out much like I had with Hybrids (where I decided to see if I could write a story based simply on a word I'd heard on the news one day: "hybrids"): I started with a phrase. Someone mis-pasted the phrase, "Then, she stole my jacket and cell phone" into an IRC channel (online chat room sorta thing) I frequent. I liked the phrase, and thought I'd try writing a play around it.
I was in no rush, unlike with the novel attempts in the past, because I had clearly demonstrated my ability to be a wordy firehose, and 75 pages didn't honestly look like a very daunting goal. So I tried to get my mind worked around the unique limitations of writing for the stage: limited locations, limited characters, nothing too outlandish and hard to stage. Doubtless experienced playwrights would have something to say on this kind of self-limitation, and I'd be interested to hear it, but that's how I handled things.
The effort ended up taking 25 days to finish, which included at least three days on which I didn't write at all, and a few days where I made only a token attempt at getting any writing done. It was finished on the train down to Portland to hang out with my family for Thanksgiving. Today, I finished a first-pass edit to clean up obvious inconsistencies, giving me a fairly readable and not too unbearable 77 page play. I still haven't come up with a title yet, so I've just been calling it NaPlWriMo 2009.
Click here to download the PDF of NaPlWriMo 2009
The play ended up being centered around time travel, and the enforcement of time travel regulations, based on a universe where timelines split every time a decision is made. It's an interesting exploration for me, and notably, I finally feel like I had some success creating believably unique characters. Previously, I've always felt like every character in a book was more or less myself with something added or subtracted. Whether my "believably unique" characters have anything more than a paper-thickness of depth to them is a completely different question, but I'll take progress where I can get it.
Bret Fetzer, Artistic Director of Annex Theatre, made some (perhaps half-joking) motions about wanting to do a reading of it, and I've been considering talking to him about it. We'll see what happens. Maybe we'll see Nigel and crew on stage at some point in the future.
Of course, because I finished in the allotted time, I am allowed to post this striking graphic on my blaggs:
I iz a winnar!
If you find yourself with constructive feedback regarding my latest foray into literary endeavors, please feel free to email or comment on FB, where this will end up in an hour or two. Hooray for creativity!
Posted at 16:52 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater