MUSES theatre project

Here in Austin there’s a little annual theatre event called MUSES. In it, the Vestige Group takes over a house for a unique kind of performance. They take pictures of every room in the house and send those out to playwrights, who then write and submit a 5-7 minute scene or monologue to take place in one of the rooms. 10-15 scenes are chosen, then casting and rehearsals take place very quickly, and roughly a month later theatre-goers can share in this very interesting live performance experience. The limited-size audience is broken up into smaller groups, and go room to room to witness and sometimes participate in these scenes.

This year, the Vestige Group decided to use only Austin playwrights and writers. I heard about all this through the Austin Writers Meetup and decided to try my hand at stage writing. Below you’ll find a PDF of the short script I wrote (a monologue) as well as the pictures from the house that inspired this scene. Scenes were only due on the 23rd, so we’re still waiting to hear which scenes will be chosen for actual production. Fingers crossed.

Picture 1 | Picture 2 | Scene: Negative Space

**UPDATE: My scene was sadly not selected for production out of the 50+ submitted. Ah well. I still consider it a good writing exercise.

World-Building Workshop 1

Today the Austin Writers Group had a workshop (first in a serirs of four) all about world-building – how to flesh out the world of your stories so that they take place in a living, breathing, dynamic world. This includes everything from plate tectonics to architecture to mythology to the weave of the local cloth, etc. There are levels and levels.

The exercise we worked on today was in creating a word garden, just to get ideas flowing and create a kind of snapshot of one specific part of that world. A place, or a scene. You’d start with one word, then for a few mintues write down any other word or phrase that came to mind off of that first. Then you cut them up into seperate cards, and draw a few. Choose 3 or 5 or however many (depending on how specific you want to be) and create a world or scene off of those words. We were then to write a paragraph or so about this new place.

My 5 words/phrases were: blazing sun, stone, horses, canyon, isolated.

And here is the paragraph I came up with:

The sun blazes down across the Outlands, heating the stones until the air above shimmers, mirage-like. The horses’ hooves strike sparks as they gallop down into the canyon. They know it’s their only hope of shade in this stark countryside. He watches from above, isolated and content, his rocky perch a brief shadow against the sun. He does this every year, when the wild horses come through – seeks them out, watches them. The older horses always guide the young ones along this same path, and he’s now worn a kind of seat into the rock, shifting his weight to keep limbs from sleeping, but never approaching closer. He knows he could catch them if he wanted to, tame them, break them; he has the skills. He would never. It is enough for him to simply know of their existence, and partake, however distantly, of a bit of their wildness and beauty. That memory, that knowledge keeps his soul afloat through the rest of the long year. It is his secret and his joy. It is also his deepest despair, for one day his masters will catch scent of his secret, and when they learn of the wild ones they will destroy them. Not kill them, no, but take them and turn them into sad mockeries of the beauty born of freedom. Make him do it, for harboring this treasure. The thought makes his chest ache. The sun beats down on his uncovered head, warning him of the hour, judging him for his future betrayal. He wants to explain that he’ll have no choice. But the sun isn’t interested in mercy today; it lowers itself to the horizon in exacting degrees. He sighs, fingering the stone collar on his neck, looking down on the horses now resting in the shade of the canyon walls. Their time is almost up.

Repose

It’s an odd mix, this feeling,
caught halfway between numb shock
and exhausted relief,
the abiding tension finally burnt out,
the resolution both dreaded and expected.

I find that even through my tears
there’s a core of calm acceptance,
simply knowing that I can rest,
no longer pouring my spirit and energy
into something so draining,
so futile,
and so one-sided.

The question now is whether I can remember
how it feels to live
any other way,

how it feels to be at peace.

A Story Is…

If you’ve checked out the sidebar, you know that I’ve recently been reading a book called Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, by David Gerrold. Well, one of the exercises in it is to figure out what a story is to you. You’re just supposed to sit down with a notepad or at your computer, write ‘A story is…’ and then finish the sentence. There’s no right or wrong answer, it’s just an exercise to help you clarify what you think a story is.

My answer took awhile to come up with, but I think it works, for both non-fiction or fiction stories:

“A story is the framework through which we teach each other about the world and about ourselves.”

What do you think? What is a story to you?

Resonance

Saw this on a Twitter post recently. Resonated a bit too strongly.

They say you shouldn’t let someone into your life who inflicts pain. Have you ever worried about someone who didn’t worry back? How to stop?

Would love to know the answer to that last one.