Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Lipstick on the Pig

Lipstick on the Pig

In my One Act Play Workshop last term I had an amazing student. In lesson 2 we were doing Character Development and I challenged the students to acquire an image of their Central and Supporting Characters.

Her approach to doing the lesson was finding photographs and pasting them to the top of the Character profile templates. When I saw her work my jaw dropped open. For about an hour I closely examined each photo and read several times the accompanying templates. When I started reading the acts of her play I had a vivid image of these characters and could picture them walking about, delivering their dialogues and monologues.

This got me to thinking about some of my own vignettes and short stories about elves in my Essence and Stones Serials. Sometimes I read a contest prompt and think about one of the episodes. The weakness of these, when I wrote them, was that they were written with a stage drama mindset and not for the mind’s eye of a prose reader’s imagination. So when I saw a prompt that fit some earlier material I want back and focused specifically at translating from a stage to a short story genre.

In the process I had acquired some images of female elves from some of our local WDC Shop owners. Legerdemain proved to be extremely helpful. What began to emerge was that there was a science to the conversion process to go along with the obvious art. This is what I did.

First I used WritingML to center and display the image. There are tutorials at WDC on how to do this. So I would paste the image at the top of a blank sheet of electronic paper and begin there. Then I would paste the vignette that had been one of the “also runs.” From there I began adding in all that rich warm exposition I‘d been dinged for not including. A part of this exposition was character descriptions. On this go around however, I had an image and after careful study began expanding my anemic earlier attempts….

You see in a play, it was my experience, that the casting director was going to read it and based upon her light and experience select an actor or actress she thought would fit the bill. Have you ever gone to a movie after reading a book and found the characters to be rather out of alignment with the impression created in your mind? Well this is a part of the problem I’m talking about….going from a novel or short story to a screen or stage play or vice versa. Now however, for better or worse, I had an image and after careful study and reviewing the litany of traits in the template, was ready to make these characters come to life.

The next step of course was to decide how many words I could devote to these sketches and that depended on the word count ceiling associated with the contest. One of the advantages a student comes away with from the one Act Play Work Shop is experience with a three scene structure that introduces, shows and peaks, and tapers down, in much the same way that most literature follows a structure of introduction, body and conclusion. Now the word count is by no means evenly distributed between the three parts. In a half hour play five minutes might be allocated to scene 1, twenty to scene 2 and five to scene 3. This is a very liberal rule of thumb and the dramatist is certainly at liberty to rob Peter to pay Paul and is anything but hard and fast….however, a written work generally has these three parts and if constrained by a word count the writer has to decide what the distribution will look like. Have you ever read a work that ended abruptly when it appeared the author bumped his/her head on the ceiling? I read a lot of contest entrys that sound like that.

In a piece of flash fiction of say a thousand words the writer has to get in, do it and get out pretty fast. Still some measure of the word count must be devoted to character development, as well as story line in addition to the other demands of the genre or form. In addition to this I discovered that WritingML has some graphic features for enhancing the default printing mechanisms. Some people go a little overboard with these and some ignore them altogether. For a young writer its like getting ready for that first date. My daughters usually over did the makeup and I recall applying a bit too much English Leather… once upon a time. (My date made me pull over and scrub my face at a service station wash room… can you imagine that?) Get the drift…?

I am reading that the richness of a composition is often in the details… and I am finding more and more that this is the case. So when you do your next contest submission, don’t be afraid to provide an image up front. After all how many novels have you purchased, hooked first by the cover art? Then give some thought to maybe bumping up the font into an something easier on the eyes….while applying some of the common sense learned long ago in the classroom of life. (chuckle, chuckle.)