Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Stage Plays, Screen Plays and Novels

Stage Plays, Screen Plays and Novels

Thursday Night is fun at the RC flying field. I took my PT 19 (A two seated single wing trainer) and Tony and Chad were there. They are good buddies and meet at the field that is located geographically about 45 minutes from their homes. The PT 19 I bought several months ago from the club president and was configured to his unique style of RC flying. They got everything configured to a more conventional mode and we fired up the aircraft. Tony flew it and it proved to be a nice flyer. He did not recommend that I fly it however. Instead they offered to let me fly Chad’s plane on a “Buddy Box.”

With a Buddy Box there are two control boxes, linked by a wire, one held by the trainer and the other by the trainee. The trainer takes the plane off and gets some altitude and the trainee then takes over. If the student has a problem the instructor can push a button on his box and take over flight of the aircraft.

I was amazed by the light touch required to get the aircraft to respond. When I first took control the plane behaved erratically as I over compensated with the controls. Without the box set-up I would have crashed. Slowly I got the hang of it but not to the extent I felt really competent. By then it was getting dark.

In this part of the country the wind blows a lot but near twilight for about an hour is a great time-period when the wind lets up a little. It was that kind of an evening and I was glad I took the opportunity to go out to the field. Chad had some pictures on his cell phone and showed me Tony’s crashed war-bird that met its demise last week. The battery that controls the ECM went defective resulting in the misshape. It was disheartening to see that beautiful airplane in pieces all over the ground.

As the Play Writing Guy, a reputation I acquired as a consequence of teaching the One Act Play class, I get frequent questions about Screen Plays. I hardly feel competent to speak about Stage Plays and Screen Plays are even more of a stretch. While most writing that involves a longer work, specifically Stage, Screen and Novels, has a lot in common, screen plays are different. The big difference is the “Screen” DUH! The writer needs to understand that the screen is doing some of the talking and write with that in mind. It is akin to but different from the Stage play which also has a screen of sorts. The big difference to me is the dialog. For both, words are important, but with the stage play the language dominates while with the screen play the imagery dominates. With the Novel, where there is no stage or screen, the author must make use of the reader’s imagination and create therein the stage or screen. This means more exposition to provide amplification of what the reader cannot physically see. These are important differences and account for why the three types of literature read so differently and why they must be written with the dynamics of each of the genres in mind.

Even so the three have much in common and the basics of what the Exploratory Writing Workshop tries to bring out is of great use to a writer in any of the three modes.