Every little piece

The other day my (amazing!) aunt and I were discussing the world of the theatre. Well, maybe discussing is a bad choice of words here. I was babbling like the loony bin that I am, and she was managing to interject a question or comment every five minutes or so. But anyway, I digress. One of the things that came up was how much behind-the-scenes work goes into putting on a play. My aunt, who appreciated the theatre but never studied it in that much detail before I became involved, mentioned that she'd never really thought about all the effort, time, and investment that went into the sets, costumes, props, sound, lights, scene changes, production, direction, etc.
When you go to see a show, you're looking at the final product of many weeks' work. What you see is a well-oiled, finely-tuned machine. You see the actors. If you look carefully, you might spot a member of the crew. You might see the director giving the curtain speech. What you don't see is the costume designer sitting in the dressing room frantically mending the lead actor's jacket in time for act two. You don't see the light board operator hunched over his script, waiting for the next light shift. You don't see the stage manager poised in the wings to cue the scene changes.
Today we had our last performance for Alice in Wonderland. Starting this Tuesday, my acting will take a backseat to more technical pursuits: I've been asked to design props for the next show at my theatre, and I've got a stage managing gig and an assistant directing gig lined up for next year. I'm planning on auditioning for a Christmas show, but that's, of course, an uncertainty. I may get a part, but I may end up stage managing. We shall see.
My point here is, it's really easy for people to forget how important the non-acting components of theatre are. When I tell my non-theatre friends that I'm in a show, I get huge reactions. "Wow, that's great! Good for you! When are the performances? I'd love to come!" When I tell them I'm stage managing or running the sound, notsomuch. "That's interesting. Is anything else new?" When I'm in the cast, friends and family crawl out of the woodwork to see me perform. No one but my closest family members and most hardcore theatre friends show up when I'm on the crew.
Now, don't get me wrong. I realize it's much more fun for the people who love me to SEE me onstage in all my glory. But what non-theatre geeks don't always understand is that being on the crew is just as much of an investment. If I'm the stage manager, I have to attend every rehearsal and every performance, just like the actors. I don't have lines to learn, but I have scene changes and cues that I have to memorize and practice. And while I don't get to take a bow, the actors couldn't do their jobs without me backstage making sure the technical aspect runs smoothly.
Without production, lights, sound, costumes, sets, props, and direction, a play is left mostly to the audience's imagination. The acting is there, but it's left to the viewer to imagine the world the characters inhabit. With those components, the audience is automatically transported to wherever the playwright invisioned. All they have to do is sit back and let the actors tell the story.
If you're a theatre lover reading this, you already know the truth in my rant. If you aren't, well...consider yourself enlightened. :)

Home sweet home

This has been a really weird couple of months for my family. For one thing, we're moving again. We just moved a year ago, but a mix-up with a bad-egg of a landlord has actually opened a great opportunity for us. We just purchased our very first house! Very exciting (I'm loving the fact that I get to paint my room for the first time in my life) but also very stressful. Moving is chaotic, especially when the move-ees are a family of packrats. I hate the idea of stuffing my treasures in boxes and moving them in disarray. It'll be great once we're at the new house and unpacked, but for now, it's just work and stress.
Another fun situation adding to our stress levels is my dad's job. Bad economy equals bad job security, and even large industries like my dad's are looking to cut some employees. My dad's in a good place--he's a great worker, and he has several other job possibilities lined up should he be downsized--but the not-knowing what will come next is still stressful, especially for him.
In the midst of all of this weirdness, there is my favorite activity in the whole widest of the world: theatre. At the moment I'm tap-dancing in/stage mananging a musical called "The Brain From Planet X." And not only that, but I'm fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams: being in a show with my theatre coach, a.k.a. my acting benefactor, a.k.a. my dad. He's in the show, too--playing the role of the ever-suffering and taciturn Private Partz. (Get it? Private Partz? Tee hee!)
The show is hilarious--it's a parody of all those oh-so-cheesy 1950's the-aliens-are-coming-to-take-over-the-world sci-fi movies. Plus it's a musical. Perfection much? The characters are all larger than life, from the hard-working inventor-for-the-government perfect-1950s-father Fred to the faithful-alien-lackey Zubrick to the world's oldest one-star general, General Mills. (Once again: tee hee!)
And besides the show, there's the theater itself. Buck Creek Players is my second home. Ever since I walked through the doors to audition for A Christmas Carol: Scrooge and Marley a year and a half ago, BCP has offered me nothing but opportunities and great friends. Even when I'm not directly involved with a show, I just love being there. I've acted, assistant directed, stage managed, run sound, and built sets. I love it all.
It's strangely grounding for me--amidst all the chaos and disorder of moving, painting, packing, etc., I know that every night, my dad and I will jump in the car, make the half-hour trip to Buck Creek, and sing through the score of the show or block out scenes. I love watching Dad perform on the stage I'm so familiar with, among the actors, directors, and crew members I know so well. I love sharing the experience with him. He's cheered on my acting endeavors for so long, I love knowing that this time, I'll not only be cheering him on, but I'll be right there with him backstage. It's a dream come true.
To a fearless father who wasn't afraid to audition with his daughter, no matter what the outcome: thank you, and all my love. You're the best in the world.

Sharing

My younger brother Ben is one creative little dude. While I'm off at the theatre stepping into a character's skin, he's at home spinning stories and worlds out of the most mundane of circumstances. Ben watches a nature documentary and gets an idea for a new species of animals he can use in a story; he reads a book on art history and imagines a world where art is illegal. There is, almost literally, nothing that won't set his imagination to work. I don't doubt that he'll be a great author and a great storyteller.
Seeing as how he and I are together every day for school, and seeing as how we're about as close as two siblings can be, we tend to use each other as sounding boards for creativity. Hardly a day goes by without Ben tapping me on the shoulder and announcing, "I thought of an idea for a..." And off he goes. I don't approach him with ideas quite as often, since writing and storytelling aren't my only creative outlets, but when I do have a new story concept, he's one of the first to know. When I'm in that stage of writing where I have the idea, but none of the details, Ben is fantastic at listening and giving input. Sometimes all it takes is one little sentence: "That's a cool thought, but what if you added this?" and my story resolves itself into plot twists and characters.
We also work well together when coming up with joint ideas. Ben is all about plot; he loves action/adventure and is fantastic at adding nuance and suspense to a story. I'm more into the characters; I concentrate on populating my worlds with realistic, well-rounded people. Together, we create outstanding characters who take amazing journeys.
But we're not always creating other planets or envisioning magical beasts. Sometimes, our combined creativity is focused on something as simple as making up an episode on one of our favorite tv shows. Ben and I share a lot of similar tastes in television (heheh...cartoon network and disney, anyone?), and we recently discovered Phineas and Ferb on the disney channel. (If you haven't seen this show, I HIGHLY reccomend it. Cartoon or not, it's super-creative and has humor for all ages.) Now we bounce episode ideas off each other all the time, and in fact, I'm actually writing some of them into full-fledged stories. Granted, they're not stories I can dream of publishing, but there's a place for such stories in the world (fanfiction.net, people...but I suppose that's another blog post.) And besides...it's just fun. It's fun writing in a world I didn't make up. It's fun trying to match the style of the show.
And most of all, it's fun creating with my little brother. Love you, Ben.

Social or personal?

Depending on how you pursue it, creativity can be a social or a private experience. It can be an activity you engage in with a huge group of friends, or one which you would only attempt in the privacy of your own home. It all depends on what your interests are, and what your personality is like.
My two biggest passions encompass both ends of the spectrum. Acting for the theater is, obviously, an extremely social activity. Even if you're in a one-man show, you are working closely with the crew and staff of the theater. And one-man shows aren't common--more often you're in a cast with at least a few other actors. Writing, on the other hand, tends to be a very personal engagement. You sit at your computer or notebook and put your thoughts on paper (or word document), usually in solitude.
However, being the social creature that I am, my writing is much less solitary than it could be. When I'm cultivating a new story idea, one of my favorite steps is sharing the idea with my family members and seeing how they respond to it. Sometimes I'll hand out copies of the first chapter of my latest work-in-progress and let my parents and brother "beta test" the story for me. And when I finish a story, I often read it aloud to my little brother, to see for myself which parts make him laugh or catch his interest.
There's other ways to make social a very personal activity like writing--for instance, I know of writing groups or clubs where authors will get together and share their latest masterpieces with each other, looking for feedback and constructive criticism. I knew a writer who wanted everyone who read her novels to fill out long, involved questionnaires about what they thought of them. There's online communities where you can post poetry and stories and get feedback from around the world.
In this last half a year or so, I've had the opportunity to experience social writing in another form. A fellow writer who is a very dear friend of mine and I decided to do a collaboration and write a novel together. It's been an amazing journey--my co-author is much more experienced than me, both in writing and in marketing finished stories, but the method with which she tackles her writing is similar to my own. We work well together.
When we started out, neither of us had any preconceptions about what the story would be about. My co-author proposed that we write a sci-fi novel, and I agreed--I tend towards the fantasy genre, but I'd been wanting to try out sci-fi for awhile anyway. She suggested that we both agree on a setting and a few major plot points, then go off and separately create a few characters. Then, without much set-up, we'd jump right into the writing section.
This is by no means the only way to do a collaboration. I'm sure there are as many methods for working with another author as their are authors. But this method worked for us, as we both tend to focus on our characters when we write (as opposed to focusing on either the plot or the setting) and we wanted our story to be mostly a character study.
We sat down and discussed the basic fabric of the story, and within a few hours we'd come up with our conflict and setting. We decided how many characters were needed, and what kind. Then we disbanded and spent some time working on our separate characters--she created one, and I created two. We exchanged the basic information about our characters (name, job, appearance, etc.)--the kind of stuff the characters would already need to know about each other--and without further ado, began to write.
We took turns writing sections for the story. She would do a few scenes, then email me her piece; I would write a few scenes, and send it back; and so on. Sometimes we would write 20,000 words within a week; sometimes the story would remain untouched for a month. We both wanted to remain unpressured, so we made sure not to rush each other--this was a fun side project, not our jobs, and we both had lots of stuff going on outside the story. We took our time and let the characters develop at their own pace.
The key element I want to stress here is communication. That was what made this work so well, in my opinion. It sounds obvious, but there you go. :P We constantly were sitting down together and having conversations like: Me: "I know we need to have such-and-such happen soon...do you want to write that scene, or should I?" Co-author: "I've got to finish up my scene with so-and-so, then you can write it, if it'll fit into your section." Me: "Sure--I just have to make sure I work in this other such-and-such, so my section might run a little long." And so on. We weren't territorial about our characters--even though I created and oversaw the main parts involving Characters A and B, my co-author wrote them into her scenes frequently, and vice versa. And we were careful to check with each other to make sure we were writing each others' characters the way they wanted.
Anyway, the point is, we're coming up to the final stretch of writing here. The climax has been and gone, and we're working on the big finish now. Once the actual writing is completed, my co-author will edit it thoroughly (she loves editing), we'll make our re-writes, and then beta-test it on our family members and friends. After that, it'll fall to me to do most of the marketing. It's been a ton of fun writing with someone else, and we're planning to do more collaborations in the future.
Oh...and I forgot to mention that my co-author doubles as my mom. :P Hey, my passion for writing had to come from somewhere, right?