First draft of my thesis play complete
You may remember my decision to scrap my original plan for my thesis play halfway through and start an entirely new on instead. When I decided that, I wrote the first scene for my teacher to see if she thought it was a good idea. I only wrote the one scene in case she didn't like it, I didn't want to go too far with an idea I couldn't make work. But once I got the go ahead, that meant I had to write most of a complete draft in the time I was originally supposed to writing the final quarter of one. I have been feverishly working the last couple of weeks to make up for that last time, and I am relieved to say I finished the draft last night in time for when I was supposed to submit.
You know, I will never worry about whether writing game material is a waste of time. Because my games have informed my playwriting to such a huge extent. When my first thesis play idea wasn't working, the only idea I could come up with was... wait for it... a plot for a game I'd just written. A story in the backstory of that game became the basis for my piece. I am SO GLAD I wrote it, because it saved me from crashing and burning. And what do you know, I kind of like the story.
Funnily enough, this makes a good point about you never know what you can do with an idea. The protagonist of my play is Mrs. Elizabeth Loring, the wife of society gentleman and WWI hero Rowan Loring, and the mother of Alice, one of the two protagonists in Tailor of Riddling Way. Elizabeth only exists because to have a child you have to have a mother, so I slapped a name on Rowan's wife. The character had like one line, and then I said she died young because there was no room for her to factor into the story.
Then I needed to write a one-shot tabletop game. I wanted to set it in the same timeline as The Tailor of Riddling Way. And what jumped out at me was a possible story for Elizabeth, for what happened to her when she stepped out of the trajectory of the story featured in Tailor. For the game, this was backstory, the mysterious events of the past that needed to be discovered in order to understand what was going on in the present. But it turned out to be suited to being depicted dramatically. It's also not an unmanageable cast, full of women, and has a pretty produceable set of properties. Not a bad addition to my repertoire!
It doesn't have a last scene, technically. I wasn't sure how to close it. But hopefully my teacher will have a suggestion. And I don't know what to call it. I suck at titles. I've tentatively reused "The Bloom of May," but that's not totally accurate for just this part of the story. I also thought about "Mrs. Loring," as that is a very significant concept, but do I really want my two first full length pieces to have titles as similar as "Mrs. Hawking" and "Mrs. Loring"?
You know, I will never worry about whether writing game material is a waste of time. Because my games have informed my playwriting to such a huge extent. When my first thesis play idea wasn't working, the only idea I could come up with was... wait for it... a plot for a game I'd just written. A story in the backstory of that game became the basis for my piece. I am SO GLAD I wrote it, because it saved me from crashing and burning. And what do you know, I kind of like the story.
Funnily enough, this makes a good point about you never know what you can do with an idea. The protagonist of my play is Mrs. Elizabeth Loring, the wife of society gentleman and WWI hero Rowan Loring, and the mother of Alice, one of the two protagonists in Tailor of Riddling Way. Elizabeth only exists because to have a child you have to have a mother, so I slapped a name on Rowan's wife. The character had like one line, and then I said she died young because there was no room for her to factor into the story.
Then I needed to write a one-shot tabletop game. I wanted to set it in the same timeline as The Tailor of Riddling Way. And what jumped out at me was a possible story for Elizabeth, for what happened to her when she stepped out of the trajectory of the story featured in Tailor. For the game, this was backstory, the mysterious events of the past that needed to be discovered in order to understand what was going on in the present. But it turned out to be suited to being depicted dramatically. It's also not an unmanageable cast, full of women, and has a pretty produceable set of properties. Not a bad addition to my repertoire!
It doesn't have a last scene, technically. I wasn't sure how to close it. But hopefully my teacher will have a suggestion. And I don't know what to call it. I suck at titles. I've tentatively reused "The Bloom of May," but that's not totally accurate for just this part of the story. I also thought about "Mrs. Loring," as that is a very significant concept, but do I really want my two first full length pieces to have titles as similar as "Mrs. Hawking" and "Mrs. Loring"?