Holidays from many cultures appear in the last months of the year.
Who do you know who needs a holiday gift?
Girls from 10 of 13: Siljeea Magic
Anyone who likes unusual fantasy: The Dry Country
Two signed copies for $15
1 signed copy for $10
Judith.pratt.writer@gmail.com
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This is a true story, with names changed to protect my family!
It was time to meet all the cousins and uncles and aunts that belonged to his new wife. Bob had his own cousins and uncles and aunts, but they had scattered across the Midwest, from South Dakota to Texas. When he was a kid, his family would visit the farm where his grandparents lived. But at most, he’d only meet an uncle and a cousin there.
Now they were going to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving dinner with his wife’s family, and dessert at another house, where he would meet every single one of her relatives.
“We call it the Pie Pahty,” said his wife. She didn’t have a Massachusetts accent, although she’d grown up there, but she loved to put it on now and then. He wondered how long he’d consider that charming.
She explained that her father was one of eight kids, all of whom had stayed in the town where they were born, and had kids of their own. “Too many to fit in one house for Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “So the oldest, Aunt Elma, decided to host the Pie Pahty.”
She also insisted that it was Aunt Elma, not Ant Elma.
She made a mince pie for the occasion. He loved pie, so he figured that anything called a pie party couldn’t be too bad.
When they arrived, the big old-fashioned kitchen was full of people. So was the dining room, where his wife deposited her pie on a table that held dozens of other pies, and the living room, where older people sat around plying forks.
“All these people are related to you?”
“Eight uncles and aunts, twenty-one cousins and their spouses and children,” she said. “But I don’t really know my cousins’ grandchildren.” Those would be the kids running around underfoot, or the ones glued to their cell phones.
She introduced him to every single person. They were delighted to meet him. Or, in true New England fashion, they just said Hello. All of them sounded like his wife did when she imitated the accent. He lost track of names after the first fifteen people.
A cousin showed off his newly created family tree. He said the family went all the way back to the Mayflower.
“We didn’t make it to the Mayflower, Cleon,” someone yelled. “We were swimming behind it!”
Cleon laughed, but kept showing his family tree to anyone who would listen. And Bob’s wife was deep in conversation with two women about her own age.
So he escaped to the kitchen with a third piece of pie, and sat down at the old pine table to eat it. The crowd had moved out of the kitchen. Aunt Elma was trotting back and forth with cups and plates, with the help of a couple of aunts or cousins he had met but couldn’t name. Two older cousins leaned on the counter arguing about the Red Sox. Bob basked in the quiet.
He’d finished his pie, and was drinking coffee, when his wife came to find him. “We’re ready to leave,” she said. “Dad’s getting our coats.”
“You know,” he said. “I missed an opportunity. I should have introduced myself as a long-lost cousin. From the Mayflower. They would have believed me.”
Contact: Judith Pratt
607-273-2661
October is National Work and Family Month. In the new novel, Siljeea Magic, Andrea’s parents work so hard that they don’t know her very well.
Ithaca, NY, playwright and author Judith Pratt has written Siljeea Magic, a magical realism fantasy for young adults. It’s about difficult families, environmental issues, and growing up. The book will be published by Black Rose Writing on October 17, 2019. Review copies are available now.
Andrea, the main character of Siljeea Magic, is starting 8th grade in a new town. But she has a secret. Most people see nothing but trees and grass in the woods that line superhighways. Andrea sees the Bokaaj, small people who live in the buffer zone woods between the highway and the big new house Andrea’s family just moved into.
Andrea is delighted to meet Erau, a Bokaaj boy about her age. He teaches her how to climb trees—he has extra toes—and how to eat acorns and ferns. But then a new road full of houses begins to chew up the woods. Andrea is kidnapped and brought to the Bokaaj leader, who hates her for that destruction. Rescued by the Siljeea, whose magic keeps the Bokaaj invisible, Andrea then discovers that she must find ways to keep these small people safe, while managing a new school, overprotective parents, and a bratty younger brother.
Judith has taught theatre at Ithaca College, written theatre reviews for the Ithaca Journal, and created fundraising and marketing materials for Cornell University. Her plays have been published by JAC Publishing, and performed in Ithaca, across the U.S., and in Cape Town, South Africa. Her play Maize is about Cornell graduate Barbara McClintock, who received a Nobel Prize for her work on plant genetics. Maize won the SciArts at LSU Playwriting Prize, 2019, and was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Mach 33: Caltech/Pasadena Playhouse Festival of New Science-Driven Plays.
Judith is now working on her third novel, and on a play about chronic invisible illness. She is available for interviews and readings.
I can’t edit my own writing.
What a surprise.
In the theatre, we know that an actor needs a director. And a playwright needs actors and directors. I’ve been an actor, a director, and a playwright. When I’m wearing one hat, I don’t try to wear any other hats.
But only now have I learned this about writing novels.
I’ve edited novels. I’ve reviewed novels. I’ve been writing for years—a thesis, academic articles, newspaper articles, marketing and fundraising materials. And several pounds of my own journals. I can spot a missed semi-colon at forty paces.
Guess what. I cannot edit my own work—any more than I can direct myself as an actor.
My novel, Siljeea Magic, will be published by Black Rose Writing in October (2019). I went over it with the proverbial fine-toothed-comb before sending it to them. I even read it backwards, paragraph by paragraph.
Black Rose formatted it. (The cover is gorgeous; check it out.) They sent it to me for review. I found a couple of things. They fixed them and sent it back.
And I discovered that I could not see the words. So I gave it to my friend Susan, who has retired from many years of writing for the Boston Globe.
She found lots of stuff. Stupid semi-colons. Words missing from sentences. A word that I made up (this is a fantasy novel) that was spelled two different ways. Along with about five sentences that were what the kids call a hot mess.
I had a nervous breakdown. Then I sent Black Rose a long list of changes.
Dave the Designer has been endlessly patient. I was waiting for him to say “This thing is formatted and ready to print, what is your problem?” But he didn’t. Thanks, Dave.
When I Googled “How to edit your own book,” I got more than three pages of responses. I like this one because it suggests printing the manuscript in an odd font.
It also suggests reading it out loud. For an 85,000-word novel, that takes time. There’s a reason I have never wanted to be a full-time editor; I lack the patience.
I also checked out novel-editing apps. I tried the freebies from two of them. But both are set up only to write in. If you want to edit your finished novel, you have to paste it into the app, 60 pages at a time. Did I mention that I lack patience? Especially because when you cut and paste the resulting section back into your novel, it blows up the formatting.
I just Googled “cultivating patience.” Five pages’ worth of tips. But I’m too impatient to read them.
COMING FROM BLACK ROSE WRITING, OCTOBER 2019
We were driving along a four-lane highway when I first saw them. Small brown people, standing in the woods that bordered the road.
I had just turned seven and had been imagining myself on a beautiful palomino horse, whose smooth gallop kept magical pace with our car. I used to do weird things like that when I was a kid. Suddenly, instead of the fantasy horse, I saw real people standing among the bare trees. They were child-sized, but I knew they weren’t children. They were the color of the dried oak leaves and pine needles under their feet, so they should have been almost invisible. But I could see them.
At first, they felt like part of my daydreams, like I’d flicked from one fantasy to another. When I was young, I was always fantasizing about something—wizards, flying horses, dragons. Having adventures. Becoming a hero.
But the next time I saw the people, our car was now going the other way on the same giant road. I couldn’t help saying, “Look!”
“What, dear?” said my mother from the back seat, where she sat to make sure my baby brother Jake didn’t get bored in his backward-facing car seat and begin to scream.
“Small people,” I said, pointing. “They must live in those woods!”
“Yes dear,” Mom said. My stepfather Craig frowned at me—I sat next to him in the front seat—but he frowns a lot. Mom says he works too hard.
Jake said something that sounded like “Hah ba ba ba ba,” and my mom said, “Yes! Bear-Bear!” He certainly did love his fuzzy bear toy; it was always covered in drool. Jake must have been about eight months old that summer, not talking, only babbling. Too bad that didn’t last.
“Where do those woods go?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Usually there are houses or industrial parks behind them.”
“Why are they there? I mean, why don’t people live there? It’s a waste of space.” My stepfather sometimes called people a “waste of space,” and I liked the phrase.
“They’re buffer zones,” Craig said. “They keep the highway away from the houses, so children who live in the houses won’t run onto the highway.”
“I wouldn’t run onto the highway,” I said virtuously.
Then Craig’s phone went off, and he talked into his headset, while Mom played with Jake and I stared out the window at the buffer zone waste places, looking for more of the small brown people.
Every weekend, as we drove on the giant roads to visit my grandmother in her condo, or go to parties with friends of my parents, I looked for the small people, the Buffer Zone people. It needed a lot of concentration, and some kind of inner shift, like seeing a pattern in a random collection of dots, like the ones in the comic pages of the newspaper. My birth father loved the comics printed in the Sunday newspapers. He used to read them to me when I was too young to be able to read them myself. Before the divorce. I still read the Sunday comics. My parents read the opinion pages and worry about the state of the world. I have more fun than they do.
At first, in those random dot things, the picture just looks like scribbles. But if you hold the page at your nose, and slowly move it away, it comes into focus as a 3D boat, or a word, or something. Seeing the small people was kind of like that.
Trying to see them made my head feel fat like I’d been too long on one of those merry-go-round things they have on playgrounds. Looking back, I wonder if I hadn’t spent my first four years in a city apartment, and the last three in a big old house in Newton with a tiny yard surrounded by fences, would I have seen the small people? Maybe I would have thought they were deer, or squirrels, or even foxes. But the biggest animal I’d ever seen, outside of a zoo, was a squirrel. For whatever reason, I knew perfectly well that I was seeing people, not deer or foxes. Or squirrels.
Then one day, when we were stuck in a line of traffic getting off the highway, I spotted four Buffer Zone people very clearly. They were sitting in the bushes that grew under the trees.
“There they are again, “I announced. “Those small people that live in the woods. In the buffer zones. What do they eat? Do they have houses? How do they live when it gets cold?”
My stepfather turned his head to frown at me. “Andrea,” he said, “those are just fantasy people. Like in all those books you read.”
“No, they aren’t,” I said, frustrated. “These people are real!” We turned off onto one of those ramp things, going even more slowly. “Right there!” I pointed. The Buffer Zone people were gathering something from the ground. “Don’t you see them?”
My stepfather sighed and shook his head; then glanced at my mom in the rear-view mirror.
That glance told me that something was wrong, but I didn’t find out what until a few days later when Mom came into my room one evening. After she had married Craig Kimball, we’d moved to a house in Newton, where I had my own bedroom. It was tiny, with spectacularly ugly turquoise wallpaper with pink poodles on it, but it was mine. In the apartment that Mom and I had together before Craig and after the divorce, we had to share a bedroom.
“How are things, Bug?” asked Mom. When I was a baby, Mom and my birth father, Mike, called me Bug because, Mom said, “I crawled constantly, exploring every corner of the apartment.”
“Good,” I said, looking up from my book.
“What are you reading now?”
I showed her. It was one of the Narnia books.
“Is it a story about woodland people?” Both Mom and my stepfather are totally clueless about the books I like to read. Mom writes marketing materials, and Craig had started his own computer development company. They read what my stepfather calls “non-fiction.” He says it as if “fiction” is kind of silly.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t found any books about them yet.”
“So you made them up all by yourself,” Mom said, admiringly.
“No,” I said.
“Honey, you know they aren’t real, don’t you?”
I did not know that. I’d seen them. I’d learned how to see them. But Mom had that little wrinkle between her eyes that she’d had so often before she married Craig Kimball.
Now, I think about all the time I wasted, when I could have maybe found a way to meet the small people. But before Mom married again, it was just the two of us, and she had that little wrinkle all the time.
My birth father, Mike Jernigan, left before I turned three. After that, he’d visit and take me to the park. I loved the worn grass and spindly trees. I was a city kid and didn’t know any better; didn’t know anything about forests full of huge trees. Mom was working, so I was always in daycare and nursery school and after-school programs. They didn’t have grass or trees. They playgrounds all had that spongy stuff underneath instead of grass.
Even when I was only four years old, I knew that Mom worked too hard and that she was unhappy. Then Craig came along, and we moved to Newton, and that little line faded out of Mom’s face. I didn’t want to bring it back.
So, when Mom said the woodland people weren’t real, I said: “I guess so.” She smiled and left me with my book, and I never mentioned the buffer zone people again. I still saw them. Sometimes they were sitting under the trees, watching the cars whiz by. Now and then I’d see them in those little hollows that the off-and-on ramps circle around.
I started to look at maps, so I’d know where we were when I saw them. I kept a secret locked journal using a code: “7/4/14 Rte 3 Taunton 3 sitting.” Which meant I saw three buffer zone people on our way to Taunton for a party with my parent’s friends. Or “11/22/14 Nana 4 running,” meaning that I saw four buffer zone people running through the woods along the highway when we were on our way to Nana’s condo for Thanksgiving. I still have the journal. It’s still secret, and it’s still locked.
Playwriting is a collaborative art.
Once you’ve made the script as good as you can, you need to find some playwrights to read it and tell you what they think. After 6 or 106 more drafts, you then 
need to find some actors to read the script to you. Listening to them, you’ll hear the places where the dialogue goes clunk. And actors always have interesting questions.
After a rehearsal or two, find a place to show your work–it can be cheap, it even can be a living room–and invite people to the reading. Preferably fellow playwrights. Afterwards, have a discussion.
As a playwright, you must learn how to make this discussion process work for you, rather than against you.
“Against you” means a couple of things.
—You decide that you should never write another word.
—You rewrite the play to please everyone, and end up with a mess. What my in-laws called “a dog’s breakfast.” That is, everything in your creative refrigerator.
To avoid this, get someone else to facilitate the discussion. This person should have lots of experience. Or they should read Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. Or both.
The Lerman approach has four major parts.
First, the Facilitator asks the audience (the “Responders) what the play meant. The Facilitator always tactfully deflects any one giving an opinion until step four.
Second, the Artist (in this case, the playwright) asks questions that they have thought out beforehand.
Third, the Responders ask neutral questions—that is, without an opinion attached. Useful: “Why does your script focus on the errors of physicians?” Not useful: “Why are you so angry at the medical profession?”
Fourth, if the Artist agrees, the Responders can state opinions. If you agree to this, remember that one opinion is only one opinion. But if five people say they hate the ending, you might want to take another look at it.
Also, when someone says “Scene Three doesn’t work,” understand that the problem might actually start in Scene One. Actors and directors also learn this. Suddenly, the show goes off the track—but often the problem happened several scenes before it actually hits.
Lerman doesn’t say this, but many others say it. Do Not Defend Your Work. Listen, take notes, say thank you. You may ask for clarification: “Tell me more about how the ending doesn’t work.” If someone asks “what were you trying to do?” you can answer them—or not. I often say, “what did you think I was trying to do?”
Recently, I’ve been considering taking an online class in writing the novel. The application guidelines point out, at length, that if you can’t manage feedback and criticism, you don’t belong in the class. It’s a skill that you can learn. I learned it the hard way. Don’t do what I did!
And remember, if you get the play into production, your script needs a director, some designers, some actors, a stage manager, and people to build the set, run the lights and sound, organize the costumes…that’s a lot of people supporting you and your script. Collaboratively.
“Write a shitty first draft.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
This is my mantra. When the shitty first draft really gets me down, I go re-read Lamott’s book.
Too many would-be writers give up because the first draft is shitty. Of course it is. Don’t worry about it. Later, you’ll edit. Later, you’ll ask a fellow writer to read it. Keep your butt in that chair and write.
But where should you start? And where do writers find their ideas?
I read many playwrights’ blogs and Facebook groups. On a couple of them, I first heard the question “Are you a Pantser or a Plotter?”
Pantsers just start writing and see what happens. They have some kind of character or image in mind, but haven’t graphed anything out. Plotters outline their plot before they begin writing. Neither one is better than the other. It depends on the writer—and on the topic, story, and/or the idea. Some stories demand to be outlined; others refuse to be so confined.
I’m mostly a Pantser. As I scribble, I learn enough about my characters to write their biographies. Then I keep scribbling. But once I have the first draft done, I often have to clean up the plot—which means I beome a Plotter. I write an outline, or I put each scene on a separate 3 x 5 card, or I draw a picture of the structure.
Actually, I kind of write in all directions. I get ideas while trying to go to sleep, or while making dinner, and I go stick them in to the draft. One writer’s group insisted that I write the whole thing before doing any re-writing. I’m not built like that. You might be. I write, I edit, I write, I get to page 184, curse, and re-write page 92. The trick is to just keep writing.
The reason I’m a Pantser is that I believe writers have to make their own clay. Sculptors get a block of something and cut away everything that isn’t an elephant (or a vision of heaven, or whatever) Writers, however, have to make the clay before they can start shaping it. So I just scribble, creating clay. Eventually, I figure out if I have an elephant or an aardvark.
You do need to be a Plotter if you’re writing a comedy, farce, or thriller. The misunderstandings and confusions of comedy usually need to be graphed out sooner rather than later. If you’re writing a thriller, your graph is essential—it’s like plotting a mystery novel. But not many playwrights write thrillers; those tend to belong to novels and movies.
All that said, most writers begin with some kind of notion, even before they Pants or Plot.
• I have begun with an image: Three women around a hibachi. An old lady trying to wear high heels.
• I have begun with an irritation: Corporate jargon. A family problem. Someone who done me wrong.
• I have begun with a question: Who was Barbara McClintock? Why do we hoard so much stuff?
• I have begun with a character: my clown, Sophy.
• I have even begun with a name: Cora B. Walrath. It was the name of a boat.
Sometimes I look at a completed play and have no idea where it came from.
And sometimes characters or stories tug at my sleeve until I write about them. Yeah, that sounds repulsively precious.
Tell that to Cora B. Walrath, of the play Cora’s Mountain. Or Sam Bidari. She lives in my novel The Dry Country. But she came from my play Chimera. After I finished the play, Sam kept telling me more about her story until it turned into the novel.
Whether you are a pantser, plotter, or some combination, pay attention to the world outside, and the world inside you. Scribble down the name, or the image; the question or the irritation. Stories are everywhere.
I began writing plays because I was an actor for a playwrights group. After working on several of their plays, I sang “I Can Do That” (from A Chorus Line), and started writing my own plays.
I especially wanted write plays because the group was all men, and they all devoutly believed what I rudely call the male orgasm approach to playwriting. That’s the three act, rising-action-climax-falling-action approach.
If your play didn’t do this, it was de facto Bad.
I didn’t agree.
This climax approach started with Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE. But it isn’t his fault. He was describing a specific kind of play popular in his time: Greek tragedy. Centuries later, a bunch of 15th century Italian scholars re-discovered Aristotle’s works, made them into a set of rules, and called them Neoclassicism. The French loved it and made it their own. Eventually, however, it died of a surfeit of regulations.
But over the years, other theatrical theorists wrote playwriting books based on this rising-action-etc. approach to plays. For simplicity, I will call it the well-made-play, or WTM.
For some time, that was how you wrote a play. Some classic plays have been written this way, by greats like Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller. If you’d like to know the whole story, here’s a very short course in the history of the structure .
After years of writing, I agree that knowing how to write in this mode is essential. All stories need a beginning, middle, and end. All plays need surprises, to keep the audience engaged. After all, when sitting in a theatre, you can’t put the movie on pause and go make a sandwich. So the writer has to keep the audience awake and interested.
But insisting that the WMP is the only way to write, or critique, a script, ends up creating a lot of tedious trash. Unfortunately, American audiences seem to love it. Especially if Secrets Are Revealed during that fabled Climax.
Don’t get me wrong; there’s some terrific stuff written with revealed secrets: August Osage County, Proof, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, to name just a few. But if you use the WMP, you have to do it brilliantly. Lauren Gunderson has an online class that takes the WMP to a new, and incredibly useful, level. She shows us how to use the WMP well.
But not everyone does use it well. For me, all these revealed secrets are getting tiresome. Googling “theatre scripts where secrets are revealed” found the following. Apologies if one of these is your play; I didn’t read them to see if you did it brilliantly. But pushing the Secret in the logline indicates otherwise.
–All ends happily when ‘The Shagwood Secret’ is revealed.
–Really really complicated and totally unique secrets are revealed over white wine.
–Dark secrets hidden in the grey mists of time are reluctantly revealed in this excellent black comedy.
–The secrets of the house have been revealed overnight as the family slept.
–A one-night stand that reveals a woman’s secret.
–A one act drama for youth theatre with a single (bedroom) setting, in which secrets are divulged
And, too often:
–Years after the death of their mother, sisters RETURN to clean out the childhood home their widowed father left behind. When their estranged younger sister CLAIMS her share of the estate, the three women find themselves unearthing…deep secrets and harsh realities of their past lives and decisions.”
I blame screenwriting for this overabundance of secrets. If you want to make money in movies, (instead of riding the endless Indie film rollercoaster) you need the Big Reveal—that is, revealing a Big Secret.
You can also have a lot of things to blow up. But that’s harder to do in live
theater.
Read more about screenwriting structure here
But I write plays, not movies. There are many other ways to skin the structure cat. Next time, I’ll look at some writers who don’t worry about revealing secrets, or about the climax.
Using columns is a great way to understand a script. After I experienced this technique, I got so I could easily take a script apart, whether reading it or seeing it. The more shows I experienced, the better I got at taking them apart in my head.
Thanks to the late Rex McGraw, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for teaching me this.
Here’s how:
A. Take an act from a full-length play, or use a one-act play.
B. Type up the script. That gets every word from your fingers to your head. Yes, it’s boring. Trust me, you gotta do it. Otherwise, you’ll skip over things that you don’t understand.
C. Make a page with columns on it. Here are five areas to cover.
1. What happened before the play began? Before each scene? How do you know that?
2. Each character’s objectives. From moment to moment, what does each person want? A cup of tea? To kill their enemy? To charm someone?
3. Each character’s obstacles: I want to charm you. You ignore me. I decide to impress you instead. That’s my next objective.
4. Environment: words that tell the designers what to do. Words like: “The day is almost over.” “I’m cold.” or “Would you like some tea?”
5. Questions: Words, events, and references that you need to look up. If a character says “He absquatulated to Tahiti,” what the heck does that word mean? And why Tahiti?
Type or hand write your answers and responses. Studies show that handwriting is the best way to learn. Typing is second.
Once you’ve looked this over, find the “through line of action.” If all the characters’ objectives are beads, the through line of action is the string for those beads.
Then ask yourself the main question: why did the playwright break the silence of the universe? What’s the point of this story?
Fair warning: staring at the script and just “thinking” your answers won’t work at all. Unless you’ve been analyzing plays for twenty years.
Even then, if I’m directing a show, or commenting on it for another playwright, I carefully take it apart. With notes. Because I’m the note taker.