Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Just when I feel I have a handle on the new site design, it all falls apart. Suddenly, all the design ideas, the rules, the declarations, all the CSS/PHP/WordPress/Ajax/JavaScript/JesusHChrist means nothing. I question my sanity, much less my abilities. Who do I think I am trying to write this thing myself?

Time to put the code down, take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else. Come back later, and  go through everything step by step.

Time to … take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else.

Playwriting can cause similar head spinning. What seems like a good idea, falls apart, often near the end of the first draft. Sometimes by page 30. Sometimes in the second or third draft. Whenever. I find the play1 always falls apart at some point and necessitates a break. Sometimes a short coffee break will do. Sometimes a break requires a whole summer or two.

A dear friend, a wonderful writer who has been away from playwriting, is trying to pick up where she left off with a play from some eight years back. She kept referring to a pile of notes from a workshop we’d been in together, facilitated by a mutual mentor. She ran in circles, writing scenes from scratch, re-writing work she’d previously written, and worrying about those old notes. “They contained such valuable suggestions,” she kept saying, yet couldn’t bring herself to read them. The notes were keeping her from moving on. She’d let her Editor’s Mind create a great Distraction from writing.

I reminded her of her longevity as a writer in many other forms, her vast knowledge of theatre, and her great dramatic instincts. I suggested she set aside two hours, pick up the pile of notes, read through them, and then put them away. Perhaps keep a notepad nearby to capture good suggestions, or new ideas that came to her while reading. To read only the notes and enough of the script for them to make sense. To not linger over them in order to not treat the notes themselves as genius. When finished reading to put the notes back in a box, a drawer, the trash, or the fireplace. Be done with them. Move on, and return to the present, which happens to be writing now, not eight years ago.

I’ve been busy planning the move of Intermission away from TypePad.com. In the three-+ years I’ve been hosted at TypePad, the service has pretty much allowed me to focus on the content and not the mechanics. I’m not unhappy with TypePad, in any significant way. Sure there were times I wanted more. Isn’t that true of all relationships that aren’t meant to be forever? I’ve always wanted a header image, and always unwilling to pay more for the privilege. The only real gripe I have with TypePad is the inability to easily backup your compete post. That is, you can backup your posts just fine. You cannot easily backup your images, something even TypePad acknowledges.

It all comes down to an economic decision. When I did an inventory of all the online/internet/blah-blah-blah services we had, there was an embarrassing array of stuff that has accumulated over the years. (Hey, I’ve been online before some of you were born! Since before the Internet was born, even. Hmmm…. too much info.) A little TypePad here, a little dotMac there, a little WI-Fi everywhere… Time to consolidate with a single web hosting service.

At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Since I was fairly happy with TypePad, I briefly considered re-creating Intermission with Moveable Type or Ruby on Rails. Open Source was the way I wanted to go. For no real good reason, other than some of my favorite blogs are built from WordPress, I decided to go with it.

Simplistically, WordPress is a combination of PHP scripting and CSS files, which create a WordPress "theme", on top of MySQL databases. You don’t have to know any of those three things in order to use WordPress. Tons of other people have created templates you can use. Most of them are free. You can even hire someone to create a template for you. Or pay to use a canned "premium" template. Lots of options. You can even expand your theme with the use of "plugins" which help you tweak the template to do what you want. You gotta have a slideshow or images in your sidebar? Then, load up a plugin like this one, or this one.

Even with all the plug and play aspects of WordPress, I decided I wanted to build my theme from scratch. There’s a lot of documentation on the web about how to put a WordPress site together, using other people’s themes. Not really a lot about how to build your own from scratch. There’s been a couple of books on WordPress, neither of which were in the realm of geekiness I needed. Good for helping you modifying someone else’s templates, true. It’s almost as if no one really wants you to know how to start from scratch, and it feels actively discouraged on some ‘guru’ sites. The best website tutorial I found was Dissection of a WordPress Theme, written three years ago.

Fortunately, there’s something called the WordPress Codex, which contains all the documentation for WordPress. Most of it, anyway. Not always easy to find a specific picayune piece of information. You gotta read, read, read the Codex.

Why from scratch? I needed to exercise a different part of my brain, I suppose. I’m geeky enough to find it fun. None of the templates I found did what I really wanted ‘em to do. I’m capable, although it’s been many years since I designed a website. (Using the word "design" loosely, not in any pretty-fied meaning of the word.) It’s also easier to fix something if you know exactly how it’s been put together.

Once I decided to go from scratch, I knew I had to throw out my very old concepts of web site construction. I quickly abandoned my old copy of Dreamweaver, and stuck with BBedit for writing code. Long gone are the days of making HTML work by using, uh, yes, you caught me, spacers and tables.

Being the old-time programmer type that I am, I like to look at what experts feel are  "best practices" for coding. I read CSS, The Definitive Guide, and a couple of others on CSS. (I’m waiting for a copy of Designing with Web Standards to show up at my door.) The book that really helped me get back on track, because it was written in plain language with clear examples, was HTML Dog, The Best Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS. Made it possible to turn to The Definitive Guide as a good reference when needed, and especially to understand what the hell people were discussing on the CSS e-list I joined.

While indulging my reading, I re-realized how much debris is out there on the ‘net. There’s a lot of stuff on blogs and "content sites" that are not date-stamped. Many, many times I found myself engrossed in some article only to discover the methodology being proffered was sooooooooo outdated. At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Even though my brain is not as elastic as it used to be, not so easily absorbing new learning, I have not had this much fun with code in a very long time. There’s so much more to learn, and I feel I have just scratched the surface. Jeez, Ajax? What the hell…?

The new site is nothing fancy. I fear talking about  "coding" overhypes it. My desire is to keep it simple, easy to navigate, and hopefully be a little friendlier too. I expect to transition to the new site in a couple of weeks. My TypePad account comes to an end mid-August.

Born June 22, 1906

…I was a guy who was trying to speak to as many people as I possibly could. I was not a guy who was writing deep-dish revelations, or writing a play like Waiting for Godot. That did not interest me. It interested me to lift the taste of the average person, just lift it a little bit.

Conversations with Wilder, by Cameron Crowe, p.233

Gone March 27, 2002

Thank you all, but this award has to be shared with Julius Epstein, Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, George Furth, Jim Goldman, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine. These are the men who created the characters that sang the songs, the situations that gave rise to the songs and the criticism that improved the songs. They were my collaborators. They are called playwrights. They invent. They make whole cloth out of nothing. They make a hat where there never was a hat. And they don’t just write musicals.

(excerpt from letter read by Mandy Patinkin on the CBS telecast, concerning Steve’s 2008 Special Tony Award® for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre)

You do know I mean Stephen Sondheim, don’t you?
He’s a former president of the Dramatists Guild.

Updated June 28, 2008:

For some reason, it occurred to me to update Final Draft, even though I’m not using it these days. The DG templates, are available there, too. I’m sure most of you already figured that out.

==== End Update ====

In the process of updating my Screenwriter software today, I noticed some new templates on the Write-Brothers site. We now have “official Dramatists Guild” stage play templates available for download.

The templates are date stamped April 2008. They have both WinDoze and Mac versions, and the templates will work only with Screenwriter 6.

In reviewing the Screenwriter templates, there are three: traditional, modern, and musical formats. There are some minor differences between the traditional and modern formats. I’ve been using the Samuel French format, which appears to be close to the traditional format. Perhaps I’m overdue for a personal overhaul?

I did notice, yet didn’t pay attention to until today, that the DG site there is
now a section on Script Format. There’s some downloadable PDFs for
examples. I think you can only access that section if you are a member.

For those of you who are not DG members, well, if you have Screenwriter 6, you can access the recommended DG formats.

The script formats are now printed in the DG Resource Directory. For non-members, the DG Resource Directory is now available to purchase at places like Drama Book Shop in NYC. Jeez, you can even get it at Amazon.

Go figure. For non-DG recommendations…

The BBC Writer’s Room has some Word templates available for download to help automate some of your script formatting woes.

The Playwriting Seminars has some thoughts to share about formatting, as well.

I’ve been traveling, and managed to see a great play in Maine, written by a friend of mine.

For the 2nd year in a row, Penobscot Theatre ended its season with its Northern Writes: A New Play Festival. For two weeks, this year’s festival included 23 plays, some short, some long. (In 2007 Penobscot staged 22 plays.) The plays are presented as concert stand readings, each with at least one rehearsal. A small number of plays are given a week’s rehearsal, and some simple staging. All plays feature an audience talk back with the cast, and the playwright. This year, all but two playwrights made their way to Maine for the talk back sessions. That’s a long way for a lot of us! The professionalism and quality of the theatre makes the trip worth taking.

Penobscot’s home is the former Bangor Opera House. It’s new, enthusiastic, risk-taking Artistic Director, Scott Levy, has broken the theatre’s box office records twice in the short time he’s been at the helm. Penobscot Theatre may be on its way to becoming an important force in the theatrical community. Keep watching. And get to Maine if you can. Maine is a great place to vacation. Bangor is some 40+ miles from Acadia National Park, one of the most heavenly places I’ve ever been to.

Playwrights note: No submission fee. Deadline to get your plays in is Feb 14, 2009.

The ensemble play I’ve recently ‘finished’ runs approx. 90 minutes with no intermission. Generally, I like intermissions. A lot. It’s a time to ponder what’s happened on stage, talk about the acting or directing, and how the playwright is gonna pull the story off in the second act. It’s a time for a smoke (if that’s your thing), a drink, or a visit to the facilities.’ For some it’s a time they can sneak out, maybe go home, and just leave the whole damn thing behind. I like act one endings. The goal being, of course, to tantalize the audience to come back after their break to see how the story resolves… or doesn’t resolve. Hopefully the audience comes back with some excitement about the next act; not dread, boredom, or trepidation.

I initially wrote an Act 1 ending, and then removed it. I felt the story moved at a fast enough pace to keep the audience sitting on their butts for the time required to get through the whole play. I removed it because I felt that the Act 1 ending was not a real lead in to an Act 2. It was an important moment. Yet in Act 2, the audience was in for big, unexpected shock, and I felt having an intermission betrayed the story, its movement, and the audience.

Having an intermission is a rule that allows the audience to get up and pee. Hey, my attention span isn’t very good when I gotta pee! It’s about keeping the audience’s attention. It’s not a rule to be broken lightly. Some of us do it too often, and the rest of us get fidgety and resentful. Then again, some playwrights might be going for resentful, fidgety audiences. ‘Tis a mystery, isn’t it? There are times when the story demands that it remain unbroken, and if the writer and company do so successfully, the play is an fidget-less ride.

The play I’m writing now has an intermission, a standard act one and two. The story’s also a little more linear than I’ve written in some time. You see, the story tells me its requirements, and off we go. I don’t decide the structure, the story decides the structure of the play. There are aspects of the story that are uncomfortable, and not sitting well with me. I’ve learned, though, to not turn away from the discomfort, and to keep writing and see what happens. After all, if the play is no good, no one ever has to see it, and I might learn something in the process.