Outline

Using my post-it note technique I have come up with a story line that I intend to follow for a while to see what it produces. It's a detour from my original vision of the piece, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it does get to the same point, I think (the scholarship on Ophelia vs who Ophelia actually is) but through an outside character.

The professor then, who was originally going to be interspersed with Ophelia, will become the main character. In fact, at this point I only have Ophelia appearing once in the entire piece. Now this may change since right now it is only an outline. The next step is to write through some of these scenes and to see if they work. Then I still won't know if it's the right story until I get up on my feet and try it out.

So back to our teacher. At this point, Sophie is the name of the teacher, and she will open the piece with a lecture about Hamlet, as if it is the first day of a high school class. She will get side-tracked by the subject of Ophelia and madness. Then through "scenes" with her sister, we will discover that she has recently lost her mother, who had been classified as insane. The piece will then focus on her perception of insanity, her fears of becoming insane, etc. She will also be forced to make a choice. I believe she will be offered a position at a university, and she will have to decide whether to take it (and move and accept success) or not.

I developed this story from the story of Ophelia. Basically, I put all the moments of Ophelia's life (that we see in the play) on post-its and arranged them on a wall. I then developed corresponding moments in my created character's life. They don't mirror each other, but rather the events in Ophelia's life inspired the new events.

Of course, actually getting down to the writing is my next step, to see if this version is the one to explore. I find writing in this manner rather terrifying, but I am ready to explore.

Physical Writing and the Power of the Post-It

Though my Ophelia project has been somewhat on the back burner for some time now, it keeps coming back in to my consciousness. Ideas continue to swim around, crystalize, dissolve, reform, and poke me back into action.

I recently received a grant to work on Esther, a project that my husband Jonathon and I created a year ago. Our first version of Esther was slightly avant-garde, by which I mean exciting, new, and innovative but also, unfortunately, confusing and not sufficiently dramaturged. We saw the seeds of something better, and applied for the grant hoping to add a playwright to our team. This past month we hired the lovely and talented Chris Cragin to join our team. We have brainstormed some new paths to take, and in the process, Chris introduced me to a system that has blown my mind with it's simplicity and appeal.

Large Post-Its. That's it. We put each scene, or story part, on to separate Post-Its. We placed them, as we wrote them, on a large white wall. We moved them around. We physically began to write the story.

This appeals to me in many ways. First of all, I can get very lost in the writing world of computers. I can't lay out all the pages and read them, printing them seems wasteful, and the words that aren't currently on the screen seem to fade into a strange netherworld and cease to exist.

Second, I seem to be equal parts an intellectually based and a physically based person. Though I am not a dancer, I need to move, and often I need to move in order to understand. I need to alternate periods of deep thinking with periods of active moving. The idea of being able to physically maneuver pieces of a future story or script is so simple, and yet it changes everything.

I intend to mess around with this new process at this very moment. Though my Post-Its are small, and I will use the shower door as my wall, I am excited about what this exercise will reveal to me about the story of Ophelia, and how I want to explore that story.

A Short Story

I've been working for these past few weeks on getting my creative writing juices flowing. In the midst of daily writing exercises, I stumbled into this story, based solely on the word ivory. When I arrived at the end of the story, I realized that it was Ophelia who was the heroine, although perhaps an Ophelia of a different time.

Ivory

She stood in ivory. Drenched in ivory. The very thought of the color on her skin was absurd to her. Her skin, being the color of ivory, faded into the dress, into the wall behind her, and slowly she disappeared. All that remained were the fruitless details of her being: eyelashes, hair, a slight red in the lips, floating on an infinite ivory canvas.

Her skin was wet, trapped by the silk fabric, which clung to her with every step she made. The sweat was cold as it drizzled down her back, and suddenly she pictured herself as a Greek marble statue, condensation from the air collecting around the cold marble, fixed in place, in a position of victory or defeat, hollow eyes reflecting the face of the viewer.

She placed her shoes on her feet, not delicate pumps that pinched her toes, but the shoes she had arrived in, converse, three years old, held together by a hope. She grabbed her jacket, an old leather bomber she had borrowed from her father one year, and leaving her t-shirt and jeans behind, she edged her way out of the shop, into the brisk December air. The short train of silk shuffled behind her on the snow, and she laughed thinking that indeed the whole world had become one sheet of ivory, one sheet of silk, and that she could disappear into it all.

Before the shop girl could realize what had happened, she hopped on to a bus, headed home. She giggled to think of the girl stumbling into the dressing room to discover the discarded clothes, thinking she might suspect that her customer had melted away, part of the snowy landscape that disappeared in the spring.

Her stop came, but she did not exit. The bus was warm, her sweat was fading, and under the jacket she felt solid, firm. When the bus came to what appeared to be an empty field, she pulled the bell. “There’s no stop here, miss,” the driver said. “No matter,” she replied, “this is where I belong.” Reluctantly the door steamed open and she stepped out onto the field. Trudging her way through the snow, the bottom of the silk slowly deforming in the cold moisture, she felt the nettles in her body begin to fade. As her skin numbed, the pain she had been dragging along with her all these years was shed, one thorn at a time, until she felt the freedom of anesthesia. Relived, tears fell from her eyes in gratitude, and she sat in the snow indian style.

“I’m supposed to drown,” she thought, “but the famed river is nowhere in sight.” Instead she began to scoop up the snow with her frozen palms, and let it fall over her face. Slowly, surely, the snow built up around her until all she could see, all she could feel, all she could breathe was snow. Ivory everywhere. And she did fade. And she became part of it. She was part of it all.