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.
