orientation.

Today was our first day of Orientation. As expected, there were lots of talks about school services and protocols and things like that, but I also experienced my first three hours of playwriting with Bill, which were utterly enlightening on their own. We were greeted by Richard Wesley via Skype, who couldn't hear a damned thing we were saying, but our acting chair Mark Dickerman is seriously one of the coolest men I've ever met.

All the early morning stuff is kind of a blur, and so is the afternoon stuff, especially when we talked to the Singapore Police, who were extremely helpful, and extraordinarily patient, given some of the downright stupid questions some people asked them. If you want to know how to not be hanged or caned in Singapore, it's actually quite simple: stay away from drugs, don't kill anyone, don't carry any dangerous weapons, don't rape anyone, and don't steal the damned street signs or graffiti all over their immaculately clean transit system. Common sense, says I.

After the Singapore Police came playwriting, and I can safely say without doubt or bravado that I know nothing about Dramatic Writing. Okay, maybe not nothing. But having been educated almost exclusively in Fiction -- where a large majority of the principles are the same -- it's still somewhat amazing to find myself sitting there and listening with rapt attention to someone teaching me, which has not happened in such a long time. I don't question whether or not I should be here, or deserve to be, but find myself instead just dying to learn, which I'm not sure I've actually ever felt before.

While I recognize that this could be boring for some people, I want to share with you some of what I learned today. This way, when I'm jaded and bitter and wondering why I ever thought this was a good idea, I can look back and see -- that I was SO excited.

So today, Bill taught us the Seven Principles of Playwriting -- or, as he put it, the One Rule of Playwriting, and the Six Principles.

THE ONE RULE is: The audience owes you nothing. Which is to say: write with economy. Make every moment carry freight.

Principle One: Show us, don't tell us. This is pretty standard in all forms of writing. My class-note beneath this says: woot, lion-killing. Which is entertaining to no one but my classmates, but some sacrifices must be made.

Principle Two: To know is to love. Know your characters, let the audience know them too.

Principle Three: The past is never dead. What a character has lived through will effect everything.

Principle Four: God is in the details. Ie, what brand of cigarettes does the character smoke, and what does that say about them?

Principle Five: Give us a problem NOW. The major dramatic question. URGENT PROBLEM.

Principle Six: Remember the value of secrets.

All of this stuff may seem pretty obvious, but trust me it isn't. In the thick of writing, you don't think about these things the way you should -- at least, you don't until you're TOLD to. Until they are pointed out to you. It's a Homer Simpson D'OH kind of moment, when you realize after the fact that you could've done so many things, but you just didn't think to.

Goal Number One for this year: make these seven articles a part of every-day thought.

Okay, a few funny notes.

Bill cited the most prevalent disease in American Playwriting today as: The Passive Central Character. After an awesome long-winded tirade, he summed it up beautifully by leaning over the desk and saying, straight and unwavering to the lot of us, "It makes for lousy, suckass drama."

I believe him.

He informed us that we were not allowed to write stupid characters.
He informed us that we should not let our writing get bogged down in despair, and asked: how then do we live? What do we do about the world sucking?
And he told us, to quote someone else: Love is after all the gift of oneself.

And the Writer's best friends are:
Pain
Suffering
and Humiliation. Wendy said: Especially humiliation.

So basically, I can't wait. Let's write some shit.