Solologue

So, getting somewhere/nowhere (delete as applicable) with my monologues, I posted to my tutor:

I've tried to pull out all the self-referencing statements ofhumiliation and knowing and specifically opened up the opening and the discovering the weapons. I'm still a little fuzzy on it being mono-modal though because I'm not sure if there are still any moments that could be bettered through showing rather than the fictional descriptions of self.

So, I believe these two point might still be outstanding on the current attachment:

1. You still occasionally shove the narrator's mental state down the audience's throat instead of thinking about how it can be shown through words and actions.
2. You need to take the opportunities to evoke place whenever they arise- it's still rather mono-modal, stuck inside this very unusual
   head.

To which he's replied (postively - yay!):

Yes, better, but you diagnose the issues well! Try not to give the gameaway every time you take the story on to the next stage ('That's where I discovered Grandpa's firearms' - 'firearms' makes the narrator soundlike a policeman, and we need the suspense of finding out what he found). Look for other examples of this narrative overloading - there are a few.

Lots still to do in the mental-athletics of my mind. Though, looking back over the weeks of input I've had from my tutor I start to wonder, wouldn't this have been easier without the middle-man? My tutor could have written it better on his own. :)

Breaking the Monologue

I'm really beginning to struggle now with the reworking of the monologue. I can see for the most part thos obvious sections that stick out, and tell the audience how the protagonist is thinking, or his mind works - which would be fine in a written form, but isn't in this instance - I've cut and pulled quite a bit, but am left with dregs and moments that I feel work but also I feel might not work, or still address the same issue of being too hung up in my protagonist's mind.

I'm hoping, out of the previous list of problems my tutor picked up on, that the following two are the only ones remaining that I'm having difficulty addressing:

1. You still occasionally shove the narrator’s mental state down the audience’s throat instead of thinking about how it can be shown through words and actions.
2. You need to take the opportunities to evoke place whenever they arise – it’s still rather mono-modal, stuck inside this very unusual head.

So, I need to be more clear on when I am doing the first and when I'm not doing the latter - which is interesting given that usually I overwrite my descriptions and lose the pace. Now, I'm supposed to level up on that - when I'm already over my self-imposed 1,500 word limit. We'll see what the tutor says.

I'm too close to it, haven't worked on the other two and it's already the 7th May. There's no time left to complete this and get working with some Drama students in time for the second week of June. The Arts Festival is a no-no, but I don't feel I can just let this slide - despite the nag of my screenplay, I've got that to write, edit, review, and a 2,000 word essay to write on it before the end of June - I need to understand and show my tutor I can use given crits appropriately without giving up.

Monomodal Monologue

I was worried about my rewrite on the monologue - worried I was getting too close to it, but, I'd tried to carry out a cut and shut. My fear was that there is still some fiction-based telling in there, but with the removal of the original opening and ending I thought it had a better developed punch to what's pertinent. I'd added more references to the bullying too, but I wasn't sure that the original flow still held together.

My tutor said the following:

There’s more punch all right. There are still too many knowing references (‘like Macbeth to an actor’; the stuff about decrying Jews and
Muslims) and you still occasionally shove the narrator’s mental state down the audience’s throat instead of thinking about how it can be shown through words and actions (stop saying ‘humiliation’, for example, and make us feel it). Structural points:

1. Give us more time at the start. Establish the ordinariness of the
   surroundings. I would take the audience see them before they see the narrator (i.e. you don’t need the first sentence, do you?). I didn’t buy the dictators – a bit obvious, surely, given what’s to come?
2. I think you need to establish a time and place for the beating at
   the bottom of page 1, otherwise it blends confusingly into the previous incident.
3. Take time to discover grandpa’s weapons. We need more space when something innocent seems to be happening, and you need to take the opportunities to evoke place whenever they arise – it’s still rather mono-modal, stuck inside this very unusual head.

First and foremost, what is mono-modal? Is it the lack of dynamics?

I have turned, rather randomly to a science paper: Multi-modal Perception

Which provides this encapsulating hypothesis:

To design, optimise and deliver multimedia and virtual-reality products and services it is necessary to match performance to the capabilities of users. When a multimedia system is used, the presence of audio and video stimuli introduces significant cross-modal effects (the sensory streams interact). This paper introduces a number of cross-modal interactions that are relevant to communications systems and discusses the advanced experimental techniques required to provide data for modelling multi-modal perception. The aim of the work is to provide a multi-modal perceptual model that can be used for performance assessment and can be incorporated into coding algorithms.

I won't know how pertinent this is, but at least I can assume mono-modal regards a thinly layered discussion that lacks visual imagery.

Also, Reading Like A Writer Of Electronic Texts, says:

New literacies are multimodal - visual, auditory and they move fast.
Computers are ‘symbol machines’ (Labbo, in press) that allow children to negotiate a complex interplay of multiple sign systems (e.g., video clips, music, sound effects, icons, virtually rendered paint strokes, text in print-based documents), multiple modalities (e.g., linguistic, auditory, visual, artistic), and recursive communicative and cognitive processes (e.g., real time and virtual conversations, cutting/pasting text, manipulating graphics, importing photographs).

Intriguing, no?

Monologue Revisal

Okay, next response from my tutor:

This is vivid and gripping, and you’ve thought about how it’s paced. I
think it would work even better if you told us more about the acts of bullying; as it stands, we have the uncomfortable and not very rewarding sensation of standing inside the head of a maniac with little apparent motive. Make us sympathise with the speaker more before you show us how he takes it out on the bully. That will give you a better tonal balance, too. At the moment you are over-explaining – it’s a very difficult trick in a monologue to reconcile performance of a mental state with the need to narrate, and in this draft there are too many moments when you are in prose fiction mode (especially looking
around the classroom). Think seriously about ditching the beginning and ending, which give too much away and try to buy our sympathy instead of earning it. I would start from the ‘primal scene’ – the classroom and the things that happened there. Make your audience imagine the place, and things will follow.

So, positives:

• Vivid and gripping
• I've worked out my pacing

And the suggestions:

• Work in the bullying more - relate the acts to the audience; to build upon his motive and gain the audience's trust and identification with the protagonist
• Change the order, removing descriptions of the place - possibly talk about the Dictators' faces and pasting the bullies over the top, but develop the tone over the original plot
• Possibly ditch the beginning and ending - as these give too much reasoning - buys audience sympathy... I guess through telling
• Think about beginning with the 'primal scene' - that moment when it all turns for him:
  "I was sitting here, minding my own, you know, whispering to Rose in the first row that I'd heard she'd put out for Julian Satiety, when Mr... answered the door to a year 7 student with a note.
  'Excuse me,' he said, and I replied, 'You're excused, Sir.'
  I hadn't meant anything by; it got a laugh from the class, but when Mr... came back in he looked fuming. 'Your mother says when you return to the Bates Motel tonight,' he said, staring right at me, like he'd had enough, 'keep your socks on, she's fed up of your cold feet in her bed'...

2 Monologues & Some Language

There are 2 different monologues available here:

• http://www.teachers.tv/monologues/sample
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/tonyjordanexamples

Showing different use of tone and beats. Anything goes, as with other forms of writing... just, I need to get mine right. Somehow, I fear I'm missing a trick. Perhaps the language.

Also, there's no conceit. My character comes across as fully aware of what he's doing and where he stands. Is that realistic?

In Alan Bennett's Talking Heads - Bed Among The Lentils - the dramatic irony with Susan is that she's not aware of her alcoholism until late in the monologue. It's the fatal flaws of the characters that help stick them in the minds of the audience. I need to flavour my piece up a bit (ooh, flavour my piece - weird language).

I need to develop a proper 15 yearold's voice, like DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little:

I sit waiting between shafts of light from a row of doorways, naked except for my shoes and Thursday's underwear. Looks like I'm the first one they rounded up so far. I ain't in trouble, don't get me wrong. I didn't have anything to do with Tuesday. Still, you wouldn't want to be here today. You'd remember Clarence Some-body, that ole black guy who was on the news last winter. He was the psycho who dozed in this same wooden hall, right on camera. The news said that's how little he cared about the effects of his crimes. By 'effects' I think they meant axe-wounds. Ole Clarence Whoever was shaved clean like an animal, and dressed in the kind of hospital suit that psychos get, with jelly-jar glasses and all, the type of glasses worn by people with mostly gums and no teeth. They built him a zoo cage in court. Then they sentenced him to death.

I just stare at my Nikes. Jordan New Jacks, boy. I'd perk them up with a spit-wipe, but it seems kind of pointless when I'm naked. Anyway, my fingers are sticky. This ink would survive Armageddon, I swear. Cockroaches, and this fucken fingerprint ink.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2003/story/0,,1044003,00.html

Why is it that the first time I tried to read Vernon God Little, I gave up after the first couple of pages, and yet, this looks quite good?

Then, I need an adult, female narrator for It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. I'll look to Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin:

Childless, I'd imagined baby crying as a pretty undifferential affair. But in motherhood I developed an ear. Oh, I imagine there are as many reasons that newborn babies cry as that grown ones do, but Kevin practised none of these standard lachydermal modes.

With me, once you left Kevin was not to be bought off with any thing so petty and transitory as milk or dry diapers. If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivalled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity; it wasn't about to be allayed by the hover of that haggard cow with her nauseating waft of white fluid. And I discerned no plaintive cry of appeal, no keen of despair, no gurgle of nameless dread. Rather, he hurled his voice like a weapon, howls smashing the walls of our loft like a baseball bat bashing a bus shelter. In concert, his fists sparred with the mobile over his crib, he kick-boxed his blanket, and there were times I stepped back after patting and stroking and changing and marveled at the sheer athleticism of the performance. Jr was unmistakable: Driving this remarkable combustion engine was the distilled and infinitely renewable fuel of outrage.

About what? you might well ask.

He was dry, he was fed, he had slept. I would have tried blanket on, blanket off; he was neither hot nor cold. He'd been burped, and I have a gut instinct that he didn't have colic; Kevin's was not a cry of pain but of wrath, He had toys dangling overhead, rubber blocks in his bed. His mother had taken six months off from work to spend every day by his side, and I picked him up so often that my arms ached; you could not say he lathed for attention. As the papers would be so fond of observing sixteen years later, Kevin had everything.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/orange2005/story/0,,1501526,00.html

Interesting that I've picked off the top of my head examples of students who may/may not have killed their fellow students - given the topic of Winter Kills.

Beats

So, here I am rewriting one of my short stories into a Monologue, whilst bearing in mind what my tutor has told me:

... you will need to do a lot of filtering to pitch your work for speaking actors... you need greater economy in indicating space and time, and you need to pace the pieces around what playwrights call ‘beats’ – the changes of direction which give a performer a clue to mood and keep the audience on their toes...

http://wondering-mind.blogspot.com/2007/03/professional-development-collaborative.html

http://www.ehow.com/tips_5213.html has this to say about beats in a Monologue:

Divide your monologue into "beats." Within each beat, analyze your
character's objective, actions, and emotions. A beat changes every time the character's objective changes. Beats usually work best when analyzing an entire script.

But, I also found the following on: http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2005/12/beat-sheets.html:

‘Beats’ are the dramatic structure of your scene. They help build to the
point and purpose of what you want to establish.

Perhaps a better example would be the Ghostbusters scene I referred to a few posts back when we meet Peter and Ray for the first time. The purpose of the scene is to introduce them as characters, show that they’re involved in the paranormal and get them to the library where the ghost has appeared.

But the drama/comedy of the scene is played out with Peter trying to impress a vacuous blonde with his paranormal test and Ray coming in spoiling his moves before they go on their way. The scene has three beats.

Beat 1: Peter tries to impress the blonde by favouring her answers over the geek who he supplies with electric shocks and the geek, fed up, leaves.

Beat 2: Peter moves in on the blonde, buttering her up for his seduction.

Beat 3: Ray bounds in, interrupts, and forces Peter to dump the blonde so that they can check out the ghost in the library.

It's important to note that a 'beat' is not an exchange of dialogue. They're mini-beats if you like, to help progress to the proper beat. For
example, Peter, the blonde and the geek go through a few funny exchanges but the beat is for Peter to impress the blonde and be alone with her.

In writing for soaps, quite often you are given the “story beats” of the serial element. For example, you may get the story line: “John goes to tell Sarah that he’s impotent but he can’t quite summon the courage. Sheila and Maria prepare to adopt their first child together.” Etc. So, as the writer, you’re looking at this outline, and these story beats, and thinking of how to break it down into small dramatic beats of action so that you can do each scene justice.

I don’t know a lot of writers who actually take the time and bother to write a full ‘beat sheet’ (where you list the scene’s purpose and its relevant beats). Crikey, sometimes an outline and treatment can be hard enough without having to go to this much detail. But if you attempt a scene by scene breakdown or a ‘step outline’ then this is essentially expressing the key beats of what’s happening and how it’s going to be dramatised.

In writing for TV, it’s invaluable and obligatory, and perhaps if we all took the time to do it with our features then our scripts would have that extra edge of efficiency, drive and purpose to make the characters and drama truly stand out.

So, I need to pay heed to this in my screenplay also. Gah! Should have guessed this... McKee's been talking on and on about it in Story. It's about time I re-read that too.

Professional Development - Collaborative Project

As part of the National Academy of Writing, we've got to do a Professional Development encompasing teaching, collaborative arts and maintaining a diary of learning. There's a lot of work involved (justly) as it covers up to two years. I've decided to take the bull by the horns and look into the collaborative element with respect to getting something done and ready for the New Generation Arts Festival (in June - whoah!).

I was wondering how I should go about linking my ideas together and getting some kind of ball rolling... perhaps I should mention what I'm considering:

I have written three 1,500 word short stories that can be turned into monologues. Their unifying themes are the 'trials of childhood':

• The courtship of two sixthform students (my original submission for entry to NAW)
• A bullied student seeks revenge on his classmates
• A daughter pieces together her mother's reasons for hating her dead father (originally the 1,000 word Fanny and Alexander improvisation).

I'm thinking of writing a 4th to wrap it all up, but have yet to plan it. Each one takes roughly 10 minutes to read out and my thoughts so far on tying it all together would be one actor/actress to read each monologue a-la a kind of Alan Bennett "Talking Heads" with basic set pieces and possibly projections of images relating to what the actors are saying - either representing the truth of the words, visual metaphors, or juxtaposed imagery.

My tutor for this module has these thoughts:

This sounds interesting in principle and would be a good project to pursue with some student actors. I’d need to see the material you’ve written, though. The word ’link’ always arouses suspicion and I think you might need to find a sharper focus for what you want to do.

Maybe I should say they're "Three separate stories on the trials of childhood".

If it’s to work as a performance there has to be a strong thread, and looking at your pieces individually I’d say you will need to do a lot of filtering to pitch your work for speaking actors. On this, I recommend two books, both of which you can order from Amazon: Anne Hart’s How to Write Plays, Monologues and Skits and Laura Harrington’s 100 Monologues. The latter is an anthology designed (if memory serves) for drama school auditions but it’s a great source of examples and ideas. At the moment you need greater economy in indicating space and time, and you need to pace the pieces around what playwrights call ‘beats’ – the changes of direction which give a performer a clue to mood and keep the audience on their toes. Think of a beat as lasting about 30 seconds! I’d start with the bullying piece.

So, more to think about, on top of planning my screenplay. Perhaps this module should wait till next year.