07 Thursday Apr 2016
Posted in Scribbling, Things
Ha, the mystery is solved.
I mean the mystery about the notes I thought I’d taken while watching my play performed, four years ago – and couldn’t find anymore. Or at least, not in the quantity I remember…
Did my storytelling mind make up all the note-taking because it was nice and writerly – the Playwright At Work?
Well, the answer is Yes – and No.
And it went like this: yesterday morning I woke up with a hazy notion that perhaps I had made notes on a printed copy of the play… Continue reading
21 Monday Mar 2016
Posted in Scribbling, Theatre
So the time has come to rewrite – or at least significantly rework – Di Uomini e Poeti, that is, Of Men and Poets. It had a good run back in 2012, and it was published, but I’ve always wanted to do something more and better with it.
Now a reprise is in the air, for Mantova’s year as cultural capital of Italy: what better chance for a new version of the play?
So I printed a copy and began searching for the notes I’d made back then… Continue reading
06 Thursday Aug 2015
Posted in Scribbling
So I received something – something that, by and large, amounts to a specimen of the famous Good Rejection.
Not quite that – no publisher was involved – but close enough: it was a reader’s report from a high-level competition. My entry didn’t even make the long list, but the anonymous reader who sent me the report had quite a few flattering things to say about my premise, my writing, my grasp of period language, and my characters. Also, and more importantly, they had some very interesting, very punctual advice to offer about what didn’t work.
Now, all of this is going to be very, very helpful: the competition being open to unfinished work (provided it would be finished by the time the long-listed entries were called in), I submitted the beginning of my work-in-progress – the one whose word count you can see in the left column. And the fact that the word count has not changed in a few months doesn’t mean I’m not working on it. I finished the first draft at the end of May, then I let it rest for a month or so, and now I’m busy revising. I plan to begin the second draft in a couple of weeks – and this is where the advice from the reader’s report will come in handy.
The report is not long, either – perhaps some 300 words: a little, concise, punctual thing that packed encouragement, food for thought and sound, clear advice… Whoever you are, o anonymous Reader, thank you.
Also, having received it right now, as I make ready to rewrite, makes it all the more valuable because I’m at the right stage to make the best use of the advice it contains. Now the perfect timing has been a nice piece of serendipity, but it goes to show how useful a bit of feedback between drafts can be.
So, back to work – buoyed by the knowledge that there are things I have done right the first time around, and even what I didn’t has “bags of potential” – and with good advice to digest and take into account as I rewrite.
A good rejection indeed.
19 Thursday Mar 2015
Posted in Scribbling, Theatre
I find myself wanting to rewrite things.
Plays, especially. Plays that were staged with good success – one even published…
But now I want to rewrite them, because seeing them staged made me aware of rough edges, mistakes, things great and small that need some more work. And because years have passed and I have learnt a few things since.
Somnium Hannibalis is a stage adaptation of my novel of the same name.* Hannibal Barca, the Second Punic War, the price of all-consuming dreams… An intense little thing – if I say so myself. It had several runs over four years, it played well, and I loved it very much, but now… I want to write it again, to change things, to shift the characters around Hannibal, to have things happen onstage more. It’s not that I have grown to dislike it, but I know how to make it so much better.
Of Men and Poets is a play on Virgil – or rather, on the fate of the Aeneid after Virgil’s death. It was a commission, and it opened rather grandly, back in the day, to the presence of Seamus and Marie Heaney, Peter Fallon, the Gotha of Europe’s Virgil scholars… Then it had a good run and was published. And it wasn’t bad – but I was so green to the craft when I wrote it, and it shows in a hundred little ways. There are many things I know now, and wish I had known back then…
And of course I couldn’t know, because a good deal of it I learnt by sitting backstage or in the audience through show after show, and getting a feeling for what works and what doesn’t, and discussing things with directors and actors… So many lessons that I can and do use in writing new plays – but those old things, they were stories I loved (even though I panicked at first when I was commissioned a play on the damn Aeneid), and it seems a pity to leave them like that. They feel unfinished, and I want to work on them some more.
After the first run of Men&Poets, I told a friend I’d have to do something with it, sooner or later. He stared at me because, he said, he had trouble imagining that a published play could be regarded as unfinished.
“It is on paper, you know…”
Well, it wasn’t unfinished when I delivered it to the company and the publisher – oh, it felt finished enough. It was only later, that it grew unfinished again. And I have a notion that, the more I learn about playwriting, the more unfinished my old plays will become.
And also that, even after I rewrite them, sooner or later they will grow unfinished again, because this is how it works. If I’ll go on rewriting again and again, or what will be worth rewriting… well, this I’ll decide – or learn – as I go. As I rewrite.
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* And yes, the Latin title was one of those mistakes…
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