There is one undeniable delight in writing: You are able to preserve what you know, defend the facts of your knowing, reconcile the truth, and create your own bookshelf of your life’s work. There is a great moral duty and an ongoing human wondering in the task of the living author — one that must not be slighted in practice or disparaged in theory — even when the current events of the day and the damnation of history are upon us.
I’m always disappointed when I talk to Artists and the first thing they start telling me is their resume, how many blog hits they have, how many tickets they’ve sold and how many social media followers they have. I’m dismayed not by their success, but by the business metrics they’re using to calculate what will always be only a fleeting, and diminishing, rate of return. Art must not be commerce. Creation must not be commercial. The Arts must never belong to the business school. The only thing of value you have as an Artist — and can control forever — is your belief in what you know is true and how that knowledge affects the quality of the work you produce falling into the long game beyond the grave.
Continue reading → Letter to a Young Artist: Popularity and Commerce Must Not Matter
Jasmine sat next to her master’s knee and shared her wish to be a writer.
Continue reading → Write What You Don't Know: Ten Sentence Story #113
The New York Times likes to consider itself the “newspaper of record” — and so when they place their foot on the throat of a production to test their muscle — theatre people the world over cringe and hope they don’t get hit with the tainted shrapnel. The NYTimes recently promoted an interactive “lesson in movie acting” with 14 celebrities “emoting” on their website.
How easy is it to waste your life? We work. We ponder. We rarely live. We prefer complaining over action. We want tears of understanding stead of a hand up out of a pit.
All good drama should convey the essence of the human condition and melodrama can never meet that mandate. A righteous dramatic experience can be uplifting, serve as a warning against degraded morality, and every play must end with a proper catharsis.
The nature of the director in any form — movies, television, stage, radio — is to serve the spirit of the script.
A director is not the master of the script — the director must be a slave to the written word in order to understand the greater purpose of the writing.
Many directors believe they are co-authors of a work and that is wrong.
Weak authors create strong directors and that wrongful power dyad is always terrible for the script.
A script is not a blueprint or an architectural dream.
A script is the bones, sinew, muscle, heart and being of any project.
For anyone other than the author to change the work in situ or to re-arrange established ideas on the page is to threaten the very core of the project that risks creating the common and the ordinary failure that reeks in the marketplace and is immediately forgotten by those in the audience who writhe and yearn for meaning in their escape into entertainment.
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