When I took advanced playwriting in theatre school, I found myself stuck. We had to write a 45-minute play and the professor nixed my first proposal because, while it had the minimum three characters, the third was entirely peripheral. I could see no way to present that story with a larger role for the third character, so it was back to the drawing board.
Or rather, a dictionary and a dart board. I picked five object nouns at random from a dictionary, turned four into characters and used the fifth as an object in dispute, then threw a dart at a world map for a setting and wove those six dots into a play.
It was almost like writing news.
More below the fold....
Dots into Stories (The Information Fairy)
I wasn't writing in a void when I began on that play. I was using two improvisation games we'd done often in acting: Person-Place-Thing and Object Personification. In the first, the audience calls out the name of a person, a place, and a thing - e.g.: Marie Antoinette, a bus stop, and a ballpoint pen - and the actors improvise a scene around them. In the second, the audience gives the actor an object and the actor builds a human character based on the properties of that object, not "be a hair clip" but "be the person a hair clip might become."
I was also using skills I'd learned in journalism school, where one of our first reporting class assignments was to write a news story based on a set of facts given us by the professor. He'd written each fact on a slip of paper and drew them in random order. Like reporters researching a story, we didn't get the facts in chronological or idea-related sequence. He'd also put contradictory facts into the mix, like we'd find as we talked to different sources on a story. We scribbled furiously as he read out the facts - which took about five minutes - then had 40 minutes to write our stories. In the next class we contrasted the stories we'd written, and near the end of that class he passed out the news story he'd written based on the same facts, several years before.
"So which story is true?" he asked.
Events happen in dots ... but we think in stories.
Our first response, not surprisingly, was to say that his story was the truth. He'd talked to the sources face-to-face, we argued. True, he agreed, but he'd been lied to before and you couldn't always tell when someone lied or misremembered. He'd had more time to research the story, we said. Yes, he replied, then told us the facts he'd read to us were the notes he took down over the six hours he researched the story, verbatim. He'd had more time to write the story, we protested. Not true; by the time he'd finished his research, he was 40 minutes from deadline.
"You had more experience," a classmate finally said. "You'd seen enough as a reporter to know how things happen and what makes sense."
"Maybe," he said, smiling. "But by the time it had all played out, mine wasn't the version that stuck."
He wasn't wrong; his story was based on the facts he had developed in his reporting. Still, he'd focused on certain elements and thought others less important. Other reporters in the area had basically the same facts and made different choices, just as we had in class. Some of their stories - different from his - were similar enough to reinforce each other and become The Story. Eventually, even his stories came to reflect The Story. It was, as he put it, "the version that stuck."
It was The Story, but was it The Truth?
That question became a recurring debate throughout the semester. We were, after all, learning to be 'objective' journalists. Our task was to report the facts, to tell the truth. Yet again and again, in assignment after assignment, we found The Truth was difficult to nail down. Fact mistakes were easy to identity and, I should add, deadly for grading. A single minor fact error, like misspelling a name, reduced our max grade on an assignment to a C; two minor fact errors, or one major fact error such as mixing up sources' quotes or people's actions, was an automatic F. We got the facts right, or else. But getting The Truth right was not so easy.
Sometimes we were assigned to cover the same story. Sometimes he let us choose our own, but several of us chose the same one. Inevitably, our stories differed. Sometimes the differences were trivial and sometimes not. When we all spent a day in criminal court covering a murder trial, you would have thought we'd sat in different courtrooms. We believed different witnesses and were impressed by different pieces of evidence. Some wrote stories suggesting the defendant would be convicted, others that he would likely be acquitted. We had the same dots, but connected them based on our own impressions, our own experiences, our own filters.
In that case there eventually was "the version that stuck," officially: the jury's verdict. Their verdict was The Story, but was it The Truth? Most of us agreed with it, even if we'd leaned the other way based on the one day of testimony we saw. The jury had seen all of the evidence in a five-day trial, and most of us were inclined to conclude they'd reached the right decision. But some, including the one classmate who'd followed the rest of the trial on her own, insisted the jury was wrong.
Stories into Dots
All of those experiences came to bear as I wrote my play. It wasn't entirely fiction, because the dart I'd thrown at the map hit a place about which I knew nothing. I spent several days in the library reading about that country, its history, its current events. Our university had access to one of its newspapers, and as English was country's official language I could order back issues and read about day-to-day life. I read the "hard" news, but also the "people" stories and ads. I looked at photos, and even cooked some recipes to get some idea of the tastes and smells my characters might sense.
The four characters, each built from properties of an object, offered plenty of friction, both between them and within each. The object at issue, by coincidence, fit well with a news story from a few years before. The dots grew into a narrative of lost faith, betrayed love, profound hope and petty jealousy: four people trying to make sense of themselves and each other as their nation fell into chaos.
My professor loved it, and even wept in class at one scene as we read it aloud. I had, he said, captured something essential about those people and that place, in that time. Feeling good about myself, I told him how I'd built the idea from randomly chosen objects and a dart thrown at a map.
He slowly shook his head. "I wish you hadn't said that. It has lots of facts, but I liked it better when I thought it was truth."
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Happy Thursday!