Collaboration or
Conspiracy For Murder
By
B.K. Hart
We shuffle in, pushing tables
together at the local Barnes and Noble Café. The conversation sometimes start
with – Why are we killing this guy – How do we kill him – What do we do with
the body? We aren’t the only group that meets Saturday mornings in the coffee
shop so I often wonder what the other patrons think we are doing. Our Sisters
in Crime group started with about 15 people. Our goal was to work on a one-act
play, learn proper formatting and technique, and create a production, which
will provide support to our chapter in the future. It is a learning experience.
My personal hope is that I might take away useful ideas for my own writing
adventures.
We perhaps should have called this
the – And, then there were none – group. We expected a little attrition over
time. It happens with every workshop. We began in May and have lost about one
person each month. The winner is going to be the last man standing, I think. Each
month some of the basic details for the play, hashed out the month before, have
changed. I must suspend expectation each time I sit down at the table and look
at the meeting as a fresh new start on the play. As a writer, this is very
difficult. One of the techniques I use to complete a novel or short story is to
pull on the consistency of what I have built when writing the previous scenes
or chapters. In writing a play, it has been scraping all progress to create
something better than we had before, then dragging back in the parts that worked
from the prior meeting.
My forte is dialogue. So, I have
written dialogue for about three different versions of how this play is
developing. One of the strong points we have covered is how to open your play
and what the audience needs to know right up-front. Sometimes this means that
you must include the person’s name in the line. In a short story / novel, I
would drop the name. In real life, I don’t call you Bob every time I speak to
you. I simply say, “Hey, how’s it going?”
I wouldn’t normally say, “Bob, how’s it going?” unless you are kind of a
stranger to me. In a story, you add the tag as in “I say to Bob, “How are you
doing?””
Another aspect we covered in some
detail was how to set the stage. What do you want the audience to see when as
soon as the curtain comes up? You can imagine for a Sisters in Crime group some
of the suggestions that might have been presented for that scenario. It’s an
important question because it can set the tone for your entire production. Do
you want the audience to know right away that this is a drama or a comedy? How
you open can do this for you.
The third and final aspect that I
found most helpful is determining how many characters you need to make your
play work. The key here for the writer is to keep in mind that each actor needs
to get paid. The more characters you have in the writing, the more money it
will take to produce. And, since our chapter is paying to produce this, we have
decided to keep this to a two or three actor/actress play. It means the writing
has to get tighter because you don’t have the luxury of adding a character to
impart information. You have to do that with what is already present in the
scene, or through dialogue.
So while we are shouting at each
other “Hit him over the head with something?” or “How do we get rid of the
blood?” I sometimes find my eyes
drifting to the remedial reading group gathered at the tables next to us and
wonder if they think we are collaborating, or conspiring.
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