Oh, the joys of rewriting.
It's a common proverb among writers of any genre that any written work needs to be rewritten over and over and over. I am no stranger to such proverbs, as 22 Stories was merely a (very long) piece of short prose. It took me almost a year to write, and was too long for most competitions or teen publications. So it sat in the back of the ethereal fibers of the interweb until someone came up with the idea that I should turn a previously-written short story into a play for the 2011 NYC International Fringe Festival. A perfect match. Eight straight hours at a Starbucks on 43rd and 8th in Midtown and a lots of coffee later, the conversion was practically done, and with some minor revisions, 22 Stories was mailed at the last possible minute.
Even before I was emailed about the Fringe, though, I was rewriting. I wanted to submit 22 Stories to the Estrogenius Festival at the Manhattan Theater Source, a place where I've worked since... 2004? They're looking to show 10-minute plays, and 22 Stories stood at over twice that. So some serious slicing and dicing was in order. On top of that, it was also going to be excerpted for Writopia Lab's Best Playwright's Festival. As a result, one section of the play got a figurative face lift. I had completely forgotten about the Fringe. By the time Elena informed me I was in, the play looked much different. It looks even more different today. Characters were expanded and dropped. 22 Stories was originally a one-woman show in essence, observing from the outside her past self's interactions with past Natasha. Most of the other dialogue came from offstage adult voices including a now-nonexistent security guard.
Rewriting is harder than it looks. At each rehearsal, I still can't help but cringe when a certain line of dialogue gets said in a certain way, or when a pause is too long or too short or even just the right length. This is not the fault of the actors or the direction: I don't know of anyone who isn't somewhat insecure about the words they conjured from their imaginations and put them on paper. When you're rewriting, you know how the final product is supposed to feel, but you don't know how to get there.
Thankfully, some outside voices *cough* told me I didn't have much work to do. Which means the final laps should be easy and fun, right? Wrong. I have mainly focused on the parts that are easy to fix, and let the harder ones fester until they either start to smell or cause a large bump in the road. I skimmed over entire characters, without giving them the justice or the voices they deserve, or figuring out exactly who they were.
I'm talking about small parts here. But even then, no how small a part a character has, he or she is a person, just in a different part of the frame. They have to have stories as well.
So I had to backtrack and think of the parents, and give Natasha's friends struggles of their own. I even had to give the principal a personality. Needless to say, it was incredibly difficult. I ended up pulling Nicoles quite often, and ordering myself to focus.
The hardest part of rewriting at all, though, is knowing when to stop the train. How much rewriting is enough? When can I freeze the script and feel confident at showing my work to complete strangers? A piece of literature or drama is rarely sufficiently finished. Yet there definitely is a certain point in which rewrites do more harm than good. I felt myself teetering on that point many a time. Does that mean I know where it now is? No. If you can locate that point, congratulations. You're a good writer. Now tell me if this stopping spot on this blog post is a good enough one.
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