I felt that I knew what effects I wanted, but that was really it.  I was in such a rut over thinking about this play in ONE WAY, that I had a hard time escaping it.

Hopefully I can use this momentum to create something more lasting.

Character Name:  Aaron

Dramatic Action Plot

What is the overall story goal:Wants to be a father (his wife already defines it as more than a gene dispenser)

Example from Where the Wild things Are:

Wants to make mischief and be a wild thing

What stands in his way: His own issues and rules

What does he stand to lose: Sarah (his wife)

Character Emotional Development Plot

Flaw:Fights against change

Strength:Thinks and makes plans

Hates:  Not being able to control how his child will be.

Loves:His wife more than anything else

Fears:What he’ll lose when the baby arrives

Dream:Having a child and nothing else changes in his life

Secret:He really doesn’t want to risk everything to have it

Nate’s Program – Nov 7th

Nate’s Program – Nov 6th

So, now that I’m on Christmas break, and have not a lot of school stuff to do, I’m going to do the 2011 PlotWriMo (Plot Writing Month), as a framework for the outline of my next full-length (which I wanted to do anyway..)

So I’ll try to do a post every day (or every other day)…

And here’s where I’m starting

http://plotwhisperer.blogspot.com/2011/12/4th-annual-plot-writing-month.html

I think I may have responded with the end result in mind, not my current draft..

There are three ways that I believe this play pushes the current boundaries of theater.

One is the cast size.  I try to keep the amount of characters in my play to only the most essential.  This play has three character, the last had three, and the only I’m currently working-on has four.  This allows me to address the superficial parts early, and really spend time digging into the character’s philosophical goals, their feelings towards eachother, and the desires that make them HAVE to speak at this moment.

Second is the philosophical meaning behind this play.  Many writer’s portray their characters as deeply-flawed and seeking redemption.  The characters may make a mistake at the beginning that they spend the rest of the play compensating for, or they search for a piece of their life that is missing.  My protagonists don’t function like that.  I take Ayn Rand’s point of view, that the purpose of art is to display people as they should be, the ideal.  Ruth (my protagonist) is a hero, who knows exactly what she wants.  It is other people who get in her way, and the audience watches her dispatch them.  It is the surety of the hero versus those who want to suck the hero to their level.  I see this play as a character proudly walking forward, assured of her steps, as opposed to a flawed individual, tripping and apologizing on his path to redeem himself.

Third is the theatrical conventions I employ in this play.  This is a play about magicians, and stage magic.  As a result, I use magic tricks which can be used either literally, or theatrically.  In scene 1, Ruth performs a disappearing-rod trick, which is a simple one to do.  As the play goes on, she hides her sister in a table (the Vanishing Man), this is a trick which can either be done literally or theatrically.  I think that a play which uses magic is something which can provide a very powerful experience.

“The Call To Adventure”

Thus it happens, in this fairy tale, that the disappearance of the ball is the first sign of something coming for the princess, the frog is the second, and the unconsidered promise is the third (p51)

So how many ‘signs’ make a good intrusion?  And what would that look like?

As this is my first blog post for Fox Valley Rep, I think I should start with a little bit of an introduction. I am Collider Playwright Garret Schneider, and am currently working on a play called “Clockwork Child”, about the destruction of an idea created between two scientists.
For me, the collaborative process (be it in anything that you collaborate with: writing, group work, music, construction), is one of shared investment. If everyone works together perfectly, then something truly beaustiful can be created (everyone has their own strength and you could create a work made entirely of people’s strengths).
Building on that idea, the collaborative process, the genesis and execution of ideas, seems to find a direct parallel in parenting and raising a child. If two collaborators work tirelessly on an idea, have it gestate, and do all that they can for it, they introduce it to the world. They bring their baby out for everyone to admire.
But, what if, as a mother, you have a different idea of what your child needs than the father does? Your child. When an idea is collaboratively created, who has ownership of it? Who decides what the next step is, who has the greatest say in its future?
Clockwork Child examines that question on the deathbed of a very real Victorian Scientist, Ada Lovelace whose failed collaboration with Charles Babbage could have resulted in the first computer, one-hundred years before the first computer was actually made.
Charles was the first inventor, while Ada perfected it, marketed it, and predicted to people (even Babbage himself) what the potential for the machine [the Analytical Engine] was. It is on Ada’s deathbed that she and Babbage have an argument which rips her from her current world and puts her in the past, where she must deter her younger self from ever embarking on the path of science.
This play is over many subjects that I am extremely passionate about: scientific exploration, gender inequality in science, birth of various subcultures (steampunk), and the lives of people with astounding mental abilities.
It is my hope that this play takes its audience on a journey, and that I can use history to help find parellels in their own struggle to achieve what is most important to them. For while Ada tries to destroy her past scientific self, she is really showing her own strength and commitment to scientific thought.

Failed Relationships are based on coming-together (1-5), and falling-apart (A-E)

Coming Together (1-5)

1. Initiate
   Superficial, desire to learn about them, initiate another meeting
2. Investing
   Investing time, energy, thought, emotions
   Giving-out personel information in hope that they will do that, too
   you start to drop-in risky things
   Most dangerous part
   Most fragile part (talk of exes?)
   There is something that happens that makes you want more
   
3. Involving
   Introduction of parents and friends
   Greater risks & more personal information is given
   People beginning to see you as a couple
   You begin making mutual decisions
   You begin to start privately fantasizing about a bigger future
4. Engaging
   You make a determined commitment (what’s the BIG step before engagement?)
   Public articulation of what you know to be true
   Move-in together, cabin together, travel together
   Privately thinking about marraige
   All the deep-seated horrible doubts, the testing of the relationship
5. Bonding
   A public ceremony which cements the decision for life
   Decision that all of the good outweighs the bad

Now, at any point, relationships can fall-apart.

A. The doubts start to creep in
General uneaseness / restlessness
The battle of good VS bad is tilting more towards ‘bad’

B. Isolating
“It’s not our music, it’s my music”
Asserting individuality into the relationship
You begin spending time out of the relationship
You start having a secret: life, fears, desires
Fantasizing about a “split”

C. Erupting
You are not talking & so you have horrible arguments about nothing / everything
Feeling of hopelessness
More time is spent in conflict than in peace

D. Dissasociation
Moving-out
Pulling yourself out of the relationship
You have stopped the relationship

E. Splitting
You take everything and you go out.  You leave.

Now, this holds for: jobs, parties, friends, families, those diagnosed with a disease/disorder

I am beyond excited, and this weekend is a big research weekend for me. I wanted to figure out a good way to document my research in a way that I can: control what I view, go back and search for it, access it remotely, and share what my process is.

I’m going to be using this blog to examine how possible this is.

“Well, I am very much satisfied with this first child of mine.  He is an uncommonly fine baby, & will grow to be a man of the first maginitude and power.” AEON 153

“He had passed over, aparently without comment, a succession of grandeoius plans and self-congratulation in the weeks-past…  On top of this letter, in Babbage’s hand, appear the words “Tuesday 15, saw AAL this morning and refused all conditions.”  120

“I believe myself to possess a must singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminentlya discoverer of the hidden realities of nature… the belief has been forced upon me…

Firstly: Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has… an intuitive perception of… things hidden from eyes, ears, & ordinary senses…

Secondly: my immense reasoning faculties;

Thirdly: my concentration faculty, by which I mean the power not only of throwing my whole energy & existence into whatever I choose, but also of bringing to bear on any one subject or idea, a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant & extraneous sources…” ALL 86

“I have never expressed to Lady Lovelace my opinion of her as a student of these matters.  I always feared that it might promote an application to them which might be injurious to a person whose bodily health is not strong…  Had any young beginner, about to go to Cambridge, shown the same power, I should have prophesied first that his aptitude at grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles would have very much lowered his chance of being senior wrangler; secondly, that they would have certainly made him an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.  The tract about Babbage’s machine is a pretty thing enough, but I could I think produce a series of extracts, out of Lady Lovelace’s first queries upon new subjects, which would make a mathematician see that it was no criterion of what might be expected of her.” ALL 82

“I am admirable as an organizer, director of other superintendants…  How many moments there are when their presence must be irritating & intolerable to me…  Add to this my total deficiency in all natural love of children…  and an eceedingly delicate and irritable nervous systems… and you will not wonder that I begin to feel them occasionally (to speak plainly but truly) a real nuisance…  I believe I am fit to educate, with proper aids.  But…  as the Chief, the general.” ALL 66

“The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.” CB 155

“A desire to govern the minds of others is a leading feature in Miss Byron’s character.  She will gain ascendency over most of those with whom she comes in contact.  The few whom she cannot govern will generally be those who might exercise almost a slavish control over her.” ALL 19

“My daughter is a happy and intelligent child, just beginning to learn her letters – I have given her this occupation, not so much for the sake of early acquirement, as to fix her attention, which from the activity of her imagination is rather difficult.” ALL 22