A good writer never rambles, in writing and in person.

Do you expend all of your energy, spend the best part of your day, and set aside a lot of time to consult others while you are writing your piece--AND THEN sit back flabbergasted when another writer simply turns his wrist and produces a masterpiece?

That is because you are writing from another person's truth, not your own.

Write from your own truth. It is as unique as your set of fingerprints.

Knowing language, its craft, and its nuances comprises 30% of the requirements for writing. Your powers of observation, capacity for reflection, insight, memory recall, and emotional truthfulness comprise 69%, while 1% goes to your enjoyment of using writing instruments, whether pen or paper or electronic media.

All of those combined constitute your talent.

A long as you have that, you need not copy other people's "styles". Your individual experience is your truth, and your truth is your writing.

Every work should present new challenges, unique ones that you've never encountered before. If you tend to produce the same work over and over, it means that you never met up to the old challenges to begin with and are still trying to master them.

Like painting, writing must be done in successive layers and glazes.

Write for the world because you write for yourself, keeping in mind that your own country and your family also read you.

There is really no such thing as lack of inspiration. As long as you are alive, you learn at least one interesting story everyday that can be developed into exciting, visual art or literature.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks: "Make Sure" by Clara

Hello Clara!

You submitted a well-written draft. If _Birth Days_ was a dramatic essay, "Make Sure" is a dramatic commentary. That these forms emerge in your oeuvre is definitely a result of your journalism. Here are my comments:

--The initial repartee between the GUARD and the DOCENT comes across as unreal, unless your intention is to write an absurd play a la Eugene Ionesco, which your work actually verges on.
--You are much better at writing in pure, straight English rather than mixing in Malay words for the GUARD's dialogue, unless you are intentionally portraying racial disconnect.
--Review your dialogue in favor of the spoken word, especially in your first few pages. I will give you only the first example I encountered: In Scene 1, Page 1, 9th Line from the Bottom, the GUARD says, "Please make sure you wear and display your sticker on your shirt at all times, while in the museum". If you omit the words and phrases in brackets--"Please [make sure you] wear [and display] your sticker [on your shirt] at all times[, while in the museum]", you will come up with "Please wear your sticker at all times", which is how it will be delivered in real life. I realize, of course, that your title is "Make Sure", so you could perhaps retain that.
--Exercise economy. Your play has too much art; it is almost like name-dropping.
--Your characters are not pleasant persons, so consider how that can actually alienate your audience.
--Your audience will be engaged only as late as Scene 5.
--The twist in Scene 8 is clever, but, after watching the play for the first time, will the audience want to watch it more than once, knowing that there is a twist in Scene 8?
--Over all, make up your mind as to what your play is focusing on: Absurdity of social norms? The value of breaking rigid rules? Authoritarianism and rebelliousness? Racial disconnect? The play dips in and out of those topics. As a result, the premise is unclear. For this one-act play, either go totally Absurd or totally Aristotelian.

Your work is promising, but ask yourself how many producers would actually take it and put it onstage. Otherwise it might be better off as a prose article.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks Singapore: _Birth Days_ by Clara

Hello Clara!

You did a wonderful job doing work and polishing your play after our session in Singapore. Your biggest advantage as a playwright is that you have unusually keen powers of observation, and are able to translate the information acquired by your senses to vivid poetry.

Here are my comments:

--Your work is not so much a play as a dramatic essay. Keep that genre in mind as you proceed to prepare it for reading.
--Always be mindful of the spoken word as opposed to the written word. Read your play aloud, audiotape yourself, and listen. For example, in Act 1 Scene 1, Page 1, Line 5, you have a line that goes "I'd stated that I was right". Delete "that" so that the line reads "I'd stated I was right". Say those two lines aloud. Isn't the second easier to project and to listen to?
--Act 2, Scene 1, Page 24 is set in an airport, and your character is on a travellator. Your producer will not spend money to construct a travellator onstage just for this one, transitory scene. Avoid cinematic visualizing. Be kind to your director and your production designer; make their jobs as easy for them as possible. Directors and production designers do not like working on problems the playwright creates for them--rather, they like taking a playwright's simple, straightforward work and challenging themselves by creating complex problems off it.
--Act 2, Scene 2, Page 33, Michael's entrance is contrived and seems out of a TV sitcom. The sound of a flushing toilet that precedes his entrance will only elicit laughter from the audience. Michael is only one man in a play filled with a bevy of women. I suggest that you cut him out and reveal his affair with Leng via exposition--either in a monologue or in dialogue between Sabine and her mother. As written in this play, Michael is a mere prop or cardboard cut-out. If you can't give a performer a substantial role, don't even write it. I have the same comment for the children Aiden and Isaac, who appear in only one scene and will only incur the production two additional talent fees. If you MUST have children there, though, change them to girls, thereby giving your play an all-female cast.
--All monologues: Study them carefully. A monologue isn't just a long-drawn speech to be delivered onstage. EVERY monologue must have a premise (conforming to the premise of the entire play), rising action, a climax, and a denouement. Note that any monologue that does not have these will tend to be boring and can actually be deleted--because anything that does not push the premise of the play forward should be deleted.
--Your wrap-up and ending are effective. However this will work only if, from the beginning of the play to the very end, ALL characters are seated in a circle round the main playing area. As such, there will be no entrances and no exits.

Overall, great work, and congratulations! This is a play that should be watched not only by every woman in Singapore but by every woman in the world.