It takes all kinds of writers, as it takes all kinds of persons, to make a world.

Like satin-stitch embroidery, a painting should be made up of deliberate, parsimonious, and carefully placed brush strokes. Anything superfluous makes it trash.

A novel comes into completion, and a life becomes replete with experiences, as surely as a bucket fills up with water under a leaky faucet.

If you want to write but feel that you are never in the right mood to do so, all you have to do is detach yourself from everything else, go to a place  where no one can find you, sit at a table, open your notebook, and pick up your pen.

Never luxuriate in your verbiage, or else your readers will eventually abandon you.

Sometimes it is a bad idea to write or paint to music, because the music will inadvertently bring associations that are superfluous to your subject matter.

Try writing and painting in silence. Allow the novel or play and the painting to make their own music. 

Imagination is an unstructured mass of images, words, memories, associations, and feelings that need to be siphoned through consciousness in order to exist as a comprehensible work of art.

Sometimes it is comprised of concepts and ideas from extraterrestrial sources, which also need to be siphoned through consciousness.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks: _Make Sure_ by Clara

Hi Clara!

You worked very hard on rewriting this play. It is tighter; every scene pushes the premise forward; and the play ends in a delightful turnabout. Your strongest points are an ear for dialogue as spoken in the streets (as opposed to poetic dialogue) and a sense of humor, both of which I found absent in your other play, Birth Days.

Make Sure verges on theatre of the absurd. It is a comment on the tension between authority and the individual (or the individualist). The only suggestion I can make at this point is perhaps link each artwork in the gallery to a particular playwright or a play (as you did the first installation with Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. That would add a dimension to the parallelism you are drawing between theatre and visual art.

This play seems more reading-ready to me than your other play. 

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks: _Birth Days_ by Clara

Hi Clara!

Again I enjoyed your handling of language. Your journalist's obsession-compulsion helped; your thorough proofreading and concern with the usage of correct idioms and spelling ensured good reading.

My comments on your manuscript remain the same as before. Since you did not make changes other than add more poetic imagery in the monologues, my dramaturging remains at a standstill.

This close to the staged reading of your play, try to consider the following:

--The overall style is poetic realism. The monologues are interspersed, however, with a melodrama. If you stripped off all the monologues that is what you merely end up with.
--The premise seems to have much to do with distrust, rather than love, or woman as co-creator and man as traitor. As such the play might be more appropriately titled Birthing Days rather than Birth Days.
--Act 2 Scene 3 onward comes across as an epilogue to the entire play. The character change of SABINE is abrupt, and the audience will feel deprived of everything that led to this change. Character change must be shown as coming from within, not as a result of a vehicular accident or of mellowing with age.
--On Page 39, the disembodied voice of the INTERVIEWER is quite out of syncopation with everything else. You've been showing all the minor characters onstage so far. Why not the INTERVIEWER?
--LENG and MICHAEL are not real characters because they do not undergo dramatic change, they are there simply as props for SABINE. The false closure you give them in the end are inexplicable.

As a general rule, when I dramaturge a play, I am unable to proceed if the playwright takes no action on my suggestions. It is pointless to keep resubmitting to me practically the same manuscript over and over again, hoping that I will see things differently.

I usually don't.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks: _Waiting for Marimekko_, revised play for staged reading, by Pamela

Hello Pamela!

I enjoyed reading the polished version of your poignant play. There is only one comment I have on your manuscript, which is the stage direction on Page 7, Lines 11 - 12 ("SARAH sits on the bench, holding his right hand and leaning against him"). "Him" can refer either to RASUL or to TAXI UNCLE. Specify ALEX.

Although a playwright may feel that her manuscript is final, keep an open mind during the rehearsals. You will find that your dialogue will adjust to the speech rhythms of your performers, and that they will spontaneously change words, split or merge sentences, and even skip lines altogether. When they do that, analyze whether there is valuable truth in the changes that they make. You have the option of incorporating them in your work.

Your overall theatrical treatment is impressionistic:

1. The important action occurs before a scene and after a scene and is never shown to the audience.

2. What the characters DO NOT SAY is more significant than what they say that comprises the true drama.

3. There is no explicit closure given to any of the characters.

Your director needs to cast brilliant performers in order to make a staged reading (as opposed to a performance with costumes, blocking, lighting, and music) work. I wish you all the best of luck.

It was a pleasure having you in my workshop. I saw your wedding pictures--yet another act in your life, and I congratulate you on this new act in your life as a young Singaporean playwright.