Playwriting Workshop For Selected, Gifted Students Of Cedar Girls' Secondary School, Friday, July 22, 2016

Playwriting Workshop for Singaporean Senior Citizens, Group 2: Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Dramaturgy With Isaac, Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Laurels make the softest bed that one could ever rest on.

Playwriting Workshop For Singaporean Senior Citizens, Group 1: Monday, July 18, 2016

Dramaturgy With Shen And Beverly, Sunday, July 17, 2016

Playwriting Workshop For Singaporean Youth At Risk, Sunday, July 17, 2016

It is fear of poverty, not death, discrimination, or loss of love, that every writer and painter fears most. The archetype of the starving artist has long been ingrained in our sensibilities. That is why many contemporary writers and painters go out of their way to take on profitable, full time jobs to pay their bills, buy their food, build their houses, and prepare themselves for retirement.

You can tell that a writer has transcended a crisis by reading his/her recent work, and it is usually excellent work. Learn, therefore, to allow your anger, grief, frustration, and despair to fuel your creativity.

Personal crises, like wars, can either bring out the best or the worst in you.

Note that WWI and WWII gave birth to timeless cultural forms, such as jazz, Hollywood, modern housing, and the exploration of plastic.

Note also that CURRENT wars are giving birth to nothing but paranoia, religious dissent, discrimination, and indignity in travel. (Electronic technology doesn't count; it would have developed anyway with or without wars.)

Make your crises bring out the best in you.
 

Never underestimate your sense of smell, including psychic smell, or clairaroma. It is probably the only sense that is hardly impaired in human beings and in animals, because it alerts us not only to the fragrance of Nature but to all kinds of danger as well.

Push your sense of smell over the metaphysical edge. Do not stop at using it to smell perfume, flowers, coffee, cinnamon and vanilla in pastries, freshly-cut grass, and the like.

How does a circle smell like? And a square?

How does the color red smell like? And the color blue?

How does happiness smell like? And loneliness, or even despair?

Never start writing or painting with your mind. Write with all of your physical senses. Your mind can always edit your work later.

Join me at TheatreWorks Singapore this July?

https://writingandcommunity2016.wordpress.com/category/writing-from-the-heart/

Never paint something you do not love, keeping in mind that you will be with it frequently and that you will be glazing and refining its image over and over again until your painting is done. If not, you will soon outgrow the image and possibly abandon it completely.

The same is true of your subject matter in writing.

Whether you like it or not, writing and painting are intense moments of autism.

During those moments, no one from the outside world, not even psychologists, can penetrate your inner world.

It is disadvantageous to every writer to be unable to see things from the point of view of other people, especially people they do not like, for every writer's world has its share of antagonists.

We work off our minds and sometimes off our hearts, but we should always listen to our bodies, because only then do we know when to rest.

A writer's mind is like a building with many levels and many rooms, and your connection with him depends on which level and which room he takes you to.

At the age of 15, everything you write and paint is autobiographical. After that you journey through the paths created by different philosophies, movements, modes of spirituality, and current events, and then mark a path of your own.

At 65, everything you write and paint becomes autobiographical again, this time with the maturity and deep insight that were not there when you were but 15.

Never dread doing a major revision on your writing or painting. If it needs to get done, DO IT.

It is like unraveling rows and rows of your knitting to correct a stitch. After the piece is finished, it will have been well worth it.

The painting will tell you when something is still missing or not right.

The painting will tell you to keep on painting it.

The painting will tell you when to stop.

The play will tell you when something is still missing or not right.

The play will tell you to keep on writing it.

The play will tell you when to stop.

When painting from the imagination, ensure that no two faces look alike.

So it is with writing. Ensure that no two characters are alike.

It's called good orchestration.

Never stop working on a painting or a piece of creative writing as long as it tells you that it is not yet done. The more you glaze it with your diligence, the more it will shine. Keep working on it until there is nothing more to work on.

Remember this, that there is no such thing as an overworked painting or piece of creative writing, though there is such a thing as an overworked painter and writer.

Talent and training are a wonderful combination, but it is better to have talent without training than training without talent.

Literature and art are the best nourishment for the soul. Keep the soul well fed, for it has a healthy appetite.

A painting in progress reaches its point of no return when it looks completely different from your initial drafts, when it begins to take on a life of its own, and when it tells you everything it stills needs to complete the picture.

So it is with writing.

In-Depth Writing Exercise 7: Transrenditions

1. Imagine a fantasy object in your mind. Activate your five physical senses in doing so.

How does the object look like in the round?

What are its textures?

What sound(s) does it make?

What does it smell like?

What would it taste like?

2. Write as vivid a description as you can of the object.

3. Make a drawing or painting of the object.

4. Without showing your written description, show the drawing/painting to another writer and ask him/her to write a vivid description of the object.

5. Compare both descriptions.

Which description is more vivid?

Which, more comprehensible to the average reader?

The objective of this exercise is not to compare your writing skills with those of another writer--it is to determine how much fidelity of communication there is in yours.

Never create in competitive mode. You will only find that your most destructive competitor is yourself.

In painting, the addition of any line, plane of color, shape, or figure immediately changes your entire painting.

So it is with creative writing, and remember so as you add sentence upon sentence in completing your work.

It matters little if you spend years painting a portrait, even if your artist friend can paint a portrait in one month, as long as both products are exemplary.

It matters little if you spend years writing a novel, even if your writer friend can write a novel in one month, as long as both products are exemplary.

It is your painting or your piece of writing that will tell you that it is finally done, never the other way around, for the created work, having taken in the mind of its creator, will always have an intelligence of its own.

The mastery of writing and painting are the result not of enrollment in an academy but of the correct and judicious exercise of one's powers of observation.

Always remember this, that a single painting is much more important than the exhibit it is in, and that it should be able to stand alone outside the exhibit and outside of everything else associated with it.

So it is with every work in a literary festival or anthology.

It is the correct sequence to write first, and then paint later.

Because it is DIFFICULT to paint first, and then write later. You will literally be AT A LOSS FOR WORDS.

Painting and writing come into creation through one's personal passion, conviction, experience, habits, and preferences, not via what teachers impose in school.

That is why many brilliant painters do not have Fine Arts degrees, and why many brilliant writers do not have Creative Writing degrees.

And, after all, many Fine Arts graduates still know nothing about the rendition of correct anatomy, and many Creative Writing graduates still know nothing about the correct usage of idioms.

"Writing should be an act of love, otherwise it is merely a scribble."

--Agatha Christie, in Nemesis

Literature is like food. It can be made of the best ingredients or not, it can be cooked well and with love or not, and it can be digested either only by the intelligent or by everyone including the dense, the shallow, and the stupid.

There are gourmet writers, experimental writers, home-cooking writers, and fast-food writers.

Writing The Dream City

Writing The Dream City

BENJAMIN ZAMORA SILVA·MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2016

Writing The Dream City

Keynote for Philippine International Literary Festival at Ayala Museum

November 15, 2013

By Tony Perez

Good morning, everyone. This is the first time I’ve been invited to do a short keynote, and I’m very honored. Thank you for having me. This is also the first time I’m addressing colleagues after three years of conducting workshops for underserved audiences in different regions of the country: religious minorities, the underprivileged, the disabled, prison inmates, gang leaders, drug rehab residents, and children in conflict with the law. There are many promising writers among them. Given further guidance, they can all be practitioners like you. I wish they could be here with you today at “Text and the City”, the Ayala Museum leg of the Philippine International Literary Festival. This will be an exciting day for everyone, with internationally-known author Krys Lee and the Filipino writers here who produce not only short and long fiction but also write for comic books, graphic novels, and independent films.

My message is titled “Writing The Dream City”. I will give it in five, two-minute corollaries.

Number One: We write because we dream.

We write because we dream, and by dreaming I don’t mean being in the waking state and consciously wishing for something, or structuring a project, or planning a future. I mean dreaming while we are sleeping.

Other people often see us sitting and staring into space or quietly contemplating something. From their point of view, we are doing nothing. They don’t see that while seeming to be sitting around, we are actually writing while we are thinking. We develop characters and plots in our mind until we feel we’ve gotten them right, so that, by the time we actually encode everything, the work just flows—onto sheets of paper or onto a laptop screen. If we can write while we are thinking, it then follows that we can write while we are dreaming. In both cases, creative writing is accomplished in the subconscious, that state that bridges the conscious mind with the unconscious mind.

In much of the earliest literature available to us, including scripture, dreams are metaphorical stories relayed to the dreamer by the higher consciousness. The Hebrews listened to their dreams. They were some of the first dream interpreters. Dreams became material for decision-making in waging war, taking a spouse, moving tents, and migrating. When people today say that they cannot remember their dreams, it is because their strongest defense mechanism is repression. Since writers must frequently be in a state of vulnerability, they cannot afford to nurture such defense mechanisms. The successful writer, then, is a successful dreamer.

Number Two: Dreams are where our stories come from.

In countries where lower parts of houses go underground, the unconscious is likened to a basement or a cellar, but the unconscious is a lot more infinite than that. It is the source of all creativity. It is the open floor that extends to other open floors, the river of the unconscious that connects with the ocean of the collective unconscious.

I keep dream notebooks. I’ve been doing that since I was a child. I review those notebooks at the end of each year. I take special note of the locations of my dreams, houses I grew up in that look somewhat different, schools I went to that look somewhat different also, hotels and offices and beach resorts I’ve never seen in waking life. By studying those locations I was able to come up with my dream city, and I was able to draw a map of it. It frequently changes shape, but many of its elements are constant: the dream characters who live in the dream houses, my dream family, my dream friends. My dream city is comprised of the settings where my characters and stories happen.

I have come to believe that everyone has a dream city, and will master it if they would only bother to study it closely and draw a map of it. I have also come to believe that these cities interlock like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and that they ultimately form a globe of dream cities, and that the people whose dream cities are adjacent to ours are the people whom we love, and whom we spend most of our time with, whom we are obsessed with, whom we want to be with, if possible, forever.

We can travel from one dream city to another. We can be characters in other people’s dreams, as they can be characters in ours.

Dreams are why we understand what other people write.

Number Three: Our powers of observation should extend to our dreams.

We are trained to harness the five physical senses in exploring the world around us. In teaching the visually challenged, I discovered that they can see images in their mind, and that their dreams are filled with the same images that our dreams are filled with. That is because they also are connected to the collective unconscious of those who can see. We can train ourselves to harness our five senses in our dreams. There are writers and artists who have weak powers of observation. Their works hardly contain truth. We dream first, and then reflect on the dream after. In recalling the dream, we re-experience it in waking life. The powers of observation may be activated in one or in both cases: during the actual dreaming and during our reflection on the dream. In this manner we can revise and eventually author our dreams. We can give our dreams the endings that we like.

The objective of dreaming is to merge our dreaming life with our waking life. It is the same objective of writing when we take the reader on parallel planes of reality.

Your dream journal, then, is your writing journal. An idea that you write in your journal germinates both on paper and in your mind, and then it emerges as a creative work that you can share with others.

Number Four: When a dream recurs it is because the dreamer has not yet written it down or woven it into a story.

In our dreams, characters and stories jump out of their skins to be written down. For dreamers who are not writers, dreams recur when the dreamers do not taken the proper action required by the psyche. A dream that is not written recurs until you write it down. A dream can stop recurring only by two ways: when you have transformed it into a work of creative writing, or, if you refuse to transform it into a work of creative writing, when it moves out of your dream city and occurs in someone else’s dream city. In the latter case, it becomes someone else’s dream. If that someone else happens to be a writer, he or she will write that dream instead.

Number Five: Writing heals because dreams heal.

We succeed as writers whenever we write from our dreams. We fail whenever we write not from our own dreams, but from the dreams of others, when we write not from our own truth but from borrowed truth. Some even choose to write not from their dreams but from their nightmares.

We dream because our dreams heal us. We write our dreams in the same manner we write to remember different kinds of medicine, so that, after they heal us, we can use them to heal others too.

Again, we all welcome the visiting and Filipino writers to this gathering—published or unpublished, and, perhaps more importantly, those who are here as members of the audience who think they won’t make it but who love writing anyway. But, every writer makes it. All you have to do is dream. And then remember your dream. And then write it down.

A good writer always proofreads and polishes his most trivial social medium posting, for even that is a reflection of himself.

A good writer will always be a good writer, and so he need not fearing losing his talent, for it is an acquired ability to observe and record that, really, every human being should have.

Writing specialty stores are reviving and selling old-fashioned manual typewriters. Quite tempting to buy one, but it would be more decorative than functional for me because supplies such as ribbons, carbon paper, circle erasers with brushes, and correcting tape are no longer as available. (I even remember that I used to have two-color ribbons!)

Dramaturging for TheatreWorks Singapore: Shen

Hello Shen!

I am glad that you finally finished writing this play. You will recall that it was incomplete when I read it in Singapore and had a long, overseas phone conversation with you while you were in Tasmania.

You have written a very interesting, multi-media play verging on Theatre of the Absurd, incorporating stage, video, visual art, and sculpture. (I was tempted to mention also puppetry but the stand-ups never actually interact with the players.) The final production design should be equally interesting. You will need, however, two directors to make the play succeed: a video director and a stage director, or someone who can be both.

All of the methods you used in this play are methods of alienation, and I can see why: the subject matter and dialogue are so brutally frank that some detachment on the part of the audience is necessary. The truth will remain, nonetheless, that the entire play entails raw honesty. This will work only in a venue that encourages intimacy, such as a night club or a chamber theatre with a small audience on sofas and throw pillows.

Be mindful of the length of your videos. They should not overpower the stage play. The video that opens Scene 3, for instance, is too long.

Like Isaac, whose play I dramaturged before yours, your dialogue tends to be comprised of questions and answers. That is not really how people converse in real life. Avoid the interview format, especially since it usually elicits mere exposition and not dramatic tension. Try doing writing exercises with small scenes in which NO ONE ever asks a question. What would they say to each other?

Your ending is abrupt. Ensure that there is adequate closure for all characters, including characters who are not onstage. Also, although the play opens with a video, do NOT end it with a video. It is emotionally unfair to your stage performers. In theatre, the live performance always rules.

Finally, I hope you are aware that this is a hard play to cast. You will need to sit in on readings and rehearsals and constantly adjust your dialogue to the truth, the choices, and the personality that every cast member will put forth. This is not a vehicle for an auteur director. It is one in which the cast must participate in the creation of the play.

Dramaturging for TheatreWorks Singapore: Isaac

Hello Isaac!

First of all, I was very much surprised that you submitted a completely different play. This is not the manuscript that I read and discussed with you the last time I was in Singapore. It is, however, a very well-crafted, sensitive, and moving play, and I enjoyed reading it. It is certainly more serious than the first play (which you should keep and develop in the future, although, while it was so much fun to read, I realize that it is harder to sell to a producer). Moreover, the new play that you submitted is quite a nasty vehicle and will prove extremely challenging to its prospective actors and director. For some reason I felt that it was written for Lyon, who was one of your co-participants in the workshop I conducted.

My comments:

This play is best staged without blackouts and scene breaks. The music videos are completely superfluous and will only end up like mini-episodes from The Voice. The technical breaks are cruel to your performers, who will have to pick up their focus and concentration each time a new scene begins. Note that, in the beginning of each scene, you yourself as a playwright are picking up by means of warm-up dialogue. One long, uninterrupted play, like August Strindberg's Miss Julie, will be more emotionally fulfilling for your actors.

Such breaks also shatter the audience's suspension of disbelief.

It takes too long for the audience to learn why the son has come back and must stay. The audience will be able to take only so much suspense, after which it will decide to get bored. Your final exposition is dished out in the end as a twist, and remember that every twist is a betrayal. This prolongation thus makes the father more real and the son two-dimensional, so that the story comes across as being told from the point of view of the FATHER.

Indeed, it seems that the father is well-rounded all throughout the play, but that the son is not a character--he is AN IDEA. The dialogue therefore comes out as dialogue between a person and an idea. As a writer, did you feel defensive and that you had to be over-rational in building up the son?

Avoid interrogations, such as the son asking questions and the father answering them, like interviewer-interviewee repartee. If your characters don't NEED to say anything, then keep them silent. As I have said elsewhere, silence is a line.

Over-all, you have written a beautiful play. A reading should clarify exactly where you need to balance your elements.

There IS one drawback to this play: you need extraordinary performers to pull it off. Yes, I believe that Lyon is one of them.

Jewelers and watch repair persons are capable of operating fountain pen hospitals. They can even fix nibs or grind them to produce italics.

Never throw away old fountain pen converters. They come in handy, and universal models usually fit different pen brands.

Every cosmic writer authors works outside the frames of reference of religion and nationalism.

A Valentine's Day Eve Memory

In 1993, approximately a year after the release of my book Cubao 1980 At Iba Pang Mga Katha, I received a letter from a Chinese man named W. who said he'd read my book from cover to cover and wanted very much, in so many words, to meet me. No one had ever written to me like that before, and so I agreed. As it turned out, he took me to restaurants and to movies and showered me with all kinds of gifts. The whole thing, however, was a mess. I never liked romantic commitments, and it eventually became clear that his image of me in his mind was that of Tom, the protagonist of my novella who was some kind of male prostitute. I felt so sorry to end our friendship, and, wherever W. is now, I hope that he is happy and well and has found the love of his life. He had no idea at the time that he was actually up against a well-read intellectual whose interests were quite esoteric and far from Tom's. This episode in my life may have made me feel subconsciously guilty, and that may be why I am extra kind and generous to my Chinese friends.

I am sharing this with you because you will inevitably come across people who think that they love you--you as a person--and only because they love your work, and therefore you must always be wary of your falling into awkward situations.

Many readers think that they know their favorite writers so well. They cannot conceive that writers' works span the entire heights and depths and breadths of life, and sometimes cannot believe that, while we are indeed writing from The Heart, we are also creating worlds populated by entirely fictional characters with fictional lives.

All art has historicity. Yet, while literature cannot be hung on a museum wall like a painting, it infuses itself on all of the walls and corridors of readers' minds.

Every writer who fears being misconstrued ends up writing nothing.

After a writer cracks the mystery of a character, he tends to move on to another.

Caution: Do not apply this pattern to your personal relationships.

Phenomenology Exercise 1: Somewhat Unplugged

Live through a day off the Internet, TV, and your mobile. Be aware of the passage of time, your feelings, your attitude to breaking habits, your relationships with people, and what you choose to do in the absence of electronics.

Write your reflections in your journal.

An article by Ime Morales, a former student in creative writing:

https://moralesime.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/do-writers-lie/