These are fascinating exercises, Ren. I am happy and honored to count myself among your writing students and have found these to be immediately helpful to my craft while opening new depths of emotion in my stories. I’ve started thinking of adverbs not as mistakes but rather as revision notes left within the text to come back and choose a better verb. Thank you for helping me resolve the writing mystery that had been keeping my prose stuck in the Flatlands of thought.
Hi Ren - Thank you for a most helpful exercise. I'm just at this phase of revision - needing to add just that thing or take away bland, or improve word choice. It's tedious and necessary. Your guide gives me the reminder to go at it from a bodily POV. This will make my next few days infinitely more fun, and I have no doubt it will improve my prose.
I'm happy you found it helpful! I wiggle and gesture in between typing the words, I have always wondered if other people do. I would love someday to have a workshop where everyone had to be on their feet when they revise a text.
Ha! That sounds like fun. I walk around the house reading my poetry out loud, but have not done it with my prose. I think maybe that's what it needs, a little wiggling!
I do that all the time while I'm writing, especially for dialogue. I even look at myself in the mirror making gestures so as to better describe things. I've always done this, and find it helps immensely!
Ren, I love this post and the marriage of acting and writing that you express so clearly here. This brings up two things for me. One is a passionate hobby of mine, called Motion Theatre, developed by Nina Wise, which I’ve been studying for about 10 years. It’s a blend of improv, storytelling, and dance, and my Tuesday afternoon Motion Theatre class is one of my favorite parts of my week. It’s done in community and so there is the added experience of collaborating in a group while choosing gesture, language and movement to express what is rising in the moment.
The other thing I loved about your post is that I always read my writing out loud as an essential part of my own process, and I teach my writing students to do the same. The sound of words is so important and your care and choosing verbs really spoke to me.
Motion theater sounds really interesting! I have only been involved in improv groups that compete to entertain. I know there are other options, and keep my eyes open. I did gestalt therapy for a little while and found it extremely interesting (mostly in identifying where and when I felt uncomfortable trusting or "burdening" other people).
I use onomatopoeia quite a bit—especially in my play Alabaster. Incantatory language is incredibly potent. Unfortunately, actors sometimes treat those bits (often italicized) as optional. And then a critic comes along and says the play has no poetry. Like—are you fucking kidding me? That’s the tragedy in the drama: all your best intentions, every kind of poetry you can imagine woven in—and the director or actors can drain the nuance right the fuck out of it. Then the critic thinks: I wish the writer had considered...
Grrr. I haven't read any of Jon Fosse's novels, but I do like his poetry - in part because he writes in the 1 (of 2) Norwegian languages that is constructed from the spoken word. It is so much richer in sounds and onomatopoeia in particular, than is the more academic/neutral language. His plays are all about sound. The repetition is mesmerizing and all of the meaning is carried in between the words. When the audience hears "someone is coming" for the umpteenth time, it HAS to take on a different song. I don't think we can do that on paper. Maybe that's how theatrical poetry is radically different? How poetry makes the actor/director/light designer etc. a co-creator in a way that scripts without poetry can't? I don't know. Just riffing here.
Yes—exactly this. The music of it is everything. If the team doesn’t hear it—or worse, doesn’t honor it—the spell breaks. I don’t write stage directions or repetition out of indecision. It’s architecture. Breath. Rhythm. Rupture. Strip it out and you flatten the soul of the thing.
The poetry lives between the words—but only if everyone’s listening. And how do you put that on paper? It’s a bit backwards. It requires more noise, more carbon. And the overexplaining feels condescending.
These are fascinating exercises, Ren. I am happy and honored to count myself among your writing students and have found these to be immediately helpful to my craft while opening new depths of emotion in my stories. I’ve started thinking of adverbs not as mistakes but rather as revision notes left within the text to come back and choose a better verb. Thank you for helping me resolve the writing mystery that had been keeping my prose stuck in the Flatlands of thought.
Thank you so much for the feedback! I know not everything hits everyone as useful, so it thrills me when it does!
Hi Ren - Thank you for a most helpful exercise. I'm just at this phase of revision - needing to add just that thing or take away bland, or improve word choice. It's tedious and necessary. Your guide gives me the reminder to go at it from a bodily POV. This will make my next few days infinitely more fun, and I have no doubt it will improve my prose.
I'm happy you found it helpful! I wiggle and gesture in between typing the words, I have always wondered if other people do. I would love someday to have a workshop where everyone had to be on their feet when they revise a text.
Ha! That sounds like fun. I walk around the house reading my poetry out loud, but have not done it with my prose. I think maybe that's what it needs, a little wiggling!
I do that all the time while I'm writing, especially for dialogue. I even look at myself in the mirror making gestures so as to better describe things. I've always done this, and find it helps immensely!
This is fascinating, can’t wait to try these.
I hope you'll let me know how it works for you!
Of course, thank you.
Ren, I love this post and the marriage of acting and writing that you express so clearly here. This brings up two things for me. One is a passionate hobby of mine, called Motion Theatre, developed by Nina Wise, which I’ve been studying for about 10 years. It’s a blend of improv, storytelling, and dance, and my Tuesday afternoon Motion Theatre class is one of my favorite parts of my week. It’s done in community and so there is the added experience of collaborating in a group while choosing gesture, language and movement to express what is rising in the moment.
The other thing I loved about your post is that I always read my writing out loud as an essential part of my own process, and I teach my writing students to do the same. The sound of words is so important and your care and choosing verbs really spoke to me.
Motion theater sounds really interesting! I have only been involved in improv groups that compete to entertain. I know there are other options, and keep my eyes open. I did gestalt therapy for a little while and found it extremely interesting (mostly in identifying where and when I felt uncomfortable trusting or "burdening" other people).
I'm happy the exercises seem valuable to you!
Thank you Ren.
I use onomatopoeia quite a bit—especially in my play Alabaster. Incantatory language is incredibly potent. Unfortunately, actors sometimes treat those bits (often italicized) as optional. And then a critic comes along and says the play has no poetry. Like—are you fucking kidding me? That’s the tragedy in the drama: all your best intentions, every kind of poetry you can imagine woven in—and the director or actors can drain the nuance right the fuck out of it. Then the critic thinks: I wish the writer had considered...
Grrr. I haven't read any of Jon Fosse's novels, but I do like his poetry - in part because he writes in the 1 (of 2) Norwegian languages that is constructed from the spoken word. It is so much richer in sounds and onomatopoeia in particular, than is the more academic/neutral language. His plays are all about sound. The repetition is mesmerizing and all of the meaning is carried in between the words. When the audience hears "someone is coming" for the umpteenth time, it HAS to take on a different song. I don't think we can do that on paper. Maybe that's how theatrical poetry is radically different? How poetry makes the actor/director/light designer etc. a co-creator in a way that scripts without poetry can't? I don't know. Just riffing here.
Thank you.
Yes—exactly this. The music of it is everything. If the team doesn’t hear it—or worse, doesn’t honor it—the spell breaks. I don’t write stage directions or repetition out of indecision. It’s architecture. Breath. Rhythm. Rupture. Strip it out and you flatten the soul of the thing.
I actually put all this down recently so practitioners might have a fighting chance of understanding my style: https://www.audreycefaly.com/artistic-statement.
The poetry lives between the words—but only if everyone’s listening. And how do you put that on paper? It’s a bit backwards. It requires more noise, more carbon. And the overexplaining feels condescending.
I am so scared of revision! But this really feel like an exciting exercise!