11/1/2016 0 Comments This week, playwright Katharine Sherman delves into her (re-)writing process for "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood"i’m doing edits. we had a read-through at our first rehearsal, which of course disturbs your perception of the play and makes you see and hear all kinds of things you haven’t seen or heard before. the fact that you’re hearing it spoken, instead of reading the words or looking at paper instead of a screen or hyper awareness of the other minds and eyes and voices in the room, encountering this thing you wrote for them for the first time - whatever alchemy it is, you walk away with edits. i see my edits as separate from rewrites. i have rewrites to do, too, post-read-through, but i’ll get to those. (tomorrow). edits aren’t about story or pacing or tone or character arc they’re mostly about rhythm sometimes they’re about rhyme. edits are analogous to line notes, except the correction is both for and from me, my ear telling me that i wrote a line wrong, that there’s a better way for it to sound. one of the edits i made tonight was to change the word “truly” to the word “so.” you’d think that wouldn’t be madly important, but. i’m bad at writing about writing. absolutely terrible. to me writing is this secret sacred silent thing that you just don’t discuss. progress, you can talk about. process — i have no idea. i daydream till i panic, then i write. but editing. editing makes sense. i hear a line and it sounds wrong. it needs a tweak or a tune or a rhythmic shift. maybe i can’t articulate this any better than i can anything else about writing. so here’s an example:
another thing i’m really interested in when it comes to writing is notation, arrangement of words on a page.
i feel like the same applies for line edits. tonight i made a document, that i hope makes intuitive sense, in terms of what changes have been made to lines and how the new ones will read. will it make any sense to the actors? this and more highly self-conscious ramblings on the process of play-making, coming up!
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