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:

i’ve been cutting and adding that “and” since the first draft of this script in february of 2015. i’ve never been able to make up my mind about if the line flows better with an “and” at the top or not -
 
but i’ve written that “and” in three drafts of this script so far,
so this time it stays. ​

​​[i wrote “alana” next to the stanza because when we workshopped this show for savage umbrella’s night of new works, alana spoke these lines. there was this super specific and not-at-all-intuitive rhythm that i wanted them to be spoken in that i bugged her relentlessly about, because i am a crazy person. she mastered it because she is amazing, and because she had worked so hard to i want her to keep them in the show]

​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!