hoorah!

so, i'm oh so excited about starting to read and work on each other's plays. like...yay!

coming up with those rules of theatre was also a lot of fun, but more challenging than i thought it would be. when thinking of them i started to think, ok, what is it that I want my play to be? what does my play need to make it great? and then when we were discussing these rules in class i started to ask myself, what is it that my play is lacking? how am i not achieving these goals that we have set up for ourselves? and i've always had a problem reworking my own stuff; i think because when i write something its like, this is what i thought of and this is how i think it should be, so its hard for me to see it from a different perspective and think of different ways to accomplish whatever it is i'm trying to accomplish, so i'm really looking forward to that outside perspective. its easier for me to critique other people's work because i'm looking at it through my perspective, so i can spot things that maybe the original writer did not, but it doesn't seem to work that way when working on my own stuff.

so basically i've been throwing my play at anyone who'll sit down from 20 minutes and read it and seeing what they have to say, but usually i don't get much more than, "i liked it" or "i'd go see it," or "that was good." i don't need to know that you think its good, i need to know what you think didn't work, wasn't good, needs improvement, etc so I can go back and fix that. with critiquing other people's work i'm basically going at it from the perspective of "this is how I would want someone to critique my stuff," and i believe in brutal honesty. i think we can all pat ourselves on the back for accomplishing what we have thus far, but its a lot harder and more necessary to acknowledge what we haven't accomplished, to slap ourselves in the face for...well, i don't want to say failing at, but there are things that we, you, me, haven't done well, or could do better, and this is what i'm concentrating on and what i'd like other people to call me out on as well. 

its the hardest thing to critique someone's work, because we all know how hard we've all worked on these plays and we don't want to put anyone down, everyone wants to be liked, but if we tip-toe around the edges we'll never get to the meat of things and there won't be any improvement. so i hope my comments aren't taken as "well you did this wrong and this is terrible, blah blah blah," and more as "this is where you need work, and here you could improve by yada yada yada." and i'm looking forward to getting those same kinds of critiques.

brutal honesty. i wont be offended, and i hope others wont either.