Everyone has their own life

This has come as quite a shock to. Everyone has their own life. They are not there just to serve my purposes. I know, I realize in real life this is totally true, but I never thought about it in my writing. I went to see a musical this weekend, “Once Upon a Mattress”. The high school theater troupe did an awesome job with it, including the set design. I am always amazed what can be done with a shoestring budget and some talented people. There will always be a place for live theater, no matter how life like movies get. There is something ethereal about the amount of energy and actor or actress can project into their audience that can not be duplicated on the silver screen. Attending made me want to do two things. The first was of course relive my memories of being in a musical and find a community group that is putting one together and join. That won’t happen anytime soon with a two year old and another child at six months. I couldn’t put my wife through me not being there for work and play rehearsals. Nope, that one goes on the back burner for now. The second one is clearing off my dusty idea of a musical I had started to write about eight years ago. I was telling a friend of mine about it before the show about it and he still had some chuckles, so it may have potential. If not, I want to write something that can be done on a typical high school or college auditorium. I don’t care about the money making potential, though I wouldn’t turn it away either. I just think having musicals that scale to that environment well because they are designed for that size would be cool. Also, I am of the opinion that upscaling a production is probably easier than cutting down on stage presence. If that’s the case Broadway can still come calling and I wouldn’t miss a beat.

I did learn one other thing while watching the musical. All the parts, even some of the minor ones, had their own lives to live and conflicts to resolve. Due to the size of the production some of the conflicts were a bit shallow for the storyteller in me, but I can see why they had to be to keep the musical within an appropriate time frame. Still, you could see why everyone was doing what they were doing. What was funny was a lot of the dialog was “on the nose”, but I didn’t get taken out of the moment because these people were still being true to themselves, and the lives they were living. I’m going to have to go through Walking the Infinite and make sure my characters have lives, and try to bring that out a bit more. I don’t want to add a lot of length, but if I can make each character become more identifiable then I will have added a lot of depth.