 work with me. And then after that, I would talk to the audience members about their work and their creative process. The idea was not to talk about myself and my work, but about the work of the audience, whatever you guys are up to, and help in any way I can to encourage you along on your mostly creative journeys, but sometimes people come in and they're not doing creative stuff. They're just trying to get through the day as parents or as accountants or what have you. We welcome it all. We're here to help all everybody. And what we do is we work together for 20 minutes and then we take questions for the remainder of the hour. And I want to thank the Public Theater for their support over these 11 years and more recently how around who came on about three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, to help us live stream. And when we were doing it in the lobby of the Public Theater now, of course, they have helped together working together to create this beautiful community that we have here. So I'm just going to tell you how to get in touch. Did you have a question after our work time? Go Audrey. Thanks, SLP. So if you have a question and you're inside of Zoom, all you need to do is click on the participant tab at the bottom of your screen. There will be a raise your hand button in there. It's on the bottom of your screen. It's on a laptop or the top if you're on an iPad or a tablet. And if you're watching on HowlRound.tv, you can ask us questions by tweeting at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. Or you can tweet it at Public Theater NY or you can write into our Instagram messages. And those are the ways. Those are the ways. These are the days. These are the days that we will look back upon and go, wow. So with that in mind and many other things, I'm sure, let us get to work. Right, there it is. 20 minutes. Yeah, ready to talk with you about your work, your creative process or the weather. Or the weather. All good options. We've got some questions. Laura, you are up first. Are you there? And you should get a flash saying I'm asking you to unmute. Is it there? Okay, cool. I thank you for these sessions. This is really becoming therapy for me. I heard your interview on BBC. It was so great. I hope your mother heard it too. I had been wanting to try to get in touch with you. I'm an idiot with technical stuff. So I'm like old school. I'm a senior citizen. So you kept on saying James Baldwin. And I felt like this is a sign. I knew David, his brother, very well. And David, because David worked at McKells. And Pat McKell got me in the music business a million years ago. So it was like the craziest. James used to come in and we used to call him Jimmy. Okay, so that was I can't wait. I wish I call like skips, you know, Henry Louis Gates skip, but I can't. So I had Jimmy at least. Well, he used to come in and Maya Angelou came in and Tony Morrison and everybody. It was great. My mentor is Yuri Kocciama. She was good friends with Malcolm X. So between I saw all the like writers and political people, then I got a chance. I worked in R&B. So I worked with Ashvin and Simpson and Stevie Wonder and everybody. Anyway, big deal, whatever, you know, but I am a race jumpy. And I actually I'm in doing trying to do stand up. But right now I can't find the funny. I mean, this is I love the protests. I can't even do the protest because I'm a senior. I'm in a category where I can't go out and protest. But how do you get yourself motivated again to just when you find the block? When you how do I how does one get motivated when she finds the block? You said like right now I can't find the funny like like the protest is is seeping into my head and everything and and I feel like, you know, we're it's just whatever. I don't know if my husband just got tested today for the virus and it's freaking me out. So nothing is funny anymore. I can't, you know, so how do you write how do you get back into your work when that's a great quite when the world is too much with us, they might say, you know, which is a line from somebody's poem, maybe it's Wordsworth. But when the when we feel the pressures of the world and they it makes it difficult to to not only engage with the world in some fashion, but to also get even a little bit of our work done every day, which keeps our courage up, which keeps like this encouraging thing going on in us, which is why one of the reasons why I think it's really important to focus on your work even a little bit every day. I would say, Laura, if you ordinarily do stand up and you can't find the funny, then do stand up. That's not funny. You know, I mean, I don't know the rules of stand up. I don't do stand up. I stand up a couple hours ago in a meeting. Lord have mercy. But it's some, you know, stand up doesn't have to be funny. Dave Chappelle, you know, put out a new program. You know, stand up does not have to be funny. Stand up, you know, like in church where you, you know, you're a witness. So, Laura, if you can't find the funny, that's okay. Use what you're finding. You know, whatever it is that you're finding, you just have to stand up and do, you know, performative talking to people, to hip them to what you know, because what's great about your situation, Laura, is you have this wonderful, I mean, we all have a history if we're here, right? We all have something. We all have a backstory. Your backstory is very rich and beautiful. And you're a senior. It's not as smart to get out there right now because COVID is a real difficult and scary thing for everybody, but especially people who are seniors, right? So, or compromised in some other, I mean, some fashion, not that seniors are compromised. But I would mind, you know, listen to your gut on that point, but really find a way to do your work. You know, performance poetry, you can tell us the truth as you see it, Laura. It doesn't have to make us laugh and go, haha, and want to buy another drink and leave the venue, you know, going, yay, hooray, it can make us, it can break our hearts. I bet you can. I would tell the truth, Laura, as you see it right now, I would love to hear it and then put it on Zoom, have a Zoom show, you know, and we'll all, I'll tune in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, Laura. All right. Up next, we've got Crystal. Crystal. Hi. Hi. Hello, my friend. How are you? Are you still in Jersey? I am so in Jersey. I can't get out. How are you feeling? Well, there's, there's definitely some chaos and some family dramas that we're dealing with. But God is good anyway. We're, we're, we're getting through, we're getting through. You were right. You were very, very right about working on one thing and putting my hand on the play that I couldn't get ideas for, The Father Chronicles. I now have about five or six ideas to add on to it. So I thank you so much for that. That is helping me with my process of breathing, like I was telling you before. My question is actually regarding now I have a problem with this play, the demagogue play, because the first drop that I gave in, I was asked not to make her so accurate to fictionalize her a lot. And to make her, to make her, I just, I guess, create a scenario where she's just kind of just human and has to face her, that point where she, I guess, becomes the demagogue and kind of says go instead of, I'm saying they're supposed to be like an, an antagonist who's supposed to challenge her agenda and she's supposed to go over and do it. So now I'm having trouble with all the research that I've been doing to fantasize her to, to make her more fictional. I'm having a really hard time with that. Any thoughts? Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's thorny one. So she is an historical character. Yeah. I mean, red, she's an historical character. You've done a lot of research. Is she in the way past? I mean, I just she's still alive. She's still alive. So yeah, very old. Yeah, the tricky thing about writing about someone who's still alive is, is that there's a whole, do you have the right, the legal rights to write about, about her story? I'm just asking. I don't, I don't think no, no. Okay, so that's two reasons why, you know, your producers might say, you know, fictionalize. You know what I mean? Okay. So, so you're not writing about her, a living person who has the rights, I think in some fashion to her life story, you know what I mean? It can't have somebody pick it up and do whatever they want with it, say whatever they want about her. I think there's so, so your, your best bet I think is to fictionalize. Step away from her character and use her character as a model or a template on which you will create this beautiful, beautiful story. It sounds like also you've done some, a lot of research and you haven't, you're very versed in the facts of the life of your character. But it sounds like what you might be missing is the dramatic context. Yes. You see what I mean? So you've got the facts. And if we just told our lives as they unfolded every day, if you think of, okay, so tell me the story of your day. Well, I got up, I went to breakfast, historically accurate, but perhaps not as dramatic as you'd like it to be if you're writing a play, a screenplay or a teleplay. Right. Right. So you have to, so we're not doing the pageant of history. We're doing drama, which is why they mentioned things like antagonist. You know, so your main character, this, this fictional character based on perhaps this historical figure, and perhaps a couple other historical figures. You can get a richer character that way, perhaps. She wants something very much. And in her way stands a person or a collection of people or an institution. Does that make sense? That's, that's creating a dramatic, that's creating drama. Yeah. And so choices and maneuver herself and her situation in order to hopefully achieve her goal at the end. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So it's basically creating a series of, of choices and obstacles and getting through them. And even, even if it's not right on the nail factual, better sounds like better than it's not sounds like what you're saying. Sounds like why don't you make up some stuff? Make it up. Because talking about a real person and it's not like you're writing a play about Abraham Lincoln. You know what I'm saying? You're writing someone who is still on this earth with us. Okay. And needs to be respected. That's my guess. That's yeah. That's my guess, but I'm not sure lawyers would know better. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. No problem. Nice to see you. Same here. All right. Up next, we've got Marta. Marta, are you there? Hi. Sorry, I just had it. Hi. Thank you. I just had a technical problem at the worst possible time. Thank you for doing this. I've actually been watching for weeks, many, many weeks, and it's my first time asking. So thank you. It's already changed so much about my work. And anyway, my question is about quote, unquote, shitty first drafts. Just how messy can they be? Because I've been so busy here. I've been working on my novel for about a year, and I was careful not to be a perfectionist, I thought. And I was pretty gentle throughout. But then I've had a couple of... I think I knew what I thought the story was from the beginning. And somehow I've spent a year not getting there yet. And I think, because I kept getting distracted by what I now think might be a backstory. I don't know yet, because I haven't gotten to the bit that I think is the story. But I just kept, yeah, I just kept kind of thinking it starts with a breakup, let's say. So I just kind of thought I had to explain the whole relationship and everything that came before to the point that I thought that was the novel after a while. And so I've tried to get myself to just get to the end a couple of times, to just do like three months of, you know, just however it comes out, not looking back. But I was meant to do that in March, and we all know what happened in March. And then here we are. And I'm trying to get to the end again, but because I really need to break this summer and I have other stuff to tend to. And I've put quite a lot of things on hold for this. And I've just got really tired of this project. And it's a shame, because I think it was Tony Kushner who said, it's so different in our head than it is when we put it on the page. And so I've psyched myself out in my head, but I still don't know like if what I think the story will become is what it will become. So I'm like terrified of taking a break without it being, you know, in my drawer as I had planned. But I don't, but I don't want to like drag it through the summer and find that I'm still here in September, like in the same note taking, you know, because I don't write super linearly. So I just have a million notes. And I'm just like hitting diminishing returns in a way. And I think if I can just get to the stuff, you know, to tell it in however messy way I can, like I can do it quite quickly and put it away. But yeah, just how is it okay to have a first draft with a ton of holds and like a ton of, you know, questions and things that don't get resolved in this first draft? Or if you have any guidance about this, I'll be very great. I love your question because you're really walking us through your creative process and inviting us in, which is very courageous and generous. And we, I'll speak for myself, see parts of our creative processes. Is that the plural in your, like, like I'm thinking, whoa, I've been there. I've been there. Well, I have been there, you know what I mean? I think Marta, I am going to give you, well, first of all, here's a question. How many pages to the end? I don't know, but I have, I don't know. To the end. Yeah, let's say, let's say 70, 100. 70, 100. Okay. Okay. So if you say I really need to break this summer, I mean, what I'm doing is I'm taking it out of the kind of emotional, you know, whoa part, and we're just gonna do math for a minute. You know what I'm saying? So 70 pages, right? Something like that. Okay. Okay. So when you say you need to take a break this summer, when does summer officially begin for you? Yeah. Yeah, it's like in three days, isn't it? So I decided July, because yeah, I just have other projects that I have to deal with, and COVID has appended everything. Yeah. So July. Sure. So July, July 1st. Yeah, or, you know, yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. Or okay. And, or it can be like the second week, you know, second week of July 15th, July, July 18th, July 20th. Well, I'm just saying you're going to give yourself a month to slap down these pages. Yeah. Then you still have like a month and a half of summer. Yeah. Yeah. Which is all their other work. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I could do that. We're all, you know, right. I'm right with you on that one. Two minutes, so many times. Okay. So I would suggest that number one, you have permission to write a really, really shitty draft. Really vomit draft. You have permission, you have total permission. I mean, all the prizes and accolades and honors and PhDs honorary, I won, I confer, I say, I give you permission to write a really, really, really, really shitty draft. And I challenge you, write a shittier draft than I have. Haha. I write, I write, I write, I write in some shitty drafts. I've written some really, really shitty, shitty, awful. Oh my God. You know, they don't see the light of, they don't, I don't show them around to my friends. I, they're, they're what I rewrite, right? Okay, so you have permission, right, to, to, to, basically, you have permission to get your work done however you can. Now, here we go. The very specifics, you have 100 pages or 70 pages and you have, say, a month, right? Now, that means, that doesn't mean you have to write actually 70 pages. Here's where it gets fun. One, you can be a post-it stuck onto an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper in this chapter or 20 pages can be posted in this chapter. This chapter is going to be about such and such and this and that. I don't know how to get there, but this is what I want. Boom. That could be 10 pages. You see what I mean? It could be a section of just post-its on pages. You might write a total of 20 pages and the rest of them might be just post-its tacked on to eight and a half by 11 pieces of paper. I really want to write a scene or a play, a scene or, you know, in a novel. I really want to write a chapter about this. So the first part of the chapter is going to be about this and the second part is this. I know three lines of dialogue that the character says while she's on the devan drinking, you know, she says, you know, sure I'd blow her. I don't know what, you know, you know, whatever she says, but the rest of her, you know, you know what I'm saying? You have to do that. Get to the end because I think that's going to be the most helpful thing for you. Get to the end in some fashion, okay? Then you can put in a drawer and when you come back to it, it's going to be jumbly, you know, and then you'll rouse your courage or rouse yourself and gird your loins and go into the rewriting mode. Okay? Yeah. Thank you so much. That's really, really helpful. Please, please, please get to the end. Okay? Please. Will. I will. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Up next, we've got Shakara. There you go. Are you there? Hi, I'm here. It's pronounced Shakara. Sorry. I know it's, I understand. Reading it is different than I guess. Well, this is my first time here and this is really awesome. Thank you for doing this. I am honored to kind of meet you. So, my issue as a playwright, that side of the writing version of myself, I have a lot of trouble with subtext and I want to know how do you let the story kind of tell the message of the play instead of like letting the characters kind of like just say it because that's, I write in a way that all the monologues in my work is like kind of like Poe and me. So people are pretty direct with how they're feeling and I don't necessarily want to dial that back but I just want to know what would be your advice for that? Yeah. That's a great question and I'm practicing saying your name to Shakara like Irene Karra. Shakara. Like Irene Karra. Yes. Like Care Bear. Oh, like Care Bear. Oh, that's beautiful. Okay, that's a really great question and it sounds like your writing is very exciting and beautiful and passionate and very like on point and interesting. I think do you have, so you say it's Poe and me, do you have characters in your, would you say they're characters? I do, yes. There's characters and there's kind of a fluent, there's always a fluent story. Great. But I just, I just feel like I'm just like a little too on, like a little too direct and I want to let the events that happen kind of like tell, bring the message about more so than I feel like I spell it out for the audience too much. Yeah, it's tricky because when we spell the message out for the audience too much then there's only one message, you know what I mean? Right. We allow our characters to desire things and try to get them. Then there are many messages and I think of like, you know, fences or for colored girls or no place to be somebody or Hamlet or King Lear or top, I almost said top dogs, top girls, you know. There are many things going on. There are many messages, right? Because I believe those plays are based in character, to my mind, the way I read them. You know, a scholar might say something different, but when I read them, I think of the characters, I think of Lady in Blue and what she wants, you know what I'm saying? Right, yes. And what he wants, I think of Hamlet and what he wants. Right. And I'm an actor so I do kind of, I think everything is, it's based in like, there's a lot of character work that goes around like my writing. I just, I don't know, I don't even know how else to describe what I think I'm missing to like take myself to like the next level in my writing. I think your characters, if you could really focus on what they want, not what they're thinking about, not what they want to tell somebody, but what they want. I'm thinking of one of my play in the blood, Hesterla Negrita. She wants a better life for herself and her children. Okay. Now, that's not, I wouldn't say the message of the play. I don't know, I don't know, you know, there are many messages. Right. But that's what she wants. She wants it very much, more than anything. She'll do anything to get it. Right. Right. And that's very different, I believe, from the message of the play. Okay. So just grounded, like go sink down, you're an actor, you know how to do this, sink down out of the world of thoughts, into the world of the feelings. What is, what does my character want? What does she want more than anything? And then you'll start having the character speak from there, which will be in line with the theme or the issues, as it were, but not on the, on the nose, on the nose. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Come back and hang out. It's a fun place to be. Thank you. Thanks Shakira. All right. We've got 12 minutes left and we've got Wendell up next. Wendell, are you there? Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hi. Hello. I just learned about this last night. I'm so honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And since I have you here, I would love to say that in 2017, I was going through depression. And at the time, I didn't realize it, but your 365 days inspired me to just write every single day social media, just to be accountable so people can see that I was working through it. And it helped a lot. So I just, I want to say that before anything else. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so, I'm so glad here. I'm so, and I appreciate hearing that man. Really appreciate it. Thank you. The question I have, I spent the last 10 years in Asia working as an actor, director, writing and to try to process my feelings of all of our killings by the police, I wrote a play and use narratives from former slaves. And at the time, I was, I was really angry, but I knew my audience being mostly Japanese. I didn't think that anger would translate. So I tried to make it a little bit more educational, a little more not indirect, but a little more open. Now in 2020, I am just angry. Like that's it. And I want to write about it, but I'm concerned about like how much when you write, how much do you think about your own anger and feelings and how much of that do you feel comes across in your writing? Because I don't want to alienate or turn off anyone, but I do want to express it. Wow. Wow. That's a great question, Wendell. I have, when I write, I have both eyes on the work. Now, I think you're very smart. You're writing, you're in Japan, right? At the moment, New York. No, I mean, I mean, you're several years ago, right? Yes, yes, yes. In Japan. And you're, as you're writing, you are aware of the audience that you're talking to. I think that that's a good move. Today, I think it is a time for anger, but it's also a time for like, you know, I don't know, they say that, you know, like an NBA player, you know, or a WNBA player, she's got to play, she can't just play hot. She's got to play smart, right? So you get, you get out there on the court or whatever you're doing. You know, we got to play hot and we, but not just hot. We got to play smart because there, there's a goal and we, if we want to, if we want to just blow and tell the world how angry we are, I actually believe that that's okay. Right? If that's what your play is, just expressing anger and you alienate some people because of that. Well, right now I would say blow. You know, if you got, because you have a, because other, I feel like if we say, well, think about your audience and you don't want to alienate people and you want to make it marketable. Right? You want to, I believe that we'd be encouraged that I would be encouraging you to perhaps keep some of that pain and anger down. You know, eat your pain. And, and I don't think that's healthy, especially right now. So I'm encouraging you to, to run the energy. But also you got to play, you can't just play hot. You play, I mean, really like play like WNBA, NBA or like make a play, right? You got to play smart. And if you want to just tell people, angry are the one thing. If you want to affect positive change, you got to play smart. And you got to have, I always have both eyes on the work. I don't think about the audience too much because I am the audience. Wow. Wow. Right. Wow. So simple, but it makes so much sense. That's good. Thank you so much. Perfect. Sustain, we got it. Nailed it. Nice to meet you, Randall. Thank you both so much for this. All right. Up next, we've got Karima. Hi. Can you hear me? Hi. Yeah. Hi. Hi. I'm the piece, I'm almost done with my piece. Not a whole lot of pages, but I have to let her ride. I was right. Right. My question is this. My characters start off very like at the beginning is light is very light. There's nothing heavy really going on because they're meeting together as a book club, as a book club. They kind of come together. But throughout the interaction, something, a subject happens that changes everything. Right. And I'm finding that I have two protagonists. And I'm wondering, I think more so, can you have two protagonists in the play? Because they both like, ooh, they're both, it's like, I think the issue is more of what they're fighting against, that each person is holding. So I'm just wondering, can you do that? I would, no, I would say, yes. I mean, I'm saying yes. You've got your first draft already. You're almost almost done. I would say, yeah, say right now, you're almost to the finish line. I would say now is not the time to stop. But you know what I mean? And go, wait a minute, I got too many protagonists. You know, keep marching to the finish line, right? Okay. And then when you reread it, go, you know, is this flowing like I want it to flow? You know what I mean? So let's get you to the finish line first. Do exactly what you're doing. I think what you're doing is right for right now. Okay. And the answer is, you can have, I suppose you can have as many protagonists as you need. But at some point, perhaps, you would want to, after you finished it, you would want to take another look at it and ask that question again. Yeah, because I think what it is, honestly, the person who's trying to take over, I don't want them to take over. Okay. Because in my mind, who I wanted to be, the person that's driving it more is in the other person, it seems like he's trying to drive it. So I'm like, this is not how I had it planned. So it's like, it's kind of, I'll just, you know, I'll go ahead and just finish it. I just hope when I rewrite, I'm not starting with one paragraph. No, no, no, I think, I think you get to the finish line and then you rewrite, it's going to be a process of trimming and shaping and elongating. You're going to be building on what you've got. Okay. If we stop now and look under the engine and start tinkering with it, I think that'll slow you down. Keep going. You sound like you're in a great flow. You get to the finish line and then we start looking at it and making it longer if you want it to be longer. Yeah, I do want it to be longer, but I didn't want to force. You know, I just was trying to let the voices go and not try to force it. And hopefully when I go back, hopefully I can open it up. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Katima. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. All right. We've got about four minutes left. We've got a question from Essence. Hi there. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Welcome. Thank you. So it is my first time in this class today. I actually discovered it earlier this morning, which is amazing. And I'm actually pretty early on into my writing journey. I just graduated about a year ago, and I wrote a play about my grandmother for my senior thesis, and I actually haven't touched it until today, until then. But I, like Shakira, I come from an acting background, but my program was based in device theater and collaboration. And my biggest issue has been, so when I started writing it, and now where I can't get myself to start getting on a computer or getting my pen to paper, is that I went from being able to play on my feet with an ensemble of people and playing improv games to get all the content to page and then going, that was the first step of my creative process. And now I'm struggling to find that play now that I'm doing it on my own. And I was wondering, how can I get that back or different methods or exercises that are helpful for someone who's so used to being more improv based? That's a great question, Essence. And it's not that I'm guessing, it's not that you wouldn't get with some friends and do some improv online. That's not what you're interested in doing. Is that correct? Not right now, no. The work is a little more personal to me, so I want to get into the habit of doing it on my own. Great. Do you have any puppets? I don't, but I have socks. There you go. Girl, see, look at, he's thinking, she's creative. There you go. Okay, so you get some socks. You know where I'm going with this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have different color socks or, you know, that can be like, oh, I think this, oh, I think this, oh, here, she's thinking this. All right, get some socks. Okay. And get your imaginary friendship network going. Right? Yeah. And that's, socks are better than puppets. Yeah. Okay, awesome. It'd be fun, right? And silly. It's silly. And maybe when you write or work on your writing stand up, you know? Yeah, get on my feet and get her on the room. Start playing, move your body. Sounds like you're a writer who really comes out of your body. Remember, language is an activity, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. And don't mind if you look a little silly. See, I'm doing it. Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay. Right. Well, it's nice to meet you Essence. It's, it's six o'clock. Six o'clock. Everybody grab your socks. Go get your socks quick. I know. It's great. It's, what a wonderful thing you, you've hipped us to Essence. This is great. Yeah. Well, we'll be back next week. The links will be released, I believe, tomorrow before, I think at two o'clock now for next week. I know we change an hour different. Amazing. Each and every time. All right. So we'll see you next week. Okay, thank you guys so much. Thank you all. Thank you, SLP. You're the best. Love you. Love you. Thanks Audrey. Thank you.