 During the next four years, it was really good. And you can read it like a loud, if you're feeling sort of like down and you need a little pick me up. It's $17.99, it's a US dollar, but I bet you can get it for free at your library. Get it from the library while the library's still here. It's a great book and Carol got it so I can give it to my son if you have kids or friends or both. It's a wonderful gift. And Lynn gave me this wonderful food. I'm going to be a nasty woman right now. So, you know, we continue. We continue. This is Watch Me Work. Who hasn't been to Watch Me Work before? Anybody? We haven't been here. You haven't been to Watch Me Work. Are you here for Watch Me Work or are you just like hostages in the lobby for things? They're like, I just came for a drink and I'm trapped here. It didn't come. Oh, you mean it didn't come? No, you are. Well done. I'm well done. Thanks for coming. So, I'll give you a quick write down of what it is. So, because we have a velvet snake, that means it's a play. That's all you need to make a play, really. So, this is a play. It's also a free writing workshop, okay? So, or a free creativity workshop, actually, because we have people who are doing all kinds of work, not just writers, all right? So, what we do first is we create the action of the play together. So, what we do is we, for 20 minutes, we work to time it, we work together. So, whatever you're working on, a dance piece, a song, a writing project, whatever, whatever, whatever, you work on it, okay? And we also have people online who sometimes tweet in. They've been shy lately. We know you're out there. It's okay. Shy, you know, it's okay. So, we work together for 20 minutes and then we create the dialogue together because it's a play. And the dialogue is basically you guys' asking me questions about your creative process. I'll do that just again, okay? So, it's you guys' asking me questions about your creative process. So, if any of you want to ask me a question about my creative process, those of you who have been here before know I'm going to make it about you. Okay? So, that's kind of all there is to it, kind of, kind of. And Melissa is going to tell the folks online how to tweet in and tell them like, not if you want to tweet in, but when you tweet in. If you follow us on Twitter, you would know because I give you a little heads up as to where we are in the performance. But anyways, if you'd like to tweet in, you can tweet into us. Our Twitter handle is at what we work SLP and then make sure to hashtag howlground and that's one word. It's H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. And please, please, please send us your questions. Yes, please, please. Please, please, please, please, please send us your questions. Don't. Because there are a lot of people here today and if you don't, that's fine. But here we are. There are people, you can hear the sound of somebody. Someone who is not shy already. So, there you go. So, someone is already taking the lead. Shout out to Alicia Nash. Alicia? Alicia? I have a call. So, I'm so glad you're not here because I can't breathe on you. But anyway, so we're going to work for 20 minutes. I'm going to use my phone today as a timer, okay? And we're going to work. I'm going to, usually I type on the typewriter, but today I have some manuscripts to correct, so that's what I'm going to do. Right. So, pretend you hear the sound of a typewriter. Okay, begin. Let's go. So that everybody can hear you. Anybody? Are you here for watching? We studied some of your plays in our theater class. Oh, wow. I know. Where do you go to, where do you teach? We're at a public school in Bushmore. Oh, right on. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Welcome here. These are some of the interesting things, right? Oh, right on. So, you guys do some playwriting of your own. Yeah. How's it going? Good. Good. Yeah, is that all right? Yeah. Do you write on the typewriter or do you write on a typewriter? Do you write on the computer or by hand? On the, by hand and on the computer? Yeah. Which do you prefer? Yeah. Handwriting, your hand gets tired, she said. That's true. And when you type, it's like, it's already there. You don't have to like write it and then type it, you know, right? It's like one stop shopping. That's smart. Yeah. Sometimes ideas can flow more freely when you're just like, anybody else? So, we're just going to talk and feel free to like, raise your hand or like, blur it something out. It's not formal. It's very informal here. Okay. Anybody else have any questions about, hey, Stacey Rose. Your question, your work, your creative process. You got a good amount of people here. Does the Twitter person have a question? They just say, hey. I say hi. Yes, you have a question. What's your name? Hi, I'm Susan. Earlier this spring, I came back from a six month trip to Brazil. I came back with six notebooks and I was going to work on a manuscript of like poetry and travelogue. I was procrastinating this summer and going to get back into it. But as of a week ago and after our election, I'm feeling a combination of both futility and fervor. I feel like I need to be of service. I'm no longer interested at all in my manuscript. I do understand the need for like art and literature in the world, but it somehow feels irrelevant to me right now. So, I don't know how to deal with that. Do I take a break? Do I go back to this thing? Do I take conflict resolution classes like that? Disgusting. Conflict resolution with yourself. Well, that's where it all starts. Conflict resolution begins at home. Susan, that's a really good question. Did everybody hear Susan's question? She came back, we're a trip away. She had a lot of notebooks full of ideas, full of really good ideas. And hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, Alexis. Alexis is here. Because that's how cold it is outside. So, she came back from the trip with notebooks full of really great ideas. And she had a manuscript in mind. And then she didn't jump on it right away, we say. And then the election happened. And now she feels like, eh, I should be of service. And doing art doesn't feel like it's the way to be of the most service. It just feels like my energy is no longer there. I don't know whether to, you know, create an outlet to discipline myself and do that or take a break and do whatever is calling to me, which is not completely clear. But it's not the manuscript at the moment. It's funny. I appreciate you telling us a whole story of the journey. And, yeah, Stacy's going in. Because I bet you Stacy knows what I'm going to say. I mean, the only, the thing that gives me a hint to what you might be more inclined to do that might be right. Because you were procrastinating before the election, it might not be the thing you're supposed to be doing right now. Say, if you had hit a wall on, you know, November 9th or, you know, which was 9-11. Oh, it is. You know, Europe. Then that would say, let's find a way to get you back on the horse, you know. But because you hit a wall before that, then I would say maybe you're not ready to write it yet. So you can do an experiment. This is fun. So you can do an experiment where you can experiment with not writing it and tell yourself, you know what, I'm going to put you away and I'm going to put you in my notebooks. Do you have a nice tote bag or a cloth tote bag or a nice cloth in a little box or something? Give it sort of a cold storage above brown. Don't burn it. Just put it away. I'm going to leave you alone for, I don't know, what's a good date? What do you think? A month? Yeah? A month? Today is the what? The 21st of my best? 21st? Okay. So you could give yourself to the 21st of December. I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to actively, every day, sit in my, in my writing space at my desk or whatever with my notebook. And for 20 minutes a day, I'm going to write on, okay, calling. You're calling me to do something what? If it's not that, then what is it? Talk to me. I'm listening. I'm not getting muddled up with this other project. Doesn't seem like it's ready for that yet. Here we are. What is it that you want me to do? Okay. Give yourself a month and see what happens. Okay. Just again, I think that's a great question. So, where a lot of us are at, it's like, what do I do now? You know, so give yourself a pause and see, just actively communicate with what you think might be the other project. You know? Yeah, that's good. Okay. We'll see. It's always fun and it's like a special day for other people too. Great. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Okay, that's good. And check back in, you know, if you can come back here or check in with us on Twitter and tell us how you're doing. Okay. Thanks for asking a question. Anybody else? Yes, Sam. I'm just like, oh no. This man is not going to define the next four years of my life. I have things to say about that. And I think I'm thinking about what it's going to be like on 9-11 for me as a first responder to have to deal with him at ground zero. Right. So, that's been kind of what's been interesting about that is like, I've freed myself from research because I can just watch it in real time. And that's kind of what I'm trying to encourage people around me, but I'm mostly trying to encourage myself. So, I mean, I don't know, it's been a very, it's been a very strange experience to look at what may or may not happen and have to, you know, go through and try and figure out what, what does this mean? Like what, it's, I guess, I just kind of looked at everything and I have a, I have a scene I now like have to write. I have to write it. So, now it's just a matter of, I kind of sat here and said, okay, maybe my issue is I don't feel it. I keep going, this happened, this happened, this happened and it's something that had, you know, at 22 to be in a foreign country and be faced with something so ridiculous. And then 30 years later say, okay, I'm putting, I was in Kenya, it's not something I've really talked about and I was offered money for my passport. And it's been a very, like, I've started to talk about it because I think it's important that people know that 9-11 didn't just happen out of the clear blue sky. It was, you know, they've been working on it for 30 years. And, you know, I think about that and it's, it's not that I made a decision that I felt was the right decision, which is to say, no, don't ask me again. It's how, how am I implicated in the people on that trip that did? So, I mean, I'm trying to figure out to not feel like, okay, I'm not responsible for anybody's actions other than my own. But how I have to figure out how, how do I like navigate that? I don't want you to talk about how you're going to get your writing done. Well, that's, that's part of it. Because that somehow- I'm writing and scrolling in a notebook and that's, I'm trying to make sense of it. Right. Because somehow something happened in the way that it has, is important to talk about. And it's important to go through and process. But I, I want to talk about, you know, give you tools to take those steps out of the pit so you're not in the swirl of what happened. You know what I mean? Because that's not a good place to be. You know, we want to, we want to move forward as best, as best we can. So how is your play going? It's a, it's a difficult, I didn't realize how difficult it was because I had to just shut down and leave. And now I go, how did I end up with that and writing it down what happened each day and going through all of it. It's just getting it and having it make sense to someone other than myself. Well, I think that's the exact way, that's what I was going to guess at. The need to make sense to someone other than yourself in the right first draft, the need to have it be good in the right first draft, you want it to be good because you want to read it in front of your teacher, in front of your class, in front of your friends, right? And you want it to be good or you want to reread it and think it's pretty good, right? We got to let go of that if it's going to be anything at all. We got to let go of the need for it to make sense to anyone other than ourselves. We got to let go of the need for it to be good and we got to just embrace the need for it to be eh. I'm usually here in this part of the conversation, I use another word but I'm not going to use it because, because we have friends in the audience who are, or you know, how are you guys? 10? Yeah, you're 10. So okay, cool. So we're going to, you know, we're going to like amend our choices here to accommodate our also people who come who are 10. Yeah, so sometimes you're right and it's like eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, right? I mean any of you have like a cat or a dog, you have a dog. Can't your dog ever like throw it up? Like, and you go look, yuck, right? So sometimes when we're right, it kind of looks like that. And that's okay. That's okay. It's okay. You just have to keep moving forward. This is something that you might tell yourself as you're talking to your project, you know, but you have to keep moving forward. I keep telling you guys that you just have to keep moving forward and writing to the end and then seeing what you got and make it better from there. Okay. Tracy had questions. Yeah. Remember last week I was telling you that I was having a really hard time getting back into it and taking a little bit and doing all that and not been doing that. And a lot of the issue I was having was around the election and was around everything that was swirling around it. But what I came to find and what I discovered through just meeting with friends and hanging out and reading profusely, going to see shows, just involving myself and determining what I, like I thought about it and I was like, well, I'm 40 and I'm going to die. And what I'm not going to change between now and the time I die is what happens to this country in any large scale. So what can I do to make, like, what do I want to do at this time and how can I be more productive? Well, I can't think of anything I'd rather do than right place. And so it's like investing myself in that has helped me one calm down and to find a voice for what it is I want to say and who I want to help. And so it's sort of like I can't change the political construct of this country with one play. I just can't. No matter how long I write it, no matter how long I rewrite it, I can. But I can push and help others push to make their art and express themselves and go into communities I feel concerned for and be of help in that way, whether it's with my art or whatever. But it makes me feel useful. And so yeah, I just, you know, just dig in, just dig in deeper into what you were already doing and just find what you love and do it. Like, for me, this just the week, it just feels different. Like, I just decided to dig in. And it's just been such a great week. It's not been a great week, but it's just been a week where I feel like I have some type of hold on something and that this election and this new president and his administration is not going to dictate who I am as an artist for the rest of my life. Yo, I was wrong about you, man. I apologize. I apologize sincerely. You know, I apologize. My son says, I apologize. Will you accept my apology? I would love to be proven wrong. You know, I will apologize to that man every day of my life. If I am proven wrong, I don't mind being wrong. So let's bring it on. Let's see. Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember your name. Hey, hey. I did. I couldn't hear. And it was like the book section. And I was like, well, in case another book comes through, I better be ready. So I just had a workshop of a play I've been working on for too long, I think, maybe not so. But nonetheless, a play I've been working on for a while and I'm like, okay, I've looked at you for a long time. And I didn't like that too. And I think I found the way to fix it. But my question is about the process of like working with other people on, let's say, like a rewrite that you're not like super keen about, like, you're like thinking you're had like, oh, this sucks, it sucks, it sucks, like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, like, how do you be like productive in a workshop room when you're not liking your own work that's on the page in front of everyone? Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll say something about it. It's tricky because when I have a grab through something that I mean, this question is, why did you bring it to a workshop if you weren't relatively pleased with it? Was it the deadline? Had someone commissioned it and said, you must bring it on the 10th of November. It was a deadline. Deadline and then election. So don't, don't, don't, we, we, we, we, we let us promise to ourselves and everyone we love that we will not blame the election for any short of our own shortcomings. Why did you bring it to a workshop if you weren't happy with it? Why did you bring it to a workshop? This is because it's a question that you have to ask yourself. Why did you bring it to the workshop if you were not happy with the play? So a structural flaw, perhaps, but when you're in that situation, when you're in the church. Okay. So you were going to say it was a, that was a construct of the, yeah. Writing pages, bringing it to a workshop. Right. Okay. So you were kind of like, it had to happen when it happened because you decided it was a workshop. Yeah. Okay. So so you're in a situation that's far from perfect. Okay. So what you did here, and people are reading your work and you're like, not alone with it. That would happen? Yeah. Okay. And so what do you do? Right? That's the question. What? Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. So what do you do? No, what do I do? I'm not doing anything. I'm over here. Yeah. So what do you do? If you can, like sort of, have you ever walked down the street and you hear really loud noise like someone, maybe one of those hardworking people who's doing construction, jackhammer? And you're like, oh man, or, or a ambulance goes by really, really loud or firetrucks, they're going to save somebody. Right. And you hear that. And you think, oh, so loud. And you see people all around you going like that. Okay. That might be effective. What is also effective is to hum a tone in your head. I just started doing this because I didn't want to be one of those people. I just wanted to keep walking. I wanted to keep walking. Right. So I started to hum a tone in my head, any tone. So I've been doing this for years. So my now fiance, I, we were walking down the street like that and he goes, I just made it up. He said, no, Bose noise canceling headphones. It's built around the same idea. The noise. Right. So this is what you do when you're in a workshop where it's really, really hard, you give yourself a tone that you can hold on to. So you're not listening to the voices that are negative, not the voices of the actors. They're wonderful. The voices telling you, this is shit. This is awful. So you give yourself a tone to hold on to. This is good. I'm only going to make it better. I'm so proud of myself for writing these five pages or whatever. I'm going to write five more. The actors are going to teach me so much. Isn't it great that I got accepted to this workshop? This is wonderful. I'm happy to be here. Look, I'm healthy. Look, I live in such a cool city. Whatever you want to say, give yourself things to say that are positive, encouraging, uplifting and will encourage you to go forward. Right. Okay. And they will cancel out those sounds that you don't need entering your head. Okay. Even if you have to write in your notebook, I'm only going to make this better. Oh, that was a silly line. It's only going to get better. It's only going to get better. You know, right? It's only going to get better. Okay, there you go. So there you go. So you got it already. The tone of your head. Bose noise canceling headphones. And they're, you know, you know, but that's basically what you're doing. You're giving yourself a mantra is called, what is the, what is actually the, I think it's mind vaccine mantra. Yeah, mind vaccine. One of my fabulous yoga teachers told me that mantra, the one of the transitions is mind vaccine. So I don't know if anybody's an anti-vaxxer in the house. I don't know what were you, whatever your parents did, that's cool. But um, yeah, so mind vaccine, it helps you inoculate yourself against the SSIT. I know you guys can spell. So a bunch of questions, but I'll just pick one for time's sake from Alicia Nash. And she says, how do you break up scenes? How do you know a scene is complete? Because she's afraid that sometimes she's boring and sometimes has early conflict. Early conflict. Yeah. I don't know. How do you know? So how do you know when it's, Alicia says how do you break up scenes? Okay, so there's different ways. You can do it by math, right? Scenes, you can do it by, they're called, if you go to grad school or talk to people who go to grad school or undergrad school, they'll talk, they'll use a term called French scenes, which might be like, well, French K, SS, ING, but I don't know. French scene has been an actor exits the stage, right? And that's usually means a scene is over or a scene, there's a demarcation over the end of the scene. I think of it like a throw a ball in the air and it lands, you know, an actor is trying to do something and they reach, they're trying to cross the river and they step from one stone to another, their foot goes down, right? It's an organic thing. I would say, I have a big question about that. Read a lot of well-structured plays. I know it can be expensive to go to plays these days, but you could certainly, at the library again, read a lot of well-structured plays. They can be classics, they can be contemporary plays, and you'll see there's a pattern that emerges. You'll see the pattern, the organization of action. Sometimes, yeah, your scenes are going to be too long, you work that out in workshop, you know, where you see, oh, this is so boring, and you can do cuts, so don't worry about getting a perfect before you go to the workshop. But if you have a real question about it, read some well-structured plays and you'll see how the action rises and falls in a scene. Okay. It's a craft thing, but no crafting. Anybody else? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure what that means, I mean, I mean, I'm trying to think, what great plays have like early cards left, right, right away, like, and then Hamlet, he's like, what, what? There's a ghost? What? I mean, that's like in the first, like, seven pages, right? I mean, that's swear, or swear, or swear. The ghost goes, swear, or swear, or swear. I mean, that's, that's the first rush. And then you bring up something else that has nothing to do with the argument just to like start something, like that can happen sometimes, and like play their movies, like if you watch a really crappy movie sometimes, and like, it's like, okay, why are they fighting, like, I don't know, I think that's what she, I'm not sure. Okay, okay, that's what, that's what seems to you. And maybe that, do you have, Dan? Yeah, maybe that's it. The early conflict thing, I mean, as you said, like, it's, most plays have like conflict baked into the structure of it, like it immediately is happening. And so I guess if we're talking about like early conflict, maybe like what you're thinking is that you're like laying it bare too quickly, where it's like very clear, like, okay, this character is this problem, this character is this problem. And I guess what I'd recommend, like when you look at a play that seems like there's not action happening at the beginning, if it's a good play, this is a generalization, but if it's a good play, usually the conflict's already happening, they're just not talking about it directly. So then when you're going back, I suppose, over like writing like exposition or stuff like that, if you make sure that like, okay, they're fighting over an apple in this first scene, like, halfheartedly, like it's a joke that it did. But if it's actually like speaking to what's going to happen later in the play in some way that the conflict is already there between these two characters, they're already not seeing eye to eye, then you're on the right track. You know, so we're trying to figure out everything without having to go, you know, going all the way to the end. So go to the end and then you can just move things around instead of trying to rewrite that first seven pages and make them perfect because you don't know. You know, early conflict is so, you know, I mean, it's like you're dating, that's the other man goes, and I'll be like, just pretend, pretend, well, pretend I'm here, but I'm saying other things. So it's like you're, you're meeting somebody new, right? And you're like, you know, I'd like overshare, right? You don't want to tell like everything about yourself, right? You want to tell a few things, you know, because they're your new friend, right? You don't want to talk about, you want to, you don't want to overshare. And that's, that might be like early conflict, I don't know, but sometimes early conflict works out great. It's hard to tell. Just write the damn thing to the end. The darn thing. Yeah, not crap. I recently started writing about a family trauma that's still going on. And I'm writing it obviously for myself because I need to write it. It could be good or whatever, important one day. I'm writing it now because it needs to be because I, I don't know how long it will go on. So why wait? The challenge I'm having is that one of the family members, I feel fine with the other family member. I feel like I'm betraying them by writing their part into the story. And I know this is something people deal with a lot, but I'm just, you know, I keep having that conflict inside, not knowing if I should just write it all, or maybe focus on one part of what's going on so that I feel better about what I'm writing. That's a great question. Miasha. Miasha, how about? That's a really great question. Everybody here can answer the question. She's writing a story about a play, about a family trauma that's still going on. A story about a family trauma that's still going on. And she wonders, she, she feels some kind of apprehension because she doesn't want to be unjust to some of the people who are involved, right? So you could, I mean, you know, yeah, people ask this question a lot, and it's good. It's lucky for us that people ask this question a lot because there are answers. Like Long Day's Journey into Night. You've never heard of that play? Right. So he wrote Long Day's Journey into Night. Eugene O'Neill, the faculty's writer, Eugene O'Neill. And he wrote Long Day's Journey into Night. And he said, yo, I need to see yo. What did he did? Yo, don't put on this play. Ever, I think. Oh, too weird. Ah, I see people know this. Don't call us to play for 25 years until I'm dead or something. Right, until I'm dead, after I'm dead, 25 years after my death. Right, exactly. Okay, so that's, and he died, and then people put it on right away, which, you know, but, but you can do, what you can do is write the story or whatever and just put it in an envelope and put it away. You don't have to show it to the world. You have to send it to the New Yorker and get it published or send it to the public theater and get it, you know, work to get a show or do a workshop, not at all. Write it, write it fully as you think it should be written, and then just put an envelope and put it away. And maybe like there's Susan doing, check back in with it in six months or a year and see how you feel about it. No? But that not, that doesn't need to stop you, though not wanting to do it justice to people at all. That's a great question. So this is, the thing about this, I make it about you. So when you ask me a question about me, I make it about you. So the question was how many plays have you written? So this is the question, how many plays have you written? You've written three plays, what's your favorite part of writing? Do you like the first draft or the rewriting or what's your favorite parts? Do you like having a public? A lot of people get to see your ideas when you're hanging up on the board at school. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. I know that it's kind of the fun part, right? And it makes all that hard work worthwhile, all the like, oh gosh, what are you doing? You know, I got to keep writing. The payoff, we call it, you know, is when you get the publisher, you get them on the board at school. You know, how many people like that part in the best? Getting it done? Yeah, some people say, I like having written. Some people say that a lot. I like having written. Really? You like that part? No. Yeah, you like having, you got like getting up on the board and having it published? Yeah, I like writing the best. I like writing. I like the actual thing of the end of it, more than anything else. I like to release about by now, which is why I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, you know, I tell you guys, yeah, we voted for love on Election Day. So we went, what we found out was the dark tower. We went to Tiffany, which is right next to the dark tower and got the ring. So that's the Lord of the Rings saga. Well, my, my relationship now, we went to the dark tower and got a ring. So we're going to be all right. Yeah. So anyway, but yeah, I like writing that writing that is fun because you get to sort of commune with that spirit is always talking to you. Spirit is whispering in your ear saying, keep going, keep going. You're doing great. I'm going to tell me for a time. And you've got so much for coming. So we're going to be here and not next week. We're going to be here next week at 5pm. Bye. Thank you. Thanks for your tweets, too. Thank you guys. You guys were great. Yeah, they really, they rock.