RealityBypass

    Well now that Wizard of Oz is almost over, I’m back to having more time to keep up with blogs. Woohoo! I’ve been helping to direct our school’s Spring Musical which has been taking up a lot of time and creative energy (15+ hours a week on top of the 40 hour work day! Yes, I am crazy!). The kids are really learning to own their roles and our Lion, who has been my personal project, is finally learning how to step beyond just what’s written on the page to adding his own unique touch to the role. He had the audience in stiches with his whimpers and shivers. It was a great joy to help the students learn about the acting process.

         What does this have to do with writing? Everything! Watching movies and live theatre shows an entirely new way to use words to create images. In a book, we write so the reader can create a mental image. When you add the visual element of theatre, you can see just what image those words create. It’s a great exercise. The same goes for music and viewing pictoral art. Anything that inspires creativity or stirs emotion is a great place to gain ideas.

           I’ll confess a secret: I’m a frustrated artist! In the genetic dice roll, my sister got all the painting and drawing talent. I started writing in order to express what I had been trying unsuccessfully to paint! My mother has one bedroom full of my sister and brother’s artwork, she had to look for 2 months to find anything of MY painting that she kept! (And it was a pseudo collage, I traced different images from books and put them together, then colored with cray-pas…) Hah. Alas, It’s hard to frame a story, it just doesn’t look the same!

        But the joy of theatre is that you can paint an image… with people! You can tell the talented artists what you want to see, and they create it for you. Then, you bring it to life with color, music and movement. I love that about theatre. And it teaches you how words relate to visual images, which is great for novel writing.

~Kris