The Play's the Thing...

 

find my books here!

When writing my novels I often lean for help on my time in educational, community, and just-for-fun theatrical productions. 

Why? STRUCTURE!

When involved in theater, either before or behind the footlights, either acting or directing or stage managing or providing costumes or lighting...I got to hear the play sliced diced, taken apart, tinkered and experimented with, then put back together and performed, with high hopes, towards the delight of audiences. It this process the structure comes through!

Choose the best, you'll be living with it for awhile!

Some of what I learned: 

1. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage!  Translated: if I'm going to spend all this time with a project, it had better be well written! So I've always tried to find good theater or movie projects to give my time to. For my books: SAME...anything less than striving for excellence is not worth my time.

2. Plays are about PEOPLE, just like novels. In my first draft, I am also creating a cast list, a dramatis personae in theater. Who's who? Are they all necessary to tell my story? Do two perform the same function and so can be combined, or one of them eliminated? Are they of various ages, genders, backgrounds to help my story have multiple perspective and generations?

3. Plays are composed of SCENES. So are books. I find it more helpful to look at my manuscript as scenes, rather than chapters, then dissect...do I have too many scenes in the same room or place? Do I mix up daytime and nighttime locations? Does each scene have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a consistent point of view? Will each scene leave the reader satisfied and/or wanting more?

scenes: leave 'em hanging, when necessary!

Priscilla Brown goes walking

 We  know walking is excellent exercise, and I find it so not only for the body but for my contemporary romance writer's mind. I've found the senses come alive during a walk: sight, small, touch, hearing, taste, offer inspiration and suggest ideas. Several years ago when I lived by the sea in New South Wales, I loved strolling along the beach. Underfoot there's the tactile sensation of sand hard and damp where the tide has just receded, and soft close to the dunes where the water seldom reaches. The breeze carries the aroma of the ocean - lick lips and taste salt. Since this is a bay, there's no surf and the waves are not usually high. Paddling on the edge, cool wavelets wash over feet. During my excursions on the beach, I started to write in my head the novel which became Where the Heart Is. However, the final story is set not in temperate Australia but on an exquisite sub-tropical Caribbean island. https://books2read.com/Where-the-Heart-is

 

Moving inland to a rural area, I became an alpaca owner, and as I walked around the farm my senses received whole different influences: the scents of grass and
of warm animals, handling their smooth fleece, the dog barking to get them to move to another paddock, the breeze rustling through the windbreak eucalypt trees.Enjoying the curiosity and intelligence of these handsome friendly creatures meant that I had to put them in a novel, and Sealing the Deal took shape. https://books2read.com/Sealing-the-Deal

 

In my current semi-urban area, the senses are still present during my exercise walking around the tree-lined streets close to a railway line.There's the light wind hissing thought the foliage of the huge trees bordering the rail line, and the rattle of trains and hooting as they approach the station. The area has mostly quiet road traffic, and a lot of cockatoos screaming at each other. Right now in late spring blossom trees are shedding their white and pink flowers, and the scent of wattle pervades the air. My local walking has not yet brought forth a complete new story, but bits and pieces of characters, description, setting are gradually coming together. I have been known to sit on someone's garden wall to jot down in my ever-present notebook a particularly interesting and potentially important idea or thought or observation.

Enjoy your walking and your reading, best wishes, Priscilla 

 

https://bwlpublishing.ca 

https://bookswelove.net/brown-priscilla

https://priscillabrownauthor.com