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- Reading responses must be AT LEAST 200 words.
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- Reading responses are due by midnight on the night PRIOR to our discussion of the required reading.
While the beginning of Marsha Norman's article was a bit daunting and overwhelming, by the end of it I was encouraged and inspired to write. I particularly like her point "that we just need to say what it has felt like to be a lone, living human in our time...chart the desperate path of one human toward one goal...tell the stories we need to hear, because we are traveling the same road" (Norman). This idea makes storytelling feel natural and needed, and it encourages me to write and, I think, remembering this will help avoid writing something that is boring or pointless. I also really liked the advice she gives to write about fears, and it especially makes sense after she shows how the main characters of famous plays are driven by fear, and this is because we, as humans, want to see how others overcome fears and danger. Overall, I really enjoyed this article, and I think I'll probably look back at it throughout the semester. I think the greatest encouragement in this article is "people remember the stories they feel they will need someday" (Norman).
ReplyDeleteLacey Naumann
Reading Marsha Norman's essay was interesting, the playwriting scene is something completely new to me making her essay very informative. I didn't know plays with fear as the main emotion were the most successful. Feeling the dread in your heart having it beat louder and louder till you can’t hear your own thoughts, yet can’t look away is what they want you to experience when watching a play. My money would have been on love, with the main character trying to get their crush to notice them, sleep with them, or talk to them. Since it’s something most people strive for (the proof is the millions of dating apps) I believe it would have been any novice’s first thought. While reading her essay it gave me more of an insight on the mind of a playwright, what mistakes can be made and the hoops they have to go through before they're able to sit at the playwright's table. Just like any other job it can be very competitive any little mistake can ruin the mood of the play making it stressful for the playwrights. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester and developing this skill and adding it to my writing styles.
ReplyDeleteKendra Lara
Marsha Norman’s On Playwriting is an interesting take and viewpoint of the purpose of playwriting, and it makes a lot of sense. Over the playwriting section of creative writing, we are reminded that the purpose of plays isn’t to show the audience everything we want them to understand, is to have them think and feel the way we want them to long after the play. This carries into the playwriting course, but Norman tells us that we should leave a message to the audience, have them see what they must see. I want to add that the writer must stay true to themselves in order to write an effective play. We can’t be censored because people find our work to be too “vulgar” or “obscene”. The audience is ideally supposed to be understanding, but sometimes the truth can be unnerving, and if we leave any audience members observing themselves because of our play, we done our job effectively. The article gave me a better understanding of my goals for this class and inspired me to start thinking of a topic to write for my 10 minute play. I don’t know where my skills can lead me, whether to write plays or just teach a high school class about writing plays, but I am optimistic.
ReplyDelete-Luis Alonzo
The best piece of advice I got from this essay was to think big and bold. Unlike novels or short stories, you can't be subtle in plays. I mean, you can, but those subtleties have to be "attached" to bigger dramas like adultery or whatever. So when I write my play, I'm going to make sure that there is a big conflict that creates the tension needed to sustain interest for the entire 10-15 minutes.
ReplyDelete-Rodin Grajo
This article was definitely inspirational, my favorite quote was at the end when Marsha Norman said “Urgency is the key to a good story, fear is the force that keeps it moving”. It made me think about all the past stories or ideas that i wrote down that weren’t quite “working out” but I couldn’t see why. Her article put things in perspective and made me realize that i dont have a driving force to some of my writing. I have soft troubles but no active troubles. My trouble will come when thinking about a time that I was scared. I don’t feel like I have many of those moments, any that i would want to share anyway, then again i suppose that’s what writing is all about. Being vulnerable, sharing your experiences in the hope that other people will be effected by what your putting out there. After reading this essay i have a new motivation to write, the thought of this class made me nervous in the beginning but i think I’m a bit more confident or at least i now have a bit of a clue about playwriting and I’m excited.
ReplyDeleteAisha Teegarden
Marsha Norman's article got me thinking about the concept of conflict in storytelling. She mentions that fear is a driving force that can be observed in any given play, as it often is the motivation or source for interesting conflict, while also suggesting that an audience can turn to these plays for ideas to apply to their own conflicts. I love that unifying theme that is central to the writing, how we as writers can imbue our work with something to take away for the audience, which kind of puts a requirement on the work to have a sense of relatability, no matter how outlandish or seemingly strange a play can be. I hope that with this in mind I can create a play that has that kind of effect on the audience, where they can relate to it and if they feel like, maybe apply what they saw to their own way of thinking towards their situations in life. It also gives a feeling of daunting burden, since I feel that there will be plenty of ways to scrutinize my own writing, since as Norman writes, "choosing the wrong subject is the mistake you don’t recover from…", and the only concrete way to be sure of that is to present it to an audience. Just as fear motivates conflict in a play, so should it reflectively do so to the writer. - Jesse Rocha
ReplyDeleteWhat I got from reading Marsha Normans “On Playwriting” was that in order to write a good, compelling play, you have to make the reader feel something and having them want to turn the page. I found it interesting when she said “write about greed, revenge, rage, betrayal, guilt, adultery, and murder.” mostly because these are the things that people want to read. People want to read plays/ stories to find out if the survivor girl kills the violent murderer of her family, etc. I like when she states that listening to Jon Jory’s advice on writing about a time she was scared, was what made her career start. There’s a lot of aspects of playwriting that are overlooked, and I feel Marsha Norman talks a lot about those things such as the subject of a play being important to how the play should end. “On Playwriting” opened my mind a bit and gave me ideas on what to write about when it comes to creating plays in this class. I know I don’t want to write a mediocre play, I truly want to be able to write a good play for people to read and I’m open to any criticism and ideas anyone has when it comes to my own plays.
ReplyDeleteIlene Guevara
First reading of the semester, and I think it is a great start to an introduction to playwriting and what our focus should be into. I really liked how Marsha mentioned the different feelings we all experience, and that we need to dig deeper into them to feed the audience. She is right, people love reading sad, violent, problematic stories. We love to see people in pain and surrounded by all these problems and we are eager to see what happens next, we are feeding from those stories, we are super morbid. So that’s one way to response to this reading but it’s not everything about just reading/acting/seeing these plays and their problems, it’s about the person that experience it, like how do we perceive these characters’ emotions and feel them along them while the play runs through. It is a very good introduction to the course, I can’t wait to start working on this project, I think I already have some ideas. Something that really helped was this part: “Write about greed, revenge, rage, betrayal, guilt, adultery, and, murder. When writing about softer troubles such as injustice, loss, humiliation, incapacity, aging, sadness and being misunderstood, just be sure to attach them to one of the more active troubles.” It is a great guide as examples to how we can connect different emotions and troubles to create the play and its theme.
ReplyDeletePaulina Longoria
The human condition has always fascinated me. It's open to so much interpretation, yet everyone's experiencing it. What is the human condition? Marsha Norman defines it as "hurt" in her article "On Playwriting". However, she continues on that there's so much more to the human condition than that. It's the complex emotions and experiences that make up a person condensed into those two words. Norman addresses tackling the daunting task of playwriting and breaking it down from an exclusive craft to being able to use a relatable experience as our inspiration. Fear driving the play is an interesting suggestion. Never had I really considered that emotion to be the driving force that creates a compelling story. Building a story solely on fear isn't advised, though. As Norman clears up, if the story is only fear, the audience won't feel that sense of relief that comes with the resolution at the end of the play. I had always thought more of sadness for a drama or happiness for a comedy. Combining a soft trouble with an active trouble is also something I had never heard before. It has me brainstorming over how I can incorporate what I learned from this article into my play.
ReplyDelete-Gaby Urbano
It is interesting to read Marsha Norman’s perspective toward playwriting. She points out that humans often experience an array of emotions such as love, fear, and anger. These feelings are often portrayed in drama pieces in order to convey a stronger sense of depth and meaning to it. From my point of view of things, I believe that a good play is not only what a playwriting can craft on paper, but what he/she can make the audience feel beyond the play. It is about leaving the audience with mixed emotions about what they just saw. It is very different when a play is seen and performed than when it is solely read. Plays are meant to be performed obviously, so it is up to the actors to find a way to convey what the playwright is trying to convey in its play. When people go and watch plays, they want to see the actors express strong feelings and emotions, because after all, that is what dramas are about. Anyone, absolutely anyone can listen to a conversation and just simply write a dialogue and expect it to become a drama piece meant to be performed. Well no, dramas are much more complex than that.
ReplyDeleteIvanna Zamudio Trevino
Marsha Norman’s article taps into not just what it means to be a playwright, but what it means to be a writer of any stripe. Being able to tap into people’s deepest fears and desires is core to the art of creating stories which draw people in. Everyone has been afraid, and everyone understands fear and pain. By creating a story with characters that hurt and feel pain, a writer can make something that people relate to and understand on a deeper level. Norman suggests that this is absolutely vital to creating interest— only by having themes which your audience understands on a personal level can a writer make a truly successful work. All art is a reflection of the human condition, so drawing on your own experience with that condition and your own fears allows a writer to create a work that is both more grounded and more deeply personal.
ReplyDeleteNathan Phillip