"Totus Tuus Sum, Maria"

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This past Sunday, I made a total consecration to Jesus through Mary. Who wouldn't want to be Mary's best friend, once you get to know her?

This was very important to me, because Marian Consecration is said to be the "fastest, easiest, and surest" way of becoming a saint. I talked about how much I desire to be a saint in my post The Biggest Dream back in July of 2012. 

Becoming a saint is never easy, but, hopefully, Mary can make it easier for me. 

"Totus Tuus Sum, Maria"

I am totally yours, Mary, Mother of our Redeemer. 

Virgin of God, gracious Virgin, Mother of the Savior of the world. 

I belong to you entirely. 

All that I possess is yours. 

I take you into everything that is mine. 

Lend me your heart, O Mary. 

Amen.

Update on Writing a Play #2!

(The Previous Posts)

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I am extremely proud to announce that I finished the entire body of the play! It is all physically in existence now! Even though its only the first draft, I am already really pleased with it and I can't wait to have a few people read it and give me suggestions.

Why this sudden burst of productivity? 

It might be that I finally solved the final remaining Big Problem I was having. I couldn't find a smooth and plausible way to introduce each new color into the dialogue. 

The solution?

An 8-pack box of crayons! My female character needed to be carrying something interesting and quirky, anyway, and the colors I wanted to work with all come in the 8-pack!

It was a stroke of genius.

Unfortunately, I came up with this idea rather late Sunday evening and don't exactly remember WHERE or HOW it formed. That's the way it goes a lot of the time.

With a convenient and believable carrier for the colors, I pressed onward to write down a complete short play of about 8 pages. Writing it was fairly easy and fun, but editing it has been tough. I have to constantly pay attention to how everything SOUNDS when spoken, because that's how it will be received by audiences. I have to pay attention to 'stage left' and 'stage right'. I have to make sure that all the action that needs to be specific is clearly explained for the people who could potentially perform it. 

With that being said, I'm a little giddy with excitement. The deadline for short play submissions (July 1st) is fast approaching, and I hope I can be ready for it. 

So, there is my update, and here is an excerpt:

(Sophie sighs at his unwillingness, and switches the crayon again, this time for the brown one)

Sophie: This one is brown. Chocolate is the best way to describe brown. Its rich and dark and sweet.

Thomas: I hate chocolate. Besides, isn’t dirt brown, too?

(Sophie sighs again)

Sophie: Yes. Dirt is brown, too. 

Update on Writing a Play

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As you may or may not recall from my previous posts on this topic, I am writing a play!

I can only just now say that with any honesty because today, FINALLY, I started writing it.

I have that terrible disease where you're convinced that the very important and awesome thing you're writing will write itself by virtue of how cool it seems in your mind. The technical term would be procrastination.

Fortunately, I want to write this play badly enough that today, TODAY, I wrote two very rough pages of the beginning.

I don't think anyone really appreciates how hard a stage play is to write. I mean, you don't just write the way things are typically written in a books or magazines. You have to format it so its not just a story, but a PLAY. This looks something like...

CLARE types ferociously away at her play.

STEVE walks into the room.

STEVE: What are you doing?

CLARE: Shut up I'm writing a play leave me alone bring me some coffee.

And that's just an example. There are several different formats for a stage play, but this is the one I'd say I'm most familiar with. 

Besides the funky format, you also have to think about an actual performance of your play in order to write it. Unless your play has an extremely omnipotent narrator, you can't just sit down and say: 

Clare was majorly stressed out by writing her play. She wanted it to be amazing. She wanted it to be worthy of being chosen and performed. But she was distracted by a few things: The cookies in her desk drawer, planning her graduation party, and the TV show she'd just discovered on Netflix. But she was determined  So she blocked out the distractions and went to write her play. Unfortunately, when she logged onto her laptop, she decided to write a blog post about writing her play, instead. 

That just doesn't work. Instead, you have to very clearly and concisely SHOW the audience, by the actions and dialogue of the characters, what is going on. 

Last Friday, I got to meet author, editor, and publisher Regina Doman, and I recieved one very vital piece of advice from her about writing my play: HAVE A PREMISE* THAT IS ABSOLUTELY SO STRAIGHTFORWARD IT CANNOT BE MISSED. 

She was even nice enough to listen to the general plot of my play and suggest a really good premise to me: HOPE vs. DESPAIR. 

Everything in the play HAS to serve the premise, or it must go. My two characters have to embody the premise and convey the message while being entertaining and (hopefully) heartwarming. Since I have a 'counterbalanced statement' premise, one character has to embody HOPE, while the other embodies DESPAIR. 

This isn't rocket science, but, no, a monkey could not do it. 

So, that's a little bit about procrastination, writing a stage play, and premise. I will hopefully have a more praiseworthy update on this within a week since the deadline for play submissions is July 1st. 

As I like to do, I shall leave you with the only notable quote from what I have written thus far. The character Sophie says this to the character Thomas. I can't guarantee this will end up in the play when its all said and done, but here you go! Enjoy : )

“EVERYONE has a favorite color, Thomas, even if they don’t know it. It’s the color that makes you happiest. It’s the color that you’d paint your bedroom walls if you had the choice. It’s the one color, that, if everything in the world were suddenly that color, you’d be okay with it,”

* A premise being what the story is about/the moral it teaches. 

Writing a Play

As some of you may recall, last April (a year ago!) I posted that I was participating in something called Script Frenzy. I made a grand total of two posts on the topic.

Post #1

Post #2

Let's just say that my Script Frenzy was little more than an epic fail. I guess writing three 50,000 word novels is WAY easier for me than one 100 page play script. I think I reached a grand total of four pages and quit.

But recently, I found out about a theater group here in Minnesota looking for original short plays to perform this summer. I know this theater group pretty well; my dad loves them and we take a long drive to Rochester just to see a lot of their stuff. (This is the same group I saw perform Into the Woods that I talked about in this post) I've met several people in the group, and I thought, "I would love to write a play for them." They are wildly creative and extremely professional, and I know they would love to at least read something I wrote.

So I've decided to write a short play, just to see what happens. This will be much easier than Script Frenzy, because the play can only be roughly fifteen to thirty minutes long at the most, and I have until the summer to complete it. I'm praying to be able to write a good play, because I'm not going to lie, I would LOVE to have this theater group perform something I wrote.

Do I have an idea?

Why, yes, actually.

It was an idea I had for a short story with the working title of "Favorite Color", about a blind boy and a girl who tries to teach him about colors without using the sense of sight to describe them. I don't remember when the idea first came to me, but it's been working itself out in my head for a while now. Its not going to be easy getting it all written down, especially not in play format. Originally I wanted the characters to be like, six or seven, but the more I played with that idea the less it made sense. So I thought about making them both teenagers. But, for the sake of the innocent quality of the story that I really want, I think they can't be any older than twelve. That's just one of the many, many details I need to start working out. But I'm not going to give up, and if I have time and inspiration, I'll write another one and send in two. Who knows?

I have been really, really, REALLY bad at taking opportunities lately. I think about things, talk about them, and just watch them slide by. I don't want to be that way anymore. So, I'm going to fight for this one. I'm going to do whatever it takes to make a truly beautiful play.

If you feel so inclined, I would appreciate prayers. I want this to bring God glory in some small way, and I can't do that without grace.

I will keep you updated and let you know how it goes!

Enjoy your Wednesday : )