EXTRA CRITICUM

How deep does our sexism run?

There's a university (I shall not name it here). It is among a handful which over the years honored my Mom with an Honorary Doctorate given in conjunction with her commencement address.

My father never had any connection to this university apart from his connection to his wife.

Every year around this time, I receive letters asking for financial support addressed to my late father.

 

Is it any wonder they never receive a check?

A Simple Question for all Writers

Reading a student's new play, I find myself returning to a simple (but essential) question. 

How do you decide what to put on stage and what to put offstage? (Screenwriters: translate offstage to offscreen...)

I have my own thoughts on this subject but thought it might be fun to hear from you all on how you consider this issue in your own writing. Please post your thoughts in the comments section below. Thanks!

"Ain't" & "Fuckin'" - 2 Common Tells of Street Dialogue Written by Upper-Class Hacks

I've been catching up on some "must-view" watching from this golden age of television and have discovered a new intense pet peeve. Dialogue written for characters who are working class, poorly educated, or non-white that has obviously been written by some rich white kids who have a pretty shallow notion of what people of "less privileged" backgrounds sound like.

Look out for these 2 tells as you binge watch TV shows that feature anyone working with their hands or their genitals or outside the law.

The Alchemy of Play + Wright (or: Writer + What? = Play)

Years ago, my good pal John Yearley, a gifted writer who absolutely needs to be a playwright because his humanity or his writer soul naturally seeks its expression through dialogue, said the following about a someone who neither of us regarded as much more than a mediocre hack. As we discussed one piece of recent writing which, like all the others we'd been aware of, had sorely missed its mark in terms of just plain being something we'd want to read, let alone listen to, John remarked:

She just doesn't love language. That's the problem.

And once he'd said it, I knew he'd hit on something so simple yet so powerfully true about all great writing, even good writing. It's always composed by people who find language fascinating. And so the word choices are not arbitrary, as though grabbed hastily off the first available K-Mart shelf. Instead the words feel inevitable and still there's a freshness, a vitality to the crash of this word and that idea, or that repetition with this turn of phrase. Great writing helps us peek under the hood of what it means to be human and while attempting such a miracle there remains another layer that winks in the direction of language itself, encouraging us to adore the words themselves almost as much as we adore the humans whose brains collect and assemble them.

Truman Capote might call this the difference between writing and typing.