EXTRA CRITICUM

"Where do I fit?" And Other Questions Writers Ask in the Wake of What We Commonly Think of as Rejection

This Year's Hear Me Out Delays

On August 20th of this year I happened to be in Milwaukee for my nephew's wedding. It had been a rough summer on several fronts with the pandemic hitting several members of our National Circle of Judges hard with family emergencies, hospital visits and personal crises such that the Hear Me Out Monologue Festival and Awards Ceremony which usually happens on Labor Day was going to be pushed back to November 25th, the day after Thanksgiving.

August 20th had been widely advertised as the date by which this year's competition finalists would be announced. (That date has now been revised to tomorrow, October 25th.) And for that reason almost from the moment I checked in to my room at the Hilton Garden Inn Milwaukee I was attempting to access the hotel's WiFi to send out an email the 400+ writers who had submitted to this year's competition. A simple heads-up to let them know that the announcement would be delayed this year. 

But weddings and travel and hotel WiFi being the unpredictable things they are, our heads-up announcement did not go out until the following day, August 21st. (Yes, folks,. you may occasionally imagine that I am surrounded by a dedicated staff of highly paid professionals but this competition is pretty much run by two people with the help of an army of volunteers.)

Writers Seeing Rejection Everywhere No Matter What

In the roughly 16 hours before our e-blast was sent, I received more than one message complaining bitterly about Hear Me Out having rejected work without even so much as a thank you. Here's one example of something someone (a former student no less) emailed me at 7pm on August 20th:

When is communication most meaningful or memorable? The most powerful monologues contain within them: evidence that we are not alone.

What makes for the most compelling monologues? The same thing that makes for the most compelling dialogue. Anything that points to actual human communication.

All Dialogue is Action. We Speak in Service of Intention.

I open my mouth to speak to you. I have an agenda. Something in mind I intend to communicate with you specifically. And being human, of course, your reaction to my words as they spill out of me will never be entirely predictable... never quite what I may have expected.

Before. When I rehearsed or imagined the conversation and how it might go, I may have braced myself for resistance. Or I may have imagined my logic to be so airtight that as I plan what I'd like to say I may actually imagine any resistance simply crumbling or dissolving in the face of such powerful and indisputable wisdom. The possibilities for what we might hope for or expect or seek from others' reactions to whatever we have to say are virtually infinite.

But perfect frictionless agreement? I suppose if I were addressing a mirror, I could hope to be met with that kind of predictable assent. 

The Response to Our Words is Never Predictable

The beauty of writing scripts is that, like life, they are populated with individual human beings, each with their own lived experience which continuously feeds into a set of evolving world views, ideologies, moralities, priorities and areas of reactivity. Put two of your characters in a situation in which they're both emotionally invested and there's no end to the mayhem and mischief that may ensue.

It's Official. We Must Defeat the Algorithms. (Our Humanity Just May Depend on It)

I'm in the middle (well, probably only 20% of the way in if I'm honest) of a steep new learning curve around social media algorithms, Search Engine Optimization and the very powerful and quixotic (not-to-be-overlooked) chill of audience disinterest.

And yesterday I came upon this paragraph in a pretty interesting (albeit somewhat depressing) post I'll link to here. 

 

 

Naturally, this got me thinking.

The Recent Hadestown Kerfuffle Only Proves One Thing: "It's 2022 and still... we are all just a little out of sorts."

Read full article

How ready are we for live performance as we used to enjoy it? We're circulating a very short survey. Please take 3-5 min. to answer a handful of key questions about your feelings in the fall of 2022.

Oct 2022 Live Performance Comfort Survey

 

 

Floating in a Sea of Deception. Who are we and what are we doing here?

In early 2017 I made the decision to #unfriendfacebook. I decoupled. I changed my profile picture to this.

At the time I thought I understood my reasons. It seemed to me quite indisputable that the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election had been handed to Trump by Facebook. ///HOLD IT! STOP THIS BLOG POST RIGHT THERE!

As I write that last sentence, there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind tap-tap-tapping for attention. And I have just interrupted this post to hear it.

It says:

Hold on there, Roland, are you sure you want to let your political position muddy the waters here? I mean, we are a country divided and suppose one of your students or potential students is reading this. With that little bit about the 2016 election, you may have just eliminated 50% of your potential target market.

Regardless of how one falls on the many sides of that strange interrupting worry, what concerns me most, and what I need to address here is the kind of landscape in which such a worry even makes any sense at all.

And by that I mean, an online world which through the powerful and slowslowslow moving and largely imperceptible forces of corporate interests has grown and continues to tilt further and further toward a kind of malignant embrace which play acts connection but at its core is really just pretty much always trying to sell you something.

Because if this blog is seen to exist to serve two masters -- my human desire to dig down to the truth and the promotional needs of my business -- aren't we fooling ourselves just a little bit? I mean, if we actually try to convince ourselves that these two impulses can live under the same roof? Without killing each other?

What do you do when you wake up one morning to discover that the world you've helped build is pretty much one enormous billboard?