EXTRA CRITICUM

WHY then HOW

If you stick with this artistic life long enough (and by that I mean years, not months) you will come to recognize that the act of making stuff up to share with the world is frequently cluttered with dashed hopes, disappointment (in others sure, but also in oneself) and days and days when it feels as though nobody, not one living breathing soul other than yourself, really gives a damn or is even aware of what it is you’re up to. Or that you even exist.

When you are making something for the world and the world doesn’t appear to care, that can feel like one hell of a lonely bed you’ve made for yourself.

But here’s the thing. The loneliness and purposelessness are transitory. They can arrive and pull you down into the darkest despair quite unexpectedly. Often with little or no warning. Thankfully, they can just as easily pick up and fly off with the next slight breeze.

Taylor Swift Ticketmaster Controversy Points to a Dangerous Thing No One is Talking About: The Slow Narrowing of Our Culture

 

 

Writing Requires Listening... to everyone including yourself.

Although people looking for a writing teacher often find their way to me, the truth is I don't know that writing itself is something that can be taught. The skill of good (or great) writing starts with listening. Listening to the deepest part of you where the truth of your intentions lives. Sometimes there's a lot of noise coming between a writer and the successful execution of the idea. 

Common Sources of Distracting Noise Coming Between You and Your Vision

Imagine you need to write a synopsis of your latest screenplay. What might be some of the most unhelpful sources of noise, noise that distracts you from effectively coming up with great language to describe your new screenplay? Here are some examples of noisy voices that live inside your head and keep you up at night.

There's nothing original about your ideas.

Nobody is going to want to see this.

You better not get too specific or you'll scare off half your audience.

Your work on this latest script has taken a lot out of you and people need to understand that.

If I was really talented I wouldn't have to waste time writing marketing copy. There would be an army of professionals rushing in to do it for me.

My original impulse for starting this project dominates my view and keeps me from seeing just how far I veered off of my original idea.

I'm not honestly sure what this movie is going to be about in the end.

Someone in my writers group told me I must not forget to emphasize X, Y, or Z.

My Approach to Teaching Writers Starts With You

I have no interest in teaching you how to write like me. Nor do I imagine you want to write like anyone other than yourself. So, the primary focus when I work with a writer is always digging our way down until we uncover your deepest goal for whatever project you've brought to the RT Private Studio.

It all comes down to listening. I listen carefully to what's on your pages as well as what's not on those pages. And eventually a picture of an artist (you) comes into view. My job is to help you see what I see at the core of everything you write.

Now through Thanksgiving Day, Enroll in Advanced Monologue

Dec 12, 17, 21 and 28.

“So many playwriting development opportunities focus on the forest rather than the trees, leaving playwrights stranded with a solid idea but the inability to communicate it effectively. Roland sees every tree in the forest and meticulously helps playwrights communicate precisely and artfully.”
— Laura King, playwright

“No one understands the fundamental engine that drives all monologue better than Roland Tec. His vast experience as a theatre maker and as a filmmaker give him a unique ability to keep any writer honest. Study with Tec and inevitably you’ll begin to understand your own work better than you ever have.”
— Jared Katsiane, filmmaker

“I performed my monologue that night and I heard the laughter and immediately felt relaxed and focused. I emailed a link to the YouTube to a friend and he asked: ‘Where did you get that audience?’  I got it from Roland.”
— J. Lois Diamond, playwright

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The Six Most Likely Reasons Your Excellent Piece of Writing Did Not Take Home a Prize

Anyone who's ever been anywhere near a writing competition of any kind -- be it as a contestant, an audience member or a judge -- knows the sad fact that it's almost inevitable that really terrific work will somehow fail to capture the adoring attention of enough judges in just the right way and will be overlooked. 

I was curious  to take a closer look at this year's entries to the Hear Me Out Monologue Competition, specifically to examine the pieces that were really great pieces of writing that somehow failed to accumulate the high scores needed to advance to the finalist round. Specifically I wondered if I might be able to identify some patterns, common flaws which were working against some really terrific writing getting its proper due.

What I found may surprise you. It certainly did me. 

For any writer preparing work to submit to a seriously competitive opportunity of any kind, these 6 flaws could make the difference between taking home the gold and barely seeing the light of day. 

I suggest you copy this list and hang it somewhere in your workspace as a reminder so that every time you’re prepping a submission, you take some time to try and eliminate these obstacles.

I like to think of these as six guests you really don't want crashing your party cause they will work against your ambition for your submission by distracting the judges from the power and brilliance of what you've created. Show them the door and your chances of success will greatly improve.

We’ll count down from 6 to 1, saving the most important one for last.

#6: Typos and punctuation problems

It may not seem like in the grand scheme of things your brilliant powerfully moving work should be penalized for the odd misplaced comma or incorrect use or their, there or they’re. But here’s the thing. I know our judges are trying to look directly into the heart of each monologue, to understand its central character, to feel its pulse and not intentionally penalize you for typos. But we’re human. And if there are enough misspellings, incorrect or confusing uses of punctuation or incomprehensible sentences, the effect is this. The reader of the piece has to work harder to feel it as they read from start to finish. They may have to stop, go back a couple lines to figure out your intention. And when that happens, guess what? Their emotional investment in your piece suffers. 

#5: Layout on the page

Let’s imagine there’s a major explosion in the middle of your monologue. How you decide to place that interruption on the page is going to make a difference in how your reader spots it as the major interruption it is or whether they potentially miss it entirely.

Also, it may strike you as absolutely trivial but I was surprised to discover that submissions with hard-to-read fonts or inconsistent line spacing or line breaks tended to get lower scores. Now I know this is unconscious on the part of the judges because I am so specific about how the pieces are to be judged. Still human beings are not computers (thank god) and anything that makes it a little harder or more complicated for me as the reader to imagine and hear and see the monologue from start to finish is competing with your chance to grab a judge where they live -- to make an emotional impression. 

We may sound rather intellectual sitting in the restaurant discussing the show we all just saw together but make no mistake as it is unfolding in the theatre and we are sitting in the dark, it is an emotional experience. We're not thinking our way through your story, we're feeling our way through it. And every little interruption to provide a footnote or reveal the need for one is an interruption in my emotional journey with your characters through the story you're telling. 

#4: The Last Line

There were several gorgeous monologues this year that felt unfinished or incomplete because although the writer had a beautifully wrought idea that really kept us engaged, it felt as though they had not figured out how the ending should feel for the audience.

Any piece of theatre (or literature for that matter) can end in a number of ways. Think about your favorite pop songs. Some end with a bang. Some peter out. Some end with a hiccup. These choices make a world of difference in how an audience is going to feel about the overall piece and your choice should be carefully aimed at the emotional content of what preceded it. It’s human nature that no matter how you end your piece, we are going to use that end as a final lens through which to revisit the piece in its entirety. Choose the wrong type of end and you risk potentially getting in the way of your audience appreciating the depth and gravitas of the whole piece. Or on the other hand, sometimes an  ending too formal and sharp can risk throwing a lighthearted charm piece into unwanted (and unhelpful) comparison to other pieces with more natural heft. The last line also does something else in monologue that’s extremely important. And that is it signals to the audience something about the main character’s likely future beyond where we leave them. Last lines can hint at hope for some much needed change. Or they can confirm our worst fears about this person and the world that lies ahead of them. 

 

The problem is clear: Social Media is Antisocial. It is not prosocial.

First I left Facebook. Then you convinced me that my bottom line depended on my return. Now I'm leaving Twitter.

Here's the inconvenient truth. Social media is fundamentally antisocial. And by that I mean the very architecture of social media does not support prosocial behavior. And when society is under threat of collapse, we all need (now more than ever) to find ways to access those parts of ourselves inclined toward acting in support of the needs of others first. 

My mother, Nechama Tec, embarked on the first comprehensive study of the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In her first book on the subject, When Light Pierced the Darkness, she uncovered some surprising traits shared by most of the hundreds of Righteous Christians she interviewed. Turns out the usual categories by which sociologists would first embark on a comparative analysis of large groups such as religiosity, social strata, gender, etc. seem to have been largely inconsequential. Instead, she found some less obvious deeper qualitative traits that were shared by a majority of these individuals. And one of them was a pre-war established habit of prosocial behavior. 

Stop to offer help to someone who appears to be lost, dig into your pockets for some spare change to offer to a homeless person on the street, rearrange your schedule to help a friend who's being discharged from the hospital...

The people who habitually (easily, casually, even unconsciously) consider the needs of others important and interesting just might save us all when the shit hits the fan.

Social media encourages us to look inward, not outward. And it does this for one simple reason. 

It's public.

"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?

The Roland Tec Inner Circle Transitions to a Patreon Membership Tier

As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years. 

Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?

Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year. 

It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.

$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.

I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.

This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:

That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month. 

 

It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.

That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.

But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshop in which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).

As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.

Here's what I was able to remember:

Only URL You'll Ever Need to Access All Things Roland Tec on the WWW

If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.

R O L A N D  T E C  U M B R E L L A  .  c o m

Search Engine Optimization vs. Authentic Useful Content

The other day I was chatting with a friend who is something of an expert in the field of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and all things WWW-related. And a fact of life of our brave new online world just sort of spilled out and I'm embarrassed to admit, although this fact of life or fact of internet architecture is apparently common knowledge to anyone posting content online, I had somehow never heard or read this fact. 

Blog posts should be written around a set of search terms and the search terms should be carefully selected through research into the most common search terms in the topic about which you're writing. Apparently this is the way people who do not already know you and your blog will find their way to you.

When your posts have been carefully constructed around a curated set of key words and phrases designed to attract the right people to your blog, i.e. the people most likely to find it interesting and worthwhile. 

Here's the very first post which now strikes me as a little wet behind the ears and possibly somewhat blind to the vast tundra that the internet can be to the writer who posts from the heart without even a moment spent considering how people might find their way to you.

In a way, then, this blog has been floating in the shadows, only entering the field of vision of the people somehow connected to its contributing authors. Maybe that's why what began as a group blog eventually dwindled down to pretty much me posting 90% of the time. 

Were the other E.C. Authors simply not getting enough bang for their buck? I wish one of them had told me. 

Since I founded Extra Criticum in May of 2008, I have simply been writing about whatever thing struck me as important, odd, amusing or troubling. The most thought I ever gave to search happened once I'd finished whatever post I was working on when I'd stare at that empty box and come up with about a dozen key words to enter which I assumed would assist the Google bots and any other search engine creatures to find the article based on... what I thought it was about.

Boy was I misguided!

Navigating the Season of Submissions

Late Running GIFfrom Late GIFs

Every year around this time, as we start to notice the days growing shorter signaling an end to Summer, my teaching schedule fills up with writers eager to meet the moment. What moment is that?

It's that time of year when lots of submissions are due for development opportunities, grants and competitions. 

Recently, a favorite student of mine, someone I'll call Hal had booked time with me to prepare a major submission. This involves us reviewing writing samples together as well as the dreaded Artistic Statement. (I'll be the first to admit, by the way, that I suck at writing artistic statements; and yet people seek out my help so frequently that it almost proves the old adage: Those who can't do, teach.)

Seriously though, there's no magic secret to all this. It's simply a matter of reading someone else's material with care and then reflecting back to them what it is you see. We all have the capacity to do this. It's just that most of us lack the patience and curiosity to do it well.

The other day Hal reached out to cancel their appointment with me. It was a surprise to me because I know Hal to be a supremely hard-working and detail oriented writer. 

It was Hal's reason for canceling that inspired me to write this post. Because it contains within it what I consider to be one of the biggest challenges most artists struggle with.

Message from the Universe Received: Slow Down.

The Summer of 2022 has been full and fraught. I'm not sure why I imagined it would be smooth sailing to produce and perform my own solo show  while producing the third Hear Me Out Monologue Competition. 

There were signs of cracks in the foundation as early as May when I started to receive evidence of logistical details getting lost in emails between me and various others who make this thing happen. Entire emails went missing.

Sometimes those I'd written.

Sometimes those I was supposed to have read.

I've been told (Hello, Gary!) that I have too many email addresses. 

I know this is true. Yet seem unable (or unwilling?) to address it.

I'm hearing anecdotally of other breakdowns in communication on so many fronts that I'm beginning to suspect we're all just suffering under a collective case of Pandemic Fatigue. 

I was thrilled when A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored got a very positive review from our first critic. Others were lining up to see for themselves.

And so we added performances and decided to extend through September 7th.

And then I got sick.

And have barely been able do much more than sleep, eat a bowl of cereal and sleep some more. (Rinse & repeat)

Performances of my show were canceled. And some of you know how much this one has meant to me, possibly cause it's the first thing I've managed since March of 2020... But... If the actor can't keep his eyes open...

Having lost about two weeks in our production schedule on the monologue competition, I've finally heard the universe which seems to be playing the same tune all summer long this year. And the tune is:

Slow down. Take a breath. What's the hurry?

So, this is all to announce two important scheduling changes.

A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored will not perform August 24th but will resume for two nights only on Wednesdays August 31 and September 7.

And the Hear Me Out Monologue Festival & Awards Ceremony will postpone from Labor Day this year to a date in November, TBA. 

 

And I hope to be able to announce a new structure to hold all the RT workshops, Wednesday Gathering, the Hear Me Out Some1Speaking series and the annual competition and all the rest in a more coherent unified structure that will allow me to support the work without doing everything on an absolutely voluntary basis. More details to follow...

Please update your RT Inner Circle status to be sure not to miss any of this.

American Loneliness & Brené Brown's Continuing Quest to Understand Human Connection

Our Uniquely American Inability to Truly Connect

Any American who's had the chance to live overseas will tell you that when compared to the friendships typical of most other cultures, American bonds are wanting. When it comes to forging meaningful nourishing relationships we are quite possibly the worst. James Baldwin wrote about this a little bit when living in Paris he came to understand that much of the emptiness and mistrust of others he had always assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the Black experience was in fact a fundamental truth sewn into the whole cloth of American life.  

Morgan Jenness, the literary agent who most defied all the usual stereotypes of the business, tells a moving story from her early days when she was working in the literary department at the Public Theatre. During a particularly stressful and disheartening period she heard that Mother Teresa was scheduled to make a visit to New York and suddenly felt compelled to speak with the her in hopes of resolving what was feeling more and more like a moral crisis of faith around her chosen career path.

On a whim she found herself traveling uptown sixty blocks to wait on the sidewalk in front of the Indian Consulate hoping that the odds were good that the spiritual leader's itinerary would bring her there at least once. And, as would prove true for Jenness again and again and again over the years, on that day, her intuition served her well as she looked up and came face to face with the tiny woman she knew she needed to consult.

In a flurry, she heard herself describing a lack of meaning she'd been struggling with that gnawed at her because she deeply wanted to make a life of meaningful work and was starting to doubt whether theatre could possibly compete with selling everything and traveling to India to be of service however she could. Just feeding one human being at a time, no matter what the sacrifice.

Mother Teresa (herself a brilliant creative thinker) had an unexpected response.