Theatre Roots

Before deciding to go through college as a creative writing major and a theatre arts minor, I originally wanted to double major in psychology and cinema. By the time I was accepted into Western Washington University, I found out that they didn’t have a cinema degree available, so I had to minor in the next best thing: theatre arts. As for psychology, I decided that solving other people’s problems was too exhausting and impossible, so I chose to major in something that I was actually good at: creative writing. Back to the theatre arts major for a moment. The reason I wanted that as part of my educational pedigree was because I liked writing movie scripts and I hoped to make it into Hollywood as a screenwriter. Movie scripts differ from traditional prose because it’s quicker and doesn’t require a great deal of description. Plus, whenever a character talks, it’s as simple as putting his or her name down and writing the dialogue underneath it. When I write traditional prose, it takes me up to half an hour to write three full pages. But when I wrote screenplays, I could get through five pages in almost a third of the time. The process was so quick and painless that I actually wrote a Dungeons & Dragons-style screenplay called Tree Party Nation in a matter of two days. Granted, it’s only about 60 pages, but I still consider it one of my finer moments as a screenwriter. It wasn’t until after I graduated from WWU that I decided traditional prose was more interesting to me. At the time of this discovery, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends of mine over the internet. One of the characters I was using was a level eight human barbarian named Brutus Warcry. I got my start in traditional prose by writing Brutus’ character sketch, detailing his time as a kid in a barbaric tribe to his present day life as an MMA icon. At the time, I firmly believed that it was okay to use hyperbolic descriptions in every other sentence. It made sense at the time because it was so well received by my friends. Two years later in 2012, it dawned on me that it was slowing my writing speed down and most of the descriptions didn’t make sense. So now in the present day of my life, I write using simple descriptions such as one-word adjectives and describing literally everything that’s going on within the prose. I haven’t had any complaints yet. In fact, people seem to like what I do. This is quite the journey to go from a non-reading screenwriter to a bookworm novelist. If it wasn’t for my roots in theatre, I wouldn’t have had the material for my proses. So thank you, theatre roots, for keeping it interesting. Now let’s all do the hotdog dance!

　

***ADVICE OF THE DAY***

If you’re writing a story and you need to use the contraction of “who” and “are“, don’t forget the apostrophe. I can’t stress it enough.