Ben Crowder

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

My play Snowstorm opened last night. With my last play I went to several of the rehearsals and runthroughs, so I had a fairly good idea walking into the premiere how the show would go. Not so this time.

I could’ve gone to both the rehearsals and the runthroughs, yes, but I wanted to see what it’s like to pull back all the way and let the director and the cast have full rein over the play. Cold turkey.

And all afternoon I felt precisely like a cold turkey. It was a month and a half ago that I submitted my script, and in all honesty I hadn’t looked at it since. I didn’t remember if the play was even any good. And the performance itself wouldn’t just be my script — it would be the script clothed in flesh and blood, brought to life. Words on a page are one thing; words on a stage, another. Anxiety rode piggyback in my gut all evening.

Having watched the whole show, though, I’m happy to report that it actually turned out really well. There are nine plays total (though three of them are pretty much the same play broken up into three parts), and mine’s the middle one, right after intermission. (Which meant I was almost too nervous during the whole first half to enjoy it properly. Luckily there are two more performances today. :))

The funny thing is that it’s been so long since I read the script that I kept thinking, “Oh, wow, they added that. And that. And that.” And I just went back and re-read the script and almost every line I thought they added was actually there in the script. Fancy that. :) (The cast and director really did do a great job with it, and they added some extra blocking that worked out wonderfully. I’m pleased.)

During the talkback session I realized that mine was the only play without some kind of deeper meaning. It’s pure fluff. Entertaining cotton candy. :) (Not that I think a little of that isn’t bad. My next play is about a girl who finds out she’s going blind, so I’m getting a nice mix of light and heavy in.)

Anyway, the nine plays run about an hour and a half, with an optional talkback session afterwards (which lasts around half an hour). If you’re in Provo and are free at 3:30 or 7:30 today, it’s at Provo Theatre Company (105 E. 100 N.) and is $5/person. And if you’re not free, that’s totally fine. :) (They’ll be recording the matinee today and I’m hoping I can get a copy and upload it so the rest of you can see it.)

In summary: it’s scary as heck to see your script acted out — I felt like a shaved poodle all afternoon and evening — but it’s so worth it. :)

I checked out some books on Hebrew and Arabic today, and as I was leafing through the Hebrew one at dinner (Hebrew for Biblical Interpretation by Arthur Walker-Jones), I realized something: I really want to publish language books. Both books about the languages and texts in the languages.

You see, as I browse through the books out there, a lot of them don’t feel like they do things the right way. I’m not saying I know what the “right way” is, but I think there’s often room for improvement — particularly among the less common languages (like Gothic) where most of the grammars were written in the 1800s and early 1900s. And so I want to write introductory grammar books for dead languages. And live ones, too, but there’s more available material for them, so it’s less pressing. (Seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of market for, say, Middle High German grammar texts, I’m not planning to get any money out of them. They’ll be freely available online, probably with print-on-demand hard copies through Lulu at cost.)

The other half of the coin is actual texts. I’ve done an edition of Beowulf, but that’s about it so far. Project Gutenberg has a nice list of foreign-language texts (like Don Quijote), but it’s not as long as I’d like. Getting texts that I’m sure are public domain will be the hard part. But not insurmountable. :) (Luckily my tastes run towards the older books, which are generally more likely to be public domain.)

After a two-month break, this afternoon I finally started taking some photos again:

They’re on Flickr, as usual. I think what I may need to do to resurrect my passion for photography is spend more time Photoshopping them afterwards, to go for a more artistic look. We’ll see.

My seven-year-old brother and I have been exchanging stories via Gmail for the past few weeks — basically, he wants me to send him stories, but I cunningly told him I’d only send him each installment if he’d send me something in return. ;)

Well, his cat got run over by a car a few days ago. And today he e-mailed me a story about a cat that died and the anguish they all felt afterwards: “There were four cats and one of them was so pretty and it died two days before and they cried and cried and cried. And guess what that cat was — it was my cat Spike. My cat really died and I’m sad too.” (Spelling normalized.)

What kind of story do you send in reply to that? Is it better to mirror his grief in the fiction and talk about dealing with it, or is it better to focus on the good memories instead? (And by that I don’t mean pretending that death doesn’t exist. It does, and hiding it from children is only going to make matters worse. But in dealing with grief, do we need to point it out?)

Stories are a lot easier to write when you’re coming up with stuff out of thin air. :) Writing in response to a real person’s real need is a lot harder. A lot.

In my attempt (successful, so far) to avoid finishing Shadowpaint, I worked a little on The Girl in the Mirror (a Gothic narrative poem), and I realized something that I’d sort of noticed before but hadn’t paid much attention to: without external constraints, I naturally gravitate toward fantasy and the supernatural in my writing.

Why do I feel almost guilty about this?

Two reasons, I think. First, I’m a Mormon, and we believe in truth. Truth meaning what really is. And fantasy is, by definition almost, what is not. :) This argument doesn’t hold up very well, though, because Mormonism started in our day and age when a boy saw an angel. And as far as the world’s concerned, that’s fantasy. Our temples have an aura of mystery about them (to the outsider) that easily lends itself to imaginative speculations of the fantastical sort. And does writing stories about stuff that never happened — and never could happen — somehow distract us from the goal of becoming like God and getting back to heaven? The tiny little Puritan in me says yes, but to be honest, fairy tales and other fantasy stories actually bolster my belief in God — who is unseen. I don’t see any irony here. Even though I still feel that nagging sense of self-conscious guilt.

The second reason is our modern worship of science and the scientific method. What’s real is what matters, they say. And fantasy isn’t real. Again, tales of fancy stretch my imagination, fueling my creative drive, and that has real-world benefits all over the place (even financially).

The point is, I love fantasy — stories where things happen, in ways they don’t usually happen in our experience — and it’s time to stop being self-conscious about it. Because I sure as heck am not going to stop writing it. :) (Which isn’t to say that I don’t write realistic works — all of my plays so far have been solidly planted in reality, for example. But it’s ten times easier for me to get excited about a work that toes the line between reality and faërie.)

Today while thinking about revising Shadowpaint (my latest play, which I’m submitting on Tuesday), I realized that I’m scared. Afraid to finish revising it, because I’m afraid it won’t be good. I’ve already written seven of the eleven or twelve pages, even, and yet still I’m up against this wall. Subconsciously I think I’m waiting for the deadline to draw nearer — because once it’s here, the pressure will squeeze those last few pages out of me anyway. So why do it beforehand? (Quoth my subconscious.)

Not to mention the time I waste. I tell myself I don’t have time to finish the play, because of everything that’s on my plate, yadda yadda. Except I do have time — I just fritter it away surfing the web or checking Google Reader or “sharpening pencils.” Anything but writing. (Or anything but anything, it sometimes seems. Wresting my time out of the hands of entropy and back into my own control is something I plan to work on hard this year.)

More positively, I have written seven pages so far. (Seven doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a short 15-minute play, that’s long past halfway. :)) And I’m going to write another page tonight if it kills me.

Over the President’s Day holiday, I designed a new blog called Mormon Renaissance, the brainchild of some of my colleagues:

To quote from the sidebar blurb on the site:

Mormon Renaissance seeks to perfect the craft, critical discernment, and the quality of Mormon artistic efforts by promoting current Mormon artists and scholars and encouraging participation in the critical conversation.

And I’ll be a guest blogger, writing weekly on topics related to Mormon arts. Should be fun. :)

After spreading myself a bit thin with a few too many blogs, I’ve decided to consolidate some of them into this new blog. It’s about creativity and the things I make — writing, design, art, music, programming, you name it. And as of now it renders my old BenjaminCrowder.com blog and Outside the Box obsolete. More to come later.