Ben Crowder

My sense of time apparently has some kind of terminal illness; I was sure it had only been a day or two since I last posted here. But no, it’s been a week. It almost feels like I’m losing my grasp on time — it’s hurtling by faster than I can keep up with — and yet I’m completely okay with that.

Going along with the time theme, here’s a quick review of where I am on my New Year’s resolutions, along with some newer goals.

1. Go to London. Done. I might even go again in the fall. ;)

2. Listen to only classical music in January. I made it halfway. I don’t know why I don’t listen to classical more often, though. It clears my mind like no other kind of music.

3. Read 60 books. Goodreads tells me I’m at 27 so far for this year. Should be easy enough to hit. And with my new writing/reading focus, I wouldn’t be surprised if I make it to 70 or 80.

4. Write half an hour a day. I’ve decided to go with a word count goal instead (500 a day for now, but I’ll soon ramp it up to 2000, I think), and while it took a while to get consistent, I’m happy to report that I haven’t missed a day since June 11. (Excluding Sundays.)

5. Write five short plays and get at least two of them produced. I’ve written two so far (I think), and both got produced. I’ve also completed a draft of a full-length play.

6. Write 50 short stories. Um, I’m still at zero. Whoops. :)

7. Write one novel. I’m on chapter four of my Tanglewood novel; I started a new draft and plan to finish it by September 1 if not sooner. Incidentally, I printed out a copy of my Out of Time novel (NaNoWriMo 2007) via Lulu. It arrived today, and flipping through it, I cringed a lot. It’s painfully bad. That’s why I’m putting it on my desk, to motivate me to finish Tanglewood so I can finally have an unembarrassing novel to my name. ;) I don’t know yet if I’ll do NaNoWriMo this year. Probably?

8. Write and illustrate a children’s book. This is on the back burner till I finish Tanglewood.

9. Get into the habit of submitting work for publication. Still working on this. It’ll come soon, though, now that I’m writing a lot more.

10. Keep Mormon Artist afloat. Still alive and kicking. :) I just got two new editors, in fact. We’re coming out with our special contest issue and our sixth regular issue this month.

11. Complete 20 digital paintings. This resolution is nixed.

12. Stay at Inbox Zero. So-so. Right now I’m at three.

13. Get married. :P Um, a younger, more reckless Ben put this on the list. An older, hopefully wiser Ben is going to take it off now. :) (Off the public list, that is. It’s still very much on the not-so-public list, although not tied to any specific timeframe. ;)) (Yay for unnecessary disclaimers. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to become a lawyer.) (Those wonderings never last more than a few seconds. I could never be a lawyer.) (Okay, Ben, time to shut up and move on. Right now. :))

And now for the newer goals:

A. Read no more than five books at a time. Did I mention this on here? I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s mostly going well, though sometimes it’s really hard. And I’m not counting the books I read on my iPhone as part of the five. (Yeah, that’s probably cheating, huh. :)) I miss my 15-at-a-time days, but I’m finishing more now, which is better.

B. Cut side projects and focus on writing. It’s going really, really well. I’ve still got a small handful of loose ends but they should all be tied up by the end of the month, and even now I’m writing a lot more and reading a lot more. I’d forgotten how good clarity and focus feel. :)

Every time I’ve tried to start writing a novel (excepting NaNoWriMo in 2007) or full-length play, I’d bail out a couple chapters in, thinking I couldn’t fill a whole book or evening with whatever it was I was writing. And I was right.

See, I had an epiphany earlier this week. In Creative Writing, Brandon Sanderson said we need to take three or four ideas and slam them together. And in that moment I realized my problem: I’ve been trying to sustain a whole novel or full-length play on a single idea.

One idea is great for a short play or short story, but for something longer, you need more meat. All sorts of possibilities are opening up to me now, not to mention confidence that I can actually write this full-length play (80–120 pages) for my playwriting class and this new novel (4000 words/week, or 260 pages by semester’s end, which’ll be about half of the book) for Brandon’s class. I’m giddy. :)

Over the past month, I’ve been revising Tree of Blood a lot. (Ten or eleven times, to be exact.) After several revisions I realized that I’d written myself into several plot knots, primarily because I’d been adding in all sorts of backstory without stepping out to make sure it still made sense as a whole. And so I stopped myself. I wrote an outline for the whole play, then went back and rewrote it from scratch, and after a few tweaks here and there, it’s noticeably better. Still creepy, but without all the confusing holes in the plot. :) We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment and will be performing in a mere two weeks. Egads!

And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life :P), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. :) And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me. :)

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

I haven’t done a very good job of keeping up with this blog lately, have I. :) As it happens, I got a little, um, distracted, but I’m happy to report that the distraction has left as abruptly as it came, and life is now back to normal again.

It isn’t just blogging that I’ve been slacking off on these past two weeks — it’s pretty much everything. So I’ve written next to nothing, hardly even been myself. I’ve got to figure out how to prevent this in the future…

Anyway, today I decided that I need to consolidate my writing projects, because there are too many of them — twelve or so plays, seven or eight novels, a handful of stories that want to be novellas, etc. — and without focusing on one at a time, I’ll never get anywhere. So, I’ve decided to give myself a few blanket categories to work within, and inside each category I’ll only work on one thing at a time. Here are the categories (for now):

1. Short fiction. This’ll be short stories, basically. I thought about taking one of the stories I’ve started and finishing it, but I feel like I want to start afresh — particularly because most of my stories to date have been fantasy of one sort or another, and I’d like to write something realistic. And religious.

2. Long fiction. I’ll try to alternate projects between fantasy and realistic, but that may or may not work. Anyway, the novel I’ll be working on for the time being is Rupert’s Umbrella Adventures. (It’s YA fantasy.)

3. Short play. This is my New Play Project category. :) My first project is to finish revising Alchemy so I can get it out for more feedback and see if I’ve fixed the problems that cropped up in the current draft. Then I’ll start writing a play to submit to the next NPP show, “Long Ago and Far Away.” (I have till June 3, and I want to submit three or four different plays, but so far all of my ideas have been for the other sets this year. Grr.)

4. Long play. I started writing a play tentatively called The Color of Love for Script Frenzy at the beginning of the month, but it pretty much went nowhere. (I have two or three pages of dialogue and that’s it.) The milieu of the play — a BYU student ward — is one I know quite well, and it should be a fun play to write. (And no, it won’t be like Singles Ward. If I’m lucky I might even be able to redeem the genre. :P)

5. Nonfiction. This’ll be my book/essay category. For now, the book I think I want to write is one on how to write a grammar text, particularly for dead languages. In other words, how do you teach a language through a book, without being boring and monotonous? So I’ll be researching pedagogical methods of language instruction, particularly focused on doing it through a book and not through a class or audio or anything else. But I’m free to change the focus if my research shows that my current idea is too restrictive or something. :)

6. Music. The oddball category, I’ll admit. It’s pretty much here purely to get me writing music more often. I’m going to start out by trying to write an arrangement of “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go” for the violin and piano.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure that dividing things up this way will work, but it seems to be the way my brain organizes them, so we’ll see. I’m also going to set goals for these projects, both long-term and weekly, so that I don’t let lots of time slip by without getting anything done.

I reserve the right to change any and all of this. :P

This morning I came up with an idea for an exercise I’m going to do soon: write seven plays in seven days. Short plays, of course. :) The primary constraint will be that on the first day, that play will have only one character, the second play will have two, the third will have three, and so on, all the way up to seven. I may add other constraints as well, to cook up some more creativity; we’ll see.

In another vein, a year ago I started writing War in Heaven, my novel about, well, the war in heaven. :) I got about three scenes in and then put it on the back burner since it wasn’t going where I wanted it to. And so it languished for the last I don’t know how many months. But today I felt it kicking around, begging for some attention. And so instead of revising Out of Time, I’m going to focus on War in Heaven instead. (Mainly because I still don’t know how I would revise Out of Time. :))

The existing three scenes/chapters were a good start, but they really took place halfway through the novel, and so I’m going to try returning to the beginning (where Lucifer’s still good) and starting from scratch. We’ll see how it goes.