Appraisals / Audio Pitch for Reverie / Audio Brainstorming Sessions (7 min)
Happy Friday!
Last week I talked about “moving with the light” of inspiration and working on whatever was fun or interesting in the moment, even if it was just for a few minutes at a time. I can report back that it was an effective strategy for battling through a tough week.
I was feeling like a lot of the projects that are out there in the world were stuck in a logjam or coming back as soft passes. Rather than get mired down in the business side of things I focused on the work and what I could control. After I finished working on notes for my contractual obligation I juggled a crime fiction novel, a supernatural thriller short story, and an audio comedy, moving with the light of my interest and inspiration.
Before last week I probably would have beaten myself up about being all over the place. This week I didn’t even give it a second thought. I never got bored or blocked and made solid progress on all three new pieces. Once I reached critical mass on the audio comedy I wanted to keep going until I actually finished it. (To be fair, I had a head start on that one because I was adapting from a feature spec) Now that script is out the door to my podcast agent, freeing up space for the short story and the novel.
By mid-week the logjam started to break, with new material going out into the world and new meetings being set. I feel recharged and hopeful.
I hope you have a great weekend and that you either make some headway on your own new stuff or you get to enjoy some downtime and have a life!
Appraisals
I feel like a lot of these newsletters start with “Julie and I were walking Ellie the other day,” and this one falls squarely into that genre.
Julie and I were walking Ellie the other day, headed up a slight incline in our neighborhood, when we spotted a woman coming down the hill in our direction. She was probably in her early sixties, in workout gear, clearly getting some exercise. When she got maybe fifteen yards from us she stopped dead in her tracks as if struck by some new thought, looked off to the side, put her hand to her mouth like she was trying to remember something important, then cut back across the street and went up the incline again.
Julie said, “That was a perfect appraisal.”
I remembered that term from her grad school days when she was studying The Stanislavski Method with a Russian teacher named Svetlana Eframova. The method is, “A system of laws or rules of organic human behavior, how consciously through the method we can reach the subconscious.” “Appraisal” is the 9th element of that method.
It’s a process of transformation from one event to another in a scene. The actor learns how to execute this transformation in three different stages. 1) You physically change your “object of attention” which can be a person, a thought or mental image, a physical object, or whatever you are concentrating your attention on in the moment, to a new object of attention. 2) You collect the facts, which is an active process rather than stationary. And 3) You come to a new objective, which takes the action in a new direction.
When I heard her talking about all of this back when she was in grad school it got me thinking about it how to use a version of it in my own scenes and about how to communicate those shifts in a kind of emotional road map for the actor and reader.
It may seem like a simple and obvious thing but it’s the kind of fundamental that’s easy to lose sight of in favor of dry plot mechanics. And sometimes we just underestimate how much the reader/actor needs in order to understand the character’s motivations or emotional point-of-view.
When I think of the word “beat” I think of the basic unit of a scene. It has a three-act structure just like the story itself:
Event
Emotional Response/Processing
New Action
Imagine a scene with a character who is a neat freak. We’ve seen sequences of them wiping down the white quartz countertops, putting away every dish after use, sweeping up crumbs with a hand vac, etc. They take pride in a spotless kitchen.
In this scene they come home from work late at night, the house is dark, they bring their things in, put them down, turn on the kitchen light — and they spot a brown ring from a coffee cup on the white quartz countertop.
Part 1, the event, is seeing the ring. Part 2, the appraisal/emotional response/processing part is the character realizing someone was in their house. “Are they still here? Am in danger?” Part 3 is the new action. Maybe they very quietly slide a knife out of the butcher block for protection before checking the rest of the house.
When I was a newer writer I would often skip Part 2 altogether in the script. My action lines were dry, leaving all of the heavy emotional lifting for the dialogue. Now I tend to write in a lot more of their emotional POV about the events in each scene in the action lines.
I can’t really show you a scene from my WIP but I looked through the recent Emmy-nominated script for MARE OF EASTTOWN and found a scene with two great examples of this three-act beat in the same scene.
In the first pic, she sees the sketchy guy (the event), she wonders if it's the peeping Tom she got called about earlier (emotional response/processing), she slams on the brakes to give chase (new action).
In the second pic she spots the tattered flyer that's been hanging there forever (the event). She's thinking, making a decision, after getting called out earlier for letting this investigation stall out (emotional response/processing). She puts up the new flyer (new action).
By the way, I really dig Brad Inglesby's use of italics for Mare's inner monologue. I may have to try that this week.
REVERIE - audio pitch segment
A few months ago I recorded myself doing a section of the pitch for REVERIE and talking a bit about my prep and process beforehand. I was going to post the video here then I realized that my camera was sitting on my desk and I was constantly touching the desk during the pitch and making the picture shaky. Instead I uploaded it to SoundCloud in case anyone is interested in hearing it.
Stream Reverie Pitch Segment by Extant Storytech | Listen online for free on SoundCloud — soundcloud.com Stream Reverie Pitch Segment by Extant Storytech on desktop and mobile. Play over 265 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
New Project Brainstorming Sessions #1-#2
More audio fun. Here are the first two sessions of brainstorming for the story idea I came up with on my trip to Rod Serling's hometown of Binghamton. It's a real-time, stream-of-consciousness working out of the basic ideas, trying to flesh out the structure, characters, and world. Each one is about a half-hour long. Still working on building out the full pitch and also trying to distinguish it from a whole section of AI, but I figured I would share the work-in-progress, in the spirit of what this newsletter is all about.
Stream Robot And Kid Brainstorming Session #1 by Extant Storytech | Listen online for free on SoundCloud — soundcloud.com Stream Robot And Kid Brainstorming Session #1 by Extant Storytech on desktop and mobile. Play over 265 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
Stream Robot and Kid Brainstorming Session #2 by Extant Storytech | Listen online for free on SoundCloud — soundcloud.com Stream Robot and Kid Brainstorming Session #2 by Extant Storytech on desktop and mobile. Play over 265 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
The Fix-Up Audiobook
I got a great surprise the other day in the form of an email from actor/audiobook narrator Wayne Mitchell. He read my short story The Fix-Up and after hearing the voices in his head was inspired to record it.
I loved it! I thought he did a really cool job in drawing distinctions between the two main characters, not just in their dialogue but also in the prose as it shifts between their points-of-view.
Check it out, and while you're at it, check out Wayne's website as well!
Stream TheFix-Up Audiobook by Extant Storytech | Listen online for free on SoundCloud — soundcloud.com Stream TheFix-Up Audiobook by Extant Storytech on desktop and mobile. Play over 265 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
Audiobook Narrator | Los Angeles | Wayne Mitchell actor narrator — www.allthingswaynemitchell.com Hi! I'm Wayne Mitchell and I'm an actor and narrator with a lifetime of experience in the arts. Check out my site and get a sampling of what I do and a glimpse of who I am. Thanks for stopping by! SAG/AFTRA audiobook narrator, SAG/AFTRA Loop Group ADR, audiobook producer, SOLEDAD movie