Dear Students of From the Page to the Stage,

Thank you, thank you! Thank you for our final session. Thank you for our week. Thank you for this adventure!

You have my gratitude for a tremendous last day, which served well to cap a week’s worth of experimentation, exploration, creation, and play.

We began with games and centering exercises, as has been our morning tradition. Our first activity was designed to explore the theory of the mirror neuron and the ways in which creatives can actively foster empathy and connectivity. It’s a simple exercise, I know, but the results do speak for themselves. Did you sense your greater progress with our other games and activities? Were you aware of how collectively you achieved more when listening to one another, rather than trying to have the last word? Well done. Well done.

We followed with our Daily Pages. Again, I congratulate you on your progress with this exercise. Please, consider making this activity a part of your regular morning routine. You won’t be sorry.

The rest of our morning focused on a truly distinct approach to creative writing. Based on the work of the celebrated Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes, you spent nearly 90 minutes engaged with a series of exercises uniquely designed to get playwrights out of their heads, into their bodies, and attuned to what Fornes believed to be deep emotional truths — deeper than any Stanislavski-based subtext exercise would be expected to match.

Our Fornes-inspired session began — how else? — with a dance party! This approach is more than silly fun. You were immediately divorced from rational thought and from preconceived expectations as to plot and structure. You got your heart rate up, and you removed from your system any fears of being silly or wrong. Silly is a superpower! Wrong is impossible!

And then… you wrote. You wrote uninterrupted for nearly 45 minutes. Fornes would insist that this work be done by hand; working with a pencil in your hand is physically more taxing than hitting keystrokes, and this is very much by design, as the words cost just a little bit more. The language in this exercise cannot be cheap, as flowery prose for the sake of flowery prose falls fast by the wayside.

Your writing was guided by a number of prompts offered to you during the session at your regular intervals, usually every 30 to 60 seconds. These prompts came fast to prevent your rational mind from thinking about structure or narrative causality. Obviously, such things are important, otherwise you wouldn’t have spent the past four days studying different forms of theory, criticism, and analysis! However, Fornes would say that she wanted to plumb her truer truth. Much of the piece you constructed during this session likely seemed surreal or even nonsensical. Still, if you review those pages I imagine you will start to find images, motifs, and text that repeated or reappeared. Fornes would say that this is a sign of where your subconscious creative mind wants to live.

Prompts were sometimes verbal in nature: I would offer dialogue or changes to a scene or location. Other times, prompts relied on alternative means. You drew, you pulled from a deck of playing cards, you were assigned random objects, and you imagined invisible items in your (possibly invisible) pockets. All of these approaches were designed to keep you wondering and to encourage exploration. Well done, friends. Well done.

And then, after lunch, as the pinnacle of our week-long session, you employed all of the tools explored this week in the creation of a short play derived from your preselected novel. Again, you wrote for nearly 45 minutes, rarely prompted by me. Rather, inspiration took you and you flew. Yes, I offered occasional thoughts about revision — are you honoring Aristotle’s six elements? How tight is your plot? How clear is your protagonist? What is your thematic statement? — but on the whole, you were autonomous in this part of our time together.  And I’m proud of you.

And even at the end, during our final segment of the day, you learned new tools and concepts. The trick of Therefore/However/Meanwhile is a great way to reinforce causality and to seek out those And Then moments that can kill an audience’s engagement with a story. You learned about the specificity of tactics, and of ensuring that your characters were active and engaged in the pursuit of their objectives.

And then… our time was at an end. One last game of 1-7, a few magic tricks, a final game of chess during ORA… and then some fond farewells.

One of my favorite movies about the art of creative writing is the Robin Williams classic Dead Poets Society. It is possible that on our walk to dismissal, one of my students stood on a curb and cried out, “O Captain, my Captain!”

Keep writing. Keep imagining. Remember: you can’t be wrong, you just need to write — and to listen.

Thank you, my friends Thank you.

Sincerely,

David Ian Lee