Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

In the Beginning was the Word

In the Beginning was the Word

Well today I finished an outline to the play I am programmed to teach…I wonder if the staff at New Horizons will throw up their hands and politely tell me that due to unexpected technical difficulties I need to get lost.

From what I can see the headmistress and two assistants are steeped in the academic tradition of formal lesson planning. I am not complaining mind you because on line class’s demand a lot of boiler plate to make sure they work in an E-environment in the absence of a living breathing professor manifested in the flesh. I can do this I keep telling myself. I'm not awed by the syllabus and lesson planning and the function of the E-Classroom…certainly there is much to learn of that but what is a bit unnerving is teaching in an area where I hardly consider myself an expert. Normally I don’t confess my doubts over perceived shortcoming but since nobody reads this blog anyway I am quite safe in venting my concerns.

As a writer I have always been a practitioner. As a student my teachers always despaired because by the time I began catching onto the material the semester was over and the grades a matter of the historical record. I remember waking up one morning a year after barely passing a statistics course and suddenly coming to the realization of what Standard Deviation was all about. The upside to my abuse mind is that I was able to apply belated knowledge to life where many of my academically gifted peers seemed to have forgotten the material altogether.

Actually being a failure as a play writer has been a benefit to my prose writing….once some fundamental differences are allowed the yearlong soak thru the soggy filter of my cortex. What I have had to learn in novel writing is the importance of exposition. A novel reader likes to be told about the trees and mountains and the wart on the Hero’s nose. On the stage the audience sees the wart and the set tells him the little about the surrounding she needs to know. So there you have it. A playwright starts out deficient in exposition and a novelist starts out deficient in dialog. Well except for another deficiency a novelist has….resonance.

I talked to a writer friend of mine about to be published in a legitimate press and she had no idea what resonance was. Can you imagine that? Shakespeare was able to sell tickets to people who weren’t even allowed in the theater and they paid good money to simply listen outside to the words. Is there a message there to writers or what….and how about rappers and the sudden resurgence of rhythm and meter and rhyme in speech patterns? The screen is great, and special effects are mindboggling but the pendulum keeps swinging back to the word….How does it go….In the beginning was the word…