Gedalya Chinn is a storyteller (and so are you). While pursuing a BFA in Acting at the University of Maryland Baltimore County(UMBC), he performed in numerous productions within the Department of Theatre, as well as outside the academic confines. Throughout his sojourn in the Baltimore/DC area, he remained active as a featured spoken word performer, and as a member of Zelda’s Inferno, a Baltimore poetry collective. He co-founded The Unmentionable Theatre, a non-profit company focusing on the responsibility of Theatre to larger socio-political issues and to its immediate community, serving as Founding Director, actor, dramaturg, playwright, set builder, and community organizer (simultaneously, on a few occasions). He moved (mid) West to Chicago in 2008, where he later earned his MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage at Northwestern University. In Chicago, he served as Literary Management Intern at Victory Gardens Theater and participated in their IGNITIONFestival as a dramaturg and rehearsal assistant. Currently, he’s back on the East Coast, riding the rails between DC, Baltimore and New York, and is supremely grateful to his expanding, expansive, inspiring and generous family (some of whom are actually related to him)...and their couches. Though he set aside his live music performance activities a number of years ago to pursue acting and writing, music was, and still is, his first love (primarily Progressive-Avant-Jazz-Kraut-Hop, non-traditional uses of found percussion, and all flavors of electronica, from the pulse-pounding and joint-jumping to the experimental knob-fiddling), and he is enjoying all the ways he is currently sharing his first love with all others.
Gedalya on...
The Process
In terms of the physical act of writing text, be it a concrete story in any form (and I define the word “story” very broadly), or less formal notes / thoughts / fragments in aid of story-building / shaping, I absolutely do set aside a significant time slot every day for that effort.
For a while now, I’ve been keeping my schedule pretty consistent, at least where and how I devote the focus of certain time slots. I start every day at 5:00am (often earlier, but my phone starts playing Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” super loud at 5:00am whether I’m already awake or not), and, after attending to “health n’ wellness” (and we all gotta attend to that...whatever that needs to be on an individual basis) 8:00am till 12:00pm is Writing Time. I use that four-hour slot in a few specific ways that would take much longer to describe, but the main point is that, yes, that is a time I set aside daily for writing. If I get more time elsewhere in the day, groovy, but that slot is taken.
I’ve been working on the “writing constantly” angle as well, and have developed a method (more like an attitude) that seems to work for me. From an “equipment” standpoint, I don’t go anywhere without some means of note-taking and recording. Pretty much ever. I have at least one pocket-sized notebook and pen on my person probably...97% of the time (I really enjoy handwriting notes and first drafts as much as possible when time allows). I also play the Notes and Voice Memos apps on my phone off the bench (actually, the majority of my responses to these questions are coming from my phone...thinking about these questions while on longer mass transit commutes has been great...though it doesn’t lend itself to brevity, clearly).
But the “equipment” is the simple part...just use what you’ve got and make it work. The thing that’s taken much more time to develop enough to be reliably useful is...let’s call it “being available for stories,” for lack of a specific term...but you get what I mean, right? Availability, to me, is a combination of a sensitive but expanded soft-focus awareness--like a “really large butterfly net” awareness--with the ability to zero in, often pretty quickly, on those curiosities, whispers, possible subtexts and implied stories that are everywhere, snatch ‘em out of the air and get some fragment of that into a notebook or voice memo to develop or discard later. All that...and the ability to figure out, during a subsequent Writing Time, what in the name of Tiresias’s tits I was thinking when I scribbled this unintelligible what-have-you in my notebook...
I don’t have this process thing totally figured out, but I’ve definitely gotten much better at making this particular way of working useful to me.
As an aside, my morning schedule of starting every day ass-early, getting in a pretty strenuous physical “warm-up” first thing (30-60 minutes daily), and then going immediately into a focused and substantial work period, was inspired directly by the OG choreographer (that’s Original Goddess), Twyla Tharp. Read her book The Creative Habit. Even if you feel no affinity for dance of any kind, I think she’s got something in there for everyone.
SatisfactionConsidering that Scripted Whim is focusing on writing for performance, whether that’s performance in a live theatrical setting, or writing for all forms of recorded media, I’m framing my response by emphasizing that the most satisfying element about Writing for Performance, for me, is the performance element, not the creation of text. Or, when the occasion for performance is not guaranteed (as, let’s face it, is nearly always the case), I love the ways in which the performance element informs the process of creating text, which is more relevant to the conversations on this blog, I think.
Under the umbrella of Writing for Performance, I tend to distinguish my writing into two somewhat amorphous categories: Plays and Performance Texts. The Play category is pretty obvious...much of dramatic literature, certainly as far as The Western Canon is concerned, would fall into this category, and I’d add most screenplays you’re likely to read as well. Pretty straight-ahead stuff, in terms of how the Writer and Script are intended to function.
I think of Performance Texts as an attempt to craft a guide or map for a performer or ensemble that is very intentionally incomplete in terms of holding a script--the physical object--in your hand and saying, okay, this is done. With these pieces, whatever I put on the page is there with the understanding that this Performance Text is really not about my attempt to create something--a story, characters, a physical and emotional environment--which relies on my facility with words and my ability to employ words and spoken language in written form. Sure, all that does matter to some extent, but, when I think of Performance Texts, that effort is a very distant second to providing a guide to the performer(s) of my incomplete idea, so they can build it with me collaboratively, even when I have no involvement with their rehearsal and performance of said text.
So, back to the question...
I’ve been working on pieces that are just about evenly spread between these two categories but, whichever way I think of a given piece, I’m jonzin’ so hard these days on this collaborative relationship between whatever words I put on the page and the very real human beings giving them voice, shape, impetus, movement with purpose and the crucial element of surprise--the unexpected and unplanned--not only for the audience, but a surprise to me--the shit that I could never script, that only exists in what I’ve written because somebody else put it there--that completely rocks my world. I just gotta get better at putting words on paper that help create the most effective guide or opportunity for that other thing to bust loose...and I’m working on it every day.
More recently, I’ve been looking for ways to intentionally blur the line, for myself, between the Play and Performance Text categories, which were only ever separate because I put that imaginary line between them, so now, I’m really excited by the ways all that stuff I said about Performance Texts keeps jumping in the mix when I think I’m writing a Play. Cracks me up, honestly.
KnowingA) Wait, that happened?! Damn. I feel like I’d remember that... Honestly, if not seriously, part of me has always known that I’m a storyteller...that I relate to pretty much my entire reality in terms of story. What story is this person, situation, experience...hell, even abstract concepts, mathematical equations and inanimate objects... What’s the story here? So maybe it took a journey down any number of “other” paths to realize that this is what I do, what I’ve always done. It’s just how I relate.
B) Partially because my early experiences and training in Theatre were focused on performance, and also because of how I think of the collaborative relationship between the writing and performance elements, even when thinking about works that inspired me early on from a writing standpoint, it’s difficult for me to isolate the writing from how it could be performed...and I’m very okay with that. Two examples of this relationship that leap to mind first are Fences, by August Wilson, and My Children, My Africa, by Athol Fugard.
Grab a copy of Fences and flip to the last two pages--Wilson’s stage directions for Gabriel’s final moment--when Gabe blows down the gates of heaven so Troy can get in. First of all, those might be my favorite stage directions ever, and there have been times--many times, at this point--when I’ve pulled that play off my shelf just to read the last two pages. All my years working in giant corporate book retail, with everything that comes with that, I’d regularly hit the drama section, pull Fences off the shelf and read this last moment between Gabriel, a broken trumpet and St. Peter, then go back to selling shit. True story.
But here’s why: I also got to see Fences a number of years ago--it was around 2004 in either DC or Baltimore--and saw Frederick Strother play Gabriel. If you’re not familiar with the last moment of Fences, I’m not gonna lay it out for you here. Read it. Today. It’s almost entirely stage directions, which are deeply moving as a climactic moment expressed through the written word...but I was in the room, very close to the stage, and saw / heard / felt Mr. Strother embody that moment...that transition...yeah, that one. It’s his collaboration with what August Wilson put on the page that makes me go back and read it again and again. I relive the actual moment every time I read the words, and the truth of that has to be a collaboration between that specific performer and Wilson’s words. For me, that’s the equation that equals Gabriel Maxson. I have no way of separating them.
I had a similar experience when I saw Fugard’s My Children, My Africa at Studio Theatre, probably around 2007. James Brown-Orleans played Mr. M. Again, I love that play on the page, and Fugard’s entire body of work, especially his collaborations with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, are constant companions. But that night, I was in the room for the moment when Mr. M rings that bell, calling desperately for his “children” to come back to school...and I am so totally shaking and crying right now just thinking about it...I can hear Mr. Brown-Orleans’ voice, I can hear the bell, and I can feel, at this moment, in my body, what it was like to experience Fugard’s play that night.
So, again, those are iconic plays with brilliantly drawn characters, crafted by two profoundly great playwrights...but those two moments exist for me in performance, and continue to inspire me to do...pretty much anything.
One last example of a writer and work that inspired me very early on. I’m adding this example because I have not ever seen or heard any part of it performed, which makes this more about the isolated experience of reading someone’s words.
I was in middle of my first-ever acting class at a community college. At that point, I had read a fair amount of “the usual suspects,” but had only gone through a rehearsal / performance process for two plays (the musical-comedy Once Upon A Mattress, and Hurlyburly...yeah, those experiences were...disimilar).
My then-girlfriend bought me a subscription to American Theatre as a gift, so I was suddenly exposed to writers and ways of creating theater that had not been on any part of my radar, and the experience that stood out back then, and continues to inspire me as a writer, was when I read the issue featuring Charles Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica. I was like, wait, what?! This is how theater being created today, right now, looks / sounds / feels on the page? I really had no idea what to with that experience then, but I’ve never been able to shake that “wait, what?!” sound of my jaw clanking off my bedroom floor. I’m pretty wild about Chuck Mee in general.
And so many others. More each day, thankfully.
The First Time
I’d just completed my BFA in Acting, but was already fooling around with the notion of trying to be a playwright. I wrote the first drafts of two one-act plays; one called "All Fall," which was a one-woman piece divided into a number of short scenes (performed by McKenzie Chinn), and the other was called "Chaser & Buck," which had two characters, both female (played by Vanessa Strickland and Katie Sasso, respectively). I later dug out the second play’s first draft in grad school for a complete overhaul, a few more drafts and a workshop process, though the first play has remained on “injured reserve.” The theater company I’d co-founded in Baltimore decided to mount a small-scale run of these two pieces together as a single Evening of Theatre, so that was my first experience hearing / seeing a performance of my work.
What I remember most clearly from that experience, which absolutely does continue to be true, even more so now, is that good collaborators are the greatest gift, full stop. Even in a more traditional theater environment (let’s say Plays, as opposed to Performance Texts and devised collaborations), actors, directors and designers who are not only skilled in their craft, but are committed to giving everything to make this “thing” work holistically...and enjoy that process...speaking purely as a writer now, those collaborators will make the writing exponentially better than it may actually be on the page...and will probably save your ass while doing it. Even back then, knowing almost nothing about how to craft a script as a writer, I knew that both drafts were...they both probably needed “help” from an actual playwright...but what they both ended up receiving, instead of a playwright, were performers who showed up in every way. That’s definitely what saved me from having my First Time turn into the sort of “playwright’s nightmare” that might’ve made me pack it in right there and go back to digging ditches.
On the off chance that any writers who read this are as pathologically insecure about their writing as I am (Writers? Insecure? Not-bloody-likely...) I gotta say that, having had that experience at the very beginning, and being able to let it inform what I do today is such a tremendous gift and safety net. Now, when I’m looking at a draft of something “in progress” thinking, God damn, boy, if this does ever see the light of day, it’s gonna be a fifteen second sound bite on the Disaster Channel, I can give myself a tiny bit of a break knowing there’s a chance the performance ensemble will be a whole lot more confident in their skills than I am in mine, and they’ll be able to back up that confidence...and save my ass.
That’s not to say I don’t totally obsess over whatever I’m writing, but it is good for me to remember periodically that, when writing for performance of any kind, other collaborators are going to get a chance to help me make this work. And they almost always come through...or have so far...so the performers, collaborators, facilitators and hell-raisers I’ve played with are a profoundly generous comfort in all of this.
Advice
My career, when I broaden it to be called Storyteller, has encompassed everything “else,” but I seriously can’t think of much I wish I’d been told. I’ve been absurdly blessed throughout this journey so far to have had not only profoundly influential teachers / mentors, but many unbelievably gifted and generous peers, all of whom have, in many ways, already imparted all the advice / guidance anyone could ever want or be foolish enough to ignore.
So...my response to this question isn’t about what I wish someone else had said or shown me, but that I wish I’d taken more of that advice / guidance to heart in those moments when it was offered, and made greater efforts to put it into practice immediately. I tend to learn lessons the hard way--feels like more error than trial--and not after the first error, either. I’m constantly laughing at myself when I experience a learning moment and I go, Oh, that’s what this is about, and another voice in my head goes, Uh...yeah...like three people already tried to tell you that...but better Ever than Never, right?
Oh, okay, here’s a quick one: I really do wish I’d known that, while we all struggle, success doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll eventually struggle less--that anything gets easier. What I need to work towards are ways to better navigate moving forward consistently--even if not in giant leaps and on a full stomach--to keep loving this ridiculously crazy struggle and what comes out of it, even when it doesn’t get any easier. So far, I’ve found that sharing the struggle with people who’re able to still feel the joy in all of this makes this process pretty effing worth it, so...thank you.
This should close with Janis Joplin cackling at the end of “Mercedes Benz,” but you’ll have to imagine that...