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28 February 2023

Triangles can be malicious

This Tuesday’s Writing for Stage and Performance session began with a chat about the writing we’ll perform at the upcoming ArtfulScribe LIT Fest on 12th March.

We reflected on our day so far, and were asked to describe it in three words / short phrases: a colour, a feeling, and an image, which we incorporated into a 5 minute freewrite.

Reading out the results of these, we tried to guess what each other’s original colours and feelings were. Here were the correct answers:

  • Silver, vague curiosity
  • Green, waiting in anticipation
  • Teal, satisfaction
  • Orange, exam-stress
  • Purple, intrigue

Speaking about a mock maths exam Katie sat earlier today, we drew the conclusion “Triangles can be malicious…”

The next activity was to choose two people you know, who you have enough of an idea about for writing them to be a shortcut (rather than inventing new characters) and write the most dramatic, cliché conversation between them that you can, where they pronounce very explicity how they feel about each other. We cast everyone from schoolfriends to Sherlock Holmes in our scenes.

We read these out, then re-drafted the scenes, this time hiding the explict dialogue (the subtext) under more nuanced, indirect lines. This could come across as subtle hinting instead of obvious flirting, for example, or be passive-aggression.

Writing for Stage returns next week!


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