The 9th draft of Not Being A Dick has been completed. The first rehearsal begins in less than three hours.
There are small changes throughout the script, and bigger changes towards the later scenes. In all, I’ve added 6 pages of new writing on top of making tweaks and changes to the existing dialogue. Got most of my new ideas in too. Still not sure if there’s room for more, or if it’s found a happy place. I suspect there will be some small changes as we move through the rehearsal process.
Interestingly, the block of text I came up with yesterday, didn’t quite materialize as written. Indeed, the text did belong to Kate in Scene 12, but David picked up bits of it in Scene 13. The passage was broken up into smaller bits so it didn’t seem too much like an exposition laced monologue. Breaking up the text also allowed me to increase the conflict in the scene because Kate really did want to say it all in one chunk, but wasn’t permitted because David kept interrupting her. If a character is going to be permitted to emote about her feelings, she needs to fight for the privilege. If she’s going to wax philosophical about her point of view, she needs to meet obstacles at every utterance. Giving her a free pass, is just bad writing methinks.
Another unexpected development was the fact that the scenes which saw the most rewriting, remain recognizable from their previous incarnations. I fully expected to be blowing up the final two scenes, but with the development that had taken place earlier in the script, and salted in throughout, nothing needed to be shifted too much. Instead of feeling ‘tacked on’, the final scene emerges as a great way to wrap things up, as opposed to being required to explain everything that came before. I actually didn’t have to change a single thing in that scene, and I thought it would be the most problematic of them all.
I guess, instead of taking 6 pages worth of new information and dumping it all in at the end of the play, I broke the information up into bite sized pieces and used that information to punch up the conflict within all the scenes equally. The scenes become stronger as self-contained units, and the play becomes stronger as a whole.
I am excited to see how the new draft sounds when it’s up on its feet.
The Mind of Jarrett 