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writerscafehub · 6 months ago

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MEET THE BARISTA: Jen

@jen-with-a-pen

1. From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)

I would honestly rate my writing a solid 3½. I know that I have lots of room for improvement and growth– I've even seen growth from fic to fic or chapter to chapter and it makes me really proud to see how far I've come.

2. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

Personally, I think that my setting/world-building and “set direction” helps me stand out. In college I did screenwriting for a bit and that's how I kinda do my rough drafts, writing them in present tense and making sure I’m showing and not just telling. Also making sure my OCs or characters have special awareness of things and people around them.

3. Are there any writers that inspire you?

SO MANY TO EVEN NAME GOOD LORD. When I was initially invited into discord servers, I was fangirling in my apartment with my cat over basically being in the same room as some of (what I consider to be) the best and biggest writers of the fandom that I had been reading for months prior. There are so many mutuals and people who inspire me, too many to name specifically, but I will say that Hope (aka pilotisms/whirlybirbs) is the one whose works really gave me the courage and motivation to start writing in the fandom for the first time. IWe’ve never talked, but I hope she knows I think about Vacant Mirrors religiously to this day.

4. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

It’s so hard picking between your children! I think it’s a close tie with FOXHUNT and FILTHY, IMPETUOUS SOULS but the latter probably takes the top spot atm. It’s been so well received, even more so than I could’ve ever imagined. I almost scrapped the entire thing and I’m so glad I decided against it.

5. Which character(s) do you find easiest to write and which do you find most difficult to write?

Bucky and Steve both come easiest to me. Finding a good flow for either of them depends on my mood and muse, but I gravitate towards one or the other 99% of the time. I'm terms of difficulties, trying to write OFCs or minor/background OCs is harder for me since they don’t have a “format” like pre-established characters do.

6. Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

Bucky. Bucky has always been my muse since Day 1 and most of my little notes or WIPs involve him in some way. Also writing settings in college or around college is a pattern I’ve noticed that, although I will never give up, I have been trying to do different time periods and not involve school since I’ve been out of it for a good two years at this point.

7. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about!

I've had this specific WIP idea/concept going on 2-3 years now and it's coming together… albeit incredibly fucking slowly. It takes place within the 6-9 months between Endgame and TFATWS and involves a lot of angst, healing, and melancholy. I've been including details from the Falcon and Winter Soldier comics along with Bucky’s healing journey through grief and PTSD, amongst other things. It's been in the works for too long, so who knows if it'll see the light of day?

8. First fandom you ever wrote for?

One Direction. I was 11 and had unrestricted Internet access. I was unstoppable. (If anyone was on Miss Literati you’re a real one.)

9. Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?

Omegaverse, hands down. Also poly fics (stucky x reader, my beloved.)

10. A trope you’ll never, ever write for.

I cannot for the love of God do pregnancies, time travel, or fantasy. Just doesn't appeal to me whatsoever.

11. Wildest fic you’ve ever written?

Probably the first time I wrote smut, which was my Ranch Hand!Bucky fic, Impressions on the Inside of Your Thigh. I wouldn’t necessarily call it wild, but to me it was/is!

12. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

Honestly? Stucky. There's something about the endless possibilities of their dynamic that makes lil ol bisexual me’s heart swell with happiness. The best thing is, they’re so versatile; you can have them be platonic or romantic and still bring out their unconditional love for one another.

13. Do you listen to anything while you write?

If I really need to get into the mood of the specific story, then yes. Otherwise, I'll either have a Twitch VOD on for background noise or just put noise-canceling headphones on and zone in on the quiet.

14. One-shots or multi-chaptered works?

One shots!

15. Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them!

Literally every time I work on one. I’ve thought about one for Chains Around My Feet where it’s like a prologue leading up to the events in Chains, but it felt more appropriate to leave it as a one shot. FILTH, IMPETUOUS SOULS also gets a daydream sometimes about how their dynamic might be back at home base, the aftermath of the fic’s events, that sort of thing.

16. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

Omegaverse. I’m slowly working up the courage, but I just don’t feel like I’m ready yet. There’s also another WIP that I had started for Whumptober 2023, but it was just too intense that I scared myself out of finishing it and posting it. HTP is definitely not for the weak of heart and mind.

17. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received?

There are legit so so many lovely ones, but I think one that stands out at the moment was when I wrote the weight and someone said something among the lines of “I don’t really read Stucky a lot but this just convinced me to read more” and that felt like such an accomplishment to me.

18. Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out?

Chains Around My Feet was my first Whumptober work and was definitely something I had never done before. I actually was pretty impressed with myself on how well (in my own opinion) I was able to write horror/whump with a Dead Dove ending. Pretty proud of it still.

19. Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

Merciless Angst!

20. Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them!

Not that I can really think of. If an OC counts as an x reader? Then the Reader I came up with for my years-long WIP.

21. If you could enter the universe of any one of your fics, which would it be and why?

Honeysuckle, hands down. Living and working in Avengers Tower, adventuring in NYC, enjoying the sunsets, all while doing it with the Bucky Barnes? Yes. Fucking. Please.

22. Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process?

When I write, the scenes play out in my head like a literal movie. I see it as scripting everything out and then running through and editing scenes, and then when everything is done, it plays out like a fully fleshed out film. It’s both a blessing yet a curse, but it’s so integral to my process.

23. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

From FILTHY, IMPETUOUS SOULS:

He scoffed a laugh. “You weren’t exactly on my list of things t’do.”

“Well I hope I’m a top priority, now.”

“Number fuckin’ one.”

24. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

I wish I could stop time and just sit down for a week and get my WIPs started and edited and DONE. I’m entering my busy travel season for work and don’t have nearly as much time and energy as I did like a month or two ago. I miss it. I miss my muse, I miss being able to sit down and spend time fleshing out all these ideas in my head. The other side of it is lack of engagement (mutuals you’re okay i promise) and lack of feedback. Like yeah, kudos and likes are okay, but whenever I get a reblog– one that isn’t from a minor or bot account– I get so happy. When I get a comment, it’s like striking gold. I just wish that the passive consumption and aggressive demand for our work would die down and readers would take the time to even share our stuff. It’s disheartening to see your favorite authors cease writing because what’s the point anymore, ya know? Anyways, SUPPORT YOUR WRITERS!

#★jen★

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windowsandfeelings · 1 year ago

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20 Questions Game for fic writers

tagged by @terrainofheartfelt and @slumped-in-the-arms-of-fiction (<3 <3 <3!)

1. How many works do you have on ao3? 25! (But I've written a lot more that are scattered across ffn and livejournal. I've been at this a while.)

2. What’s your total ao3 word count? 153,671

3. What fandoms do you write for? Eternally Gilmore Girls, lately also Nancy Drew, and not for a while, but perhaps most notably Gossip Girl. (I've written for other fandoms, too, but not recently.)

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos? All the Lights that Light the Way are Blinding (Gossip Girl) November 24, 2016 (Gilmore Girls) Met You at the Right Time (Gilmore Girls) The River in Egypt (Gossip Girl) The Boyfriend Tour of North America (Gilmore Girls)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? I try to, but I'm definitely behind on it at the moment. I so appreciate every comment I get (okay, every nice comment I get), and I want to acknowledge them.

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hmm...I don't really do angsty endings. Maybe I Am Sorry to Tell You? But that's mostly because Lost hadn't actually ended yet when I wrote it so I didn't have a way to get Rory and Jess off the island. But it wasn't really presented as angsty. (I have occasionally considered writing a sequel.)

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? All of them? IDK, maybe MYatRT? Just because it takes such a long time to get to it, but I think it's earned.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Occasionally, yes, mostly on All the Lights..., or people commenting on other fics and shitting on All the Lights... in the process.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind? I write v v v light smut.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve ever written? lol, I wrote a Barney Stinson/Buffy Summers ficlet once.

I would say I'm not a huge fan of crossovers, but I wrote a bunch of short ones back in my lj days because a couple of my friends had a crossover fic contest...really more like drabbles.

And then of course there's I Am Sorry to Tell You. Because I got really into Lost at one point and had to find a way to combine it with Gilmore Girls. And honestly I think it came out pretty well.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? I don't think so, but I've definitely seen stolen fics.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yeah! Someone translated All the Lights... into Russian!

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I can't remember. Maybe back in my ffn days? Nothing is springing to mind.

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship? LITERATI 4 LYFE

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? I'd like to finish Saturn Return someday, but I don't really know where it will go. Which is why it's unfinished.

16. What are your writing strengths? Dialogue, probably? I wasn't comfortable writing dialogue for a long time, but especially since taking screenwriting classes a few years ago I feel much more confident in it.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I struggle hard with plot. You want me to figure out what's going to actually happen in a story? Ugh!

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I would probably only do it in French or maybe very basic Spanish, because that's the extent of not English that I'm confident in.

19. First fandom you ever wrote for? I'm pretty sure the first fic I ever wrote was a continuation of someone else's post-season 1 Gilmore Girls fic that they hadn't finished, but I never published it. (I still have it. It's hand-written...and bad. Because I was 13.) The first one I ever published was a Harry Potter fic on ffn. Also bad. Very unfinished.

20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written? 100,000% Met You at the Right Time. I could not be more proud of that thing if I tried. It was a labor of love, but it also came out exactly the way I wanted to, which is just...nearly impossible to imagine. Like I could quibble with some of the writing, especially in the first couple of chapters, but at the end of the day...it's really good. Which is not a humble statement, but it's true.

tagging: @wonderlandleighleigh @oh-bonerline @strangenewgirls @stellaluna33 @georgianadarcies and anyone else who wants to do it

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thevividgreenmoss · 6 years ago

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Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

A political culture where progress in the air was measured by the president’s elegant bearing and penchant for diversity was ripe for demagoguery. The rising disaffection with a narcissistic and callous ruling class was signalled in different ways by the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy. The final blow to the Washington (and New York) consensus was delivered by Trump, who correctly read the growing resentment of elites – black or white, meritocratic or dynastic – who presumed to think the White House was theirs. Writing in Wiredmagazine a month before Trump’s election, Obama hailed the ‘quintessentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible’. Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’. He now says that ‘adherents and beneficiaries’ of white supremacy loathed and feared the black man in the White House – enough to make Trump ‘president, and thus put him in position to injure the world’. ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power. ‘But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.’ This, again, is true in a banal way, but inadequate as an explanation: Trump also benefited from the disappointment of white voters who had voted, often twice, for Obama, and of black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton. Moreover, to blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.

As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

#this review still slaps #essays #*

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writemarcus · 7 years ago

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Perhaps it was written in the stars that some stars burn longer and brighter than others. Such is the case for Michael Urie, who is making yet another star turn off-Broadway in the Red Bull Theater revival of "The Government Inspector," now in production at the Duke on 42nd Street Theater.

A satirical farce penned by Nikolai Gogol, an influential Russian-Ukrainian dramatist who challenged social mores alongside other well-known literati Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov, the recent remounting of the late writer's rollicking 19th-century comedy of errors which mocks the all-encompassing political corruption of the Tsarist Imperial Russia feels more like a scathing indictment of the current political climate; a burlesque coup de grâce of the twilight of liberal American Imperialism in the age of Donald Trump, impending war and variable consumer debt hangover.

Besides the current outing of "1984," playing a few blocks away on Broadway, the endless parallels to our real-life news cycle and Gogol's pointed commentary on régime and systemic oppression alone make this regional theater favorite the most urgent show of the season. Not bad, considering this chestnut was originally published in 1836.

Updated by celebrated American playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher, this topsy-turvy though faithful rendition of Gogol's romp deliciously highlights the ulterior motives of otherwise two-dimensional characters, underscoring the elements of a great political satire, which is, after all, a minuet between off-the-wall rib-tickling fracas and barbed social commentary. On a gorgeous set designed by Alexis Distler, which is composed of two tiers and three rooms all behind a cavalcade of a scarlet red curtain, the play unfolds. The plot is simple.

Michael Urie, whom recently took home the 2017 Obie Award for Performance for his previous appearance in "Homos, Or Everyone in America" at Labyrinth Theater, depicts Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov, an unemployed dandy fop and former minor civil servant from St. Petersburg who left the comforts of his home to write and publish a memoir.

Behind in payment, he and his long-suffering footman Osip (played by chameleon character actor Arnie Burton) are moments from being removed from the far-flung country village inn in which they seek refuge. Impoverished and suicidal, Ivan's narcissism is the only thing that stops him from going through with it; his ego knows zero bounds as indicated by the mirror he gazes into as he tries to execute himself. Well, that and unexpected knock on the door.

Earlier in the play, the citizens of this unnamed provincial Russian town (and by extent, the audience) have come to understand that the title character in question is in the area incognito, with the intent on punishing those abusing their power or those that seek to topple the Kremlin from inside. With major aspirations, the town's mayor, Anton Antonovich (played by Michael McGrath), is keen on finding the régime's superintendent and becoming allies by any means necessary. However, according to local intelligence, Ivan is believed to be the man in question.

Offered a wad of rubles, supper, sleeping quarters and a party in his honor, Ivan and Osip get more than what was bargained for and thus begun the journey. But the journey is a lot more psychological than it lets on: By all accounts, each character in the show is more or less a moral monster incapable of camouflaging their degeneracy. Nor is this rogue gallery of deplorables savvy enough to investigate the hollowness of their own ethical infertility, indifferent to concealing their debauchery, even in the open. Classist impertinence, insatiability, bribery, money laundering, embezzlement, sexual harassment, infidelity and the violence against the people are just some of the many vices.

Under the clear-cut direction of Jesse Berger, founding artistic director of Red Bull Theater, textually, this rather straightforward comic delight buzzes with the electricity of vaudeville and the lunacy of commedia dell'arte. It also helps that this production benefits from solid casting by Stuart Howard, with whom should be compensated accordingly for churning out one of the biggest success for the company in the last decade (Mary Testa, Michael Urie, Talene Monahon, Arnie Burton, Michael McGrath and Stephen DeRosa are all impeccably cast).

As an ensemble, it's difficult to conjure an equal as dynamic as this one that is currently in production; all of the thespians appear to be very sync with one another, something that is beyond indispensable for such material. Given Berger's experience, this production of "The Government Inspector" is an atypical, low-stakes, off-Broadway gem that runs like a fine-tuned Swiss watch, with great precision and class.

With exquisite Hair & Wig Design by Dave Bova and radiant costume designs by Tilly Grimes, much of the character work by the troupe of actors was executed seamlessly. Nonetheless, you couldn't ask for a better coterie of actors: Stephen DeRosa as the backslapping Hospital Director who may or may not be having an affair with his crackpot doctor (played by James Rana); Arnie Burton doubles as both Ivan's valet and the scene-stealing, gossip-churning, letter-reading Postmaster.

As Marya, Talene Monahon invokes riotous laughter as The Mayor's morose, Pushkin-reading daughter with a penchant for perversity and throwing nuclear explosive tantrums. A Broadway comedy icon of sorts, Michael McGrath burrows under the skin with tons of social commentary as slow-witted The Mayor.

And then there's Michael Urie, a monsoon of cartoonish puerility, bringing to mind the elasticity of Charlie Chaplin, the nonchalance of Buster Keaton, the screwball woozy of Kevin Klein and the offbeat absurdism of Steve Martin.

But perhaps the performance to watch is the subtle genius of veteran actress Mary Testa, who plays Anna Andreyevna, The Mayor's enthusiastically domineering wife. Relishing every single line with gusto, the underrated actress-singer is lavish in her presentation, a country bumpkin masquerading as a highborn elitist impersonating a sophisticate. The results are disastrous and laugh-out-loud hysterical in the execution of lines like, "Mine was a cultured upbringing. We had a book, and my mother whistled." SNL writers have not written lines this funny in nearly a decade.

With "The General Inspector," the Red Bull Theater has achieved a rare accomplishment by presenting an archaic and timeworn, transcontinental play in a manner that both honors the original work and doesn't give the impression that the play is a museum piece.

Think of the early work that playwright David Ives had executed in regards to 18th Century French comedies or what institutions like the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has done for musicals.

"The Government Inspector" runs through June 24 at Duke on 42nd Street Theater, 229 W. 42nd St. in New York. For tickets or information, call 646-223-3010 or visit http://www.dukeon42.org/

#The Government Inspector #Michael Urie #Red Bull Theater #Edge Media Network #Edge Media Group #Marcus Scott #Write Marcus #Articles #Reviews

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inkshares · 8 years ago

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The Coal Car

In the early days of Inkshares, we were able to connect personally with nearly every writer on the platform. When Mike Mongo and Filip Syta signed up in 2014, we emailed them and set up Skype calls to get to know them and their stories. I still spend about one-half of my day chatting with authors, reading manuscripts and giving notes. And this year will see many talented development executives join Inkshares. But there are now 10,000 writers on the platform, and we expect many new writers to come onto the platform this year. This means that in most cases connecting on a personal level is difficult until we start officially working together to publish your book and represent you. This aside, one of my goals in 2017 is to provide all writers on Inkshares, whether we’re officially publishing your book yet or not, with resources that help you both develop as a writer and realize the best version of your story.

In my twenties, both while in law school and while practicing, I was lucky enough to be represented as a screenwriter by a great management company. I was constantly given resources, exercises, and guidance on the craft of writing. It made me a substantially better practitioner of not just screenwriting but story. The truth is that great writers aren’t born—they’re made. And the same goes for great stories. It is devotion to craft and development that turns the unrealized potential in the germ of an idea into a honed story with both literary and commercial viability. I want to focus us, as a community, on that craft—the craft of developing great prose and great stories out of that prose. Whether we’re officially publishing your book yet or not, I want Inkshares to furnish helpful materials, and introduce you to various story experts with whom we work.

I want to commence this with a metaphor that I frequently give to authors with whom we’re working. I don’t think I came up with it, but I can’t remember where I read it or who told it to me. It has three parts. The first part of the metaphor is actually a simile and goes like this: a story is like a train. It picks you up in one spot and drops you off in another. The distance traveled is the measure of drama in that story. It’s how much it moved people and what it meant to them. It’s their tears, their tension, their laughter. I have always found this a helpful framework to think about a story.

The second part of the metaphor is about who the writer is on that train. It’s natural for a writer to think of themselves as a conductor, the person with a fancy uniform at the head of the train. That notion is consistent with conventionally held myths about “the greats” and is supported by unfortunate look-at-me behavior of Twitter literati. But that’s incorrect; and more than incorrect, it’s harmful. The writer is the coal shoveler in the back of the train, covered in soot, lungs full of black dust, muscles spent. Because it’s not the conductor who feeds the engine that drives the locomotive—it’s the sweaty, weary, and unthanked toiler in the coal car. Absent that person, the train does not locomote. There is no journey and no drama, just a bunch of people who paid money and didn’t go anywhere. I like this part of the metaphor because it fosters the workmanlike attitude that characterizes most successful authors.

The third part of the metaphor treats the coal that we shovel. The coal is the stuff of story: characters with universalizable motivations and meaningful arcs, well paced beats that keep us wanting more, scenes filled with moments and dialogue that bring the story to life. As a writer, your job is to create and shovel that coal, that viscera of story. But the thing about coal is that it’s made from everyday organic matter like dead trees. And however high concept or far-flung, that is what stories are made from—the little ideas that pop into our heads, the everyday things we see and hold on to, the basic human truths at the core of all great characters. But like with coal, that everyday matter needs to be subjected to heat and pressure. The heat and pressure which turns the little ideas and basic human truths into honed stories is the many outlines, character bios, beat sheets, drafts, and notes. It’s the study, the slain darlings, the 90 percent of the iceberg that nobody but you sees, the ten pages you throw away for every one you keep, the notes you take when you think you’ve nailed it and just want to be done.

I like this metaphor for many reasons, but chiefly because it breeds a workmanlike attitude focused on others. Mediocre writers satisfy their need to tell a story. They want to see their name foiled on the cover and tell people at cocktail parties “I’m a writer.” As a rule to which there are exceptions, these writers fail. Great writers, whether they “make it” or not, tell a story because they want to satisfy—to entertain and move—others. They embrace the toil. They don’t want the conductor’s uniform and don’t need to take a bow. The only thanks they need is to know that the passengers made it to their destination.

When I think of our community, I think of one big coal car. Of lactic acid and aching joints, crumpled pages and weary eyes.

We’ll write again soon when we launch the official Inkshares community page, which will have an events calendar, suggested reading lists, and other materials.

-Adam.

#inkshares #writing #writing advice

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Lee Israel had tasted success. Her career as a freelance journalist started in the 1960s, and she’d also published two successful biographies: one of actress Tallulah Bankhead in 1972, and one of journalist and game-show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen in 1979. The latter had even been a New York Times best-seller.

But her third book — a biography of cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder published in 1985 — didn’t do as well, and Israel found herself falling on tough financial times. Those were only complicated by her alcoholism and what her 2015 New York Times obituary described as “a temperament that made conventional employment nearly impossible.” To cope, she turned to a life of crime.

Sort of.

It wasn’t that Israel became a hit man or a bank robber; her misdeeds were smaller and more specialized. Beginning in 1990, she started forging letters from literary figures like Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman, selling them to rare book dealers — with the help of her friend Jack Hock — for several hundred or even several thousand dollars. She also stole original letters from archives and libraries, forged copies, replaced the originals with the copies, and then sold the originals to dealers.

In 1992, she got caught and later pleaded guilty in federal court. Her days as a forger were through. But in 2008, she published a barely contrite memoir about that period in her life, entitled Can You Ever Forgive Me? It received only middling reviews, but that didn’t stop Fox Searchlight from picking it up for adaptation. The new film that’s based on it did much better with critics during its September festival run in Telluride and Toronto.

Starring Melissa McCarthy as Israel and Richard E. Grant as her partner in crime, Can You Ever Forgive Me? feels like a buddy caper, and it’s often very funny. But it has a dark side, too. Directed by Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Marielle Heller with a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, it’s about loneliness and anxiety, about having barely two nickels to rub together, about panicking over a situation you feel powerless to fix.

The film often seems almost too strange to be based on a true story, but it’s entertaining and surprising, and it follows the story of the real Lee Israel closely. Here are five interesting tidbits about the real story of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and the woman behind it.

Melissa McCarthy playing Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Twentieth Century Fox

Israel forged and sold over 400 letters throughout her “career,” but as the movie shows, she was especially proud of her Dorothy Parker letters — no wonder, since imitating Parker’s distinctive sparkling wit so well that it fooled Manhattan’s literati was quite an accomplishment.

In one of the letters, “Dorothy Parker” writes: “Alan told me to write and apologize. So I am doing that now, while he dresses for our Turkey dinner with the boys across the road. I have a hangover that is a real museum piece; I’m sure then that I must have said something terrible. To save me this kind of exertion in the future, I am thinking of having little letters runoff [sic] saying, ‘Can you ever forgive me? Dorothy.’”

Then “Parker” signs off with that phrase.

The “Alan” in the letter was meant to be Alan Campbell, Parker’s husband and Hollywood screenwriting partner. And later, Israel found the sign-off she’d invented for Parker to be the right title for her own memoir — even though the memoir itself showed she was less repentant and more pleased with her own ingenuity.

You can read the full letter here, on NPR’s website.

Though the cat had been to the vet for tests, Israel couldn’t come up with the $40 she had to pay to get the results back — a dilemma that’s depicted in the film.

But Israel just so happened to be working on an article about comedienne, singer, and actress Fanny Brice for Soap Opera Digest. So she went into Brice’s archives, stole several letters, slipped them into her shoe, and sold them to Argosy, a rare book store.

She made $40 for each letter, which — as she told NPR in 2008 — meant that “for the first time in a long time, I had some jingle in my jeans.”

She got her cat’s tests back, too.

Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Twentieth Century Fox

In 2007, Alfred A. Knopf published The Letters of Noël Coward, edited by Barry Day and described as the “first and definitive collection of letters to and from Coward.” The book was acclaimed by critics, who praised the collection for how it captured the clever wit of the playwright, director, and actor.

But it contained two letters that were written by Israel, not Coward.

“It was very good Coward; it was better Coward than Coward. Coward didn’t have to be Coward. I had to be Coward and a half,” she told NPR. In one of the fake letters, “Coward” describes Julie Andrews as “quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English overbite.”

Perhaps ironically, it was Israel’s epistolary impersonation of Coward that eventually tipped her hand. Israel’s version of Coward often made campy references that alluded to his homosexuality, but as Israel later explained, Coward “came up in a very difficult period to be homosexual. It was a jailing offense. So it would have been very unlikely for Coward to put all these kinds of campy [references] into any kind of correspondence that went out into the world.”

Some dealers smelled a rat, and one in New York — who had previously purchased several of Lee’s Parker forgeries — blackmailed her, demanding $5,000 if she didn’t want him to testify before a grand jury. That’s when she stopped forging letters and instead began stealing originals, making copies to replace them, and then selling the originals.

Not much is known about the friend, Jack Hock, who helped Israel. In her memoir, she describes him only a little.

So to portray the character, who plays a significant supporting role to McCarthy’s, the actor Richard E. Grant read what Israel had written about the real-life Hock to complement the way the screenplay fleshed him out. “Lee Israel’s memoir was astonishingly scant on detail about him, which tells me how eccentric she was — thinking that she was the only person involved in this story,” Grant said when I interviewed him about the film.

McCarthy and Grant as Lee Israel and Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

There were only a few details to go on, according to Grant:

He was from Portland. He was blonde, was tall, was charming, had died of AIDS at the age of 47 in 1994, used a stubby cigarette holder because he was a chain smoker but thought he wouldn’t get cancer by using that, had been in jail for two years for holding at knifepoint a taxi driver in a dispute about a cab fare, which absolutely fit the bill. That is as much as I knew to go on.

And also the fact that she praised him, because once she had been rumbled by the FBI and couldn’t go out and sell these letters anymore, she got him to do it. Where she thought he might predictably get $500 or $600 for a letter that she conjured up, he came back with $2,000 or more. That was testament to how good he was at scamming or schmoozing people.

By the time Israel was being blackmailed by the dealer in New York, her relationship with Hock had deteriorated. He was in prison for robbing a cab driver at knifepoint. But when she concocted a plan to swap original letters for copies — she needed $5,000 to pay the dealer — he wrote to her that he would probably be on probation soon because he had AIDS.

He did get out, and Israel and Hock struck a deal under which Hock would sell the originals, since Israel was by then a sketchy figure among dealers. He’d get 50 percent of the take, plus expenses. Israel wrote in her memoir that she eventually realized he’d been skimming money off the top of the duo’s sales, too.

“Grifters’ habits die hard,” she wrote.

The FBI did finally catch Israel, stopping her outside a deli one day while she waited for Hock and saying that one of her customers had told them everything. Even then, though, they seemed a bit in awe of her skills as a literary mimic.

The lead investigator on her case, Carl Burrell, had retired from the FBI by the time Israel died in late 2014, of complications from myeloma, at the age of 75. But in her obituary, he called her “brilliant,” saying that his favorite letter of hers was an impersonation of Hemingway: “He was complaining about Spencer Tracy being cast as the main character in The Old Man and the Sea. ”

She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce in June 1993, and was sentenced to six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation. She was banned from stepping foot in many libraries. Hock received three years’ probation and died in 1994 at the age of 47.

Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Twentieth Century Fox

According to Israel’s memoir, she did not attend the alcohol treatment program the court ordered her to participate in, and her friends and acquaintances from the later years of her life remember that she drank copiously. Actor Bob Balaban, who executive produced Can You Ever Forgive Me? and became a friend of Israel’s late in her life, recently remarked (during a Q&A following a festival screening of the film) that she would often show up at a lunch meeting early so that she could have a drink before everyone else arrived.

But she did eventually get a job, as a copy editor for Scholastic magazines in lower Manhattan — a position with benefits that included, among other things, veterinary coverage.

Burrell said in Israel’s obituary that even though many of the original letters Israel had stolen were ultimately returned to their rightful places in libraries, some of her forgeries are probably still in circulation.

That thought would have pleased Israel, who was proud of how aptly she’d reproduced the voices of some of the most vibrantly clever writers of the 20th century. In her book, she wrote, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”

And eventually, even her own name, when attached to the letters she forged, could add value. “It has come to my attention that some of the letters are now on the market as Lee Israel’s forgeries,” she told NPR in 2008. “My work has received some attention and marvelous reviews, and people have liked the letters. And so they’re salable, apparently.”

Can You Ever Forgive Me? opens in theaters on October 19.

Original Source -> 5 fascinating stories about Lee Israel, the real person behind Can You Ever Forgive Me?

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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