You should have told me it was going to be hard to get folks to join in to read and critique! Maybe I'm unusual, but I love it when folks ask for my opinion about a piece of writing. I thought everyone did!
I had to cancel session #2 because I didn't have any folks to act as readers/critiquers. So, I made up a new TMPW rule: for every session an author gets to have their play workshopped, I am asking them to sign-up for at least two sessions as a reader/critiquer. My thanks to all the authors that have already done this, and my encouragement to all authors to join the community from both angles - as an author and as a reader/critiquer. If you want to join in the workshopping community, check out the list of upcoming sessions on our sign-up page!
Instead of running the session, I spent some time reading Jeff Sweet's piece, Feedback. In it, he talks about the elements authors encounter when having their work in a "talk-back" session. He brings up some new questions I'm going to use in upcoming TMPW sessions. Here they are:
- "Who do you think the central character of the play is?"
- "What do you think she wants?"
- "At what point did you realize the nature of the relationship between Character A and Character B?"
- "If you had to summarize the theme of the play in a sentence, what would it be?"
My thanks to Mr. Sweet for these new ideas. Check out his article on NYC Playwrights.