The joy of revisions

As I previously mentioned, “Amadeus” was a play that I really enjoyed. I love historical fiction, 1) because it’s fascinating and 2) because it’s so difficult to pull off while simultaneously being original and true. I loved The Preface, otherwise known as the The Final Encounter by Peter Schaffer because he wrote honestly about his writing experience. It was fun to read because he was admitting/sharing his experiences revising- what we now have the joy of doing!

He began with stating his problem- that he needed a confrontation between the two men, but that they could not find an actual resolution. From there, Shaffer explained how he was going to go about revising. What I found as a kind of relief, was reading how many drafts Shaffer ‘designed,’ played out, and discarded! It was fascinating to me, and I’m sure that other people would agree- that many times the more drafts that we go through the more we feel like a failure along the way. It’s a frustrating experience, but while I was reading Shaffer’s ideas, various endings, and honest approaches it made me feel a lot better. I don’t know why exactly, I guess it just reminded me that revision is simply a necessary job and that it is hard for everyone!

Furthermore, it was an interesting approach for Shaffer to consider taking one of the many themes or characteristics from early on, not necessarily important, and allowing it to lead the ending.

Revision wise for my plays- Now, I’m actually kind of looking forward to it. One thing that I’ve learned about writing has been that, with whatever you write, given some time, new writing opportunities usually present themselves. Therefore I guess you could say that I’m looking forward to seeing if any new ideas are sparked when I try to revise my past works from the semester. I’m sure I’ll end up with pages like Shaffer, tons of different ideas and unused pages…

The only thing is that there are two plays/scenes that I wrote that I’m really unhappy with. These were my adaptation and character scripts. While I thought I had an interesting idea for each of them- neither seemed to pan out and there will be a lot of reworking/possibly even scratching involved in their revisions.