THE MAZE AND THE SUBMARINE
BRINGING STORIES TO LIFE
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
As You Like It, William Shakespeare
When we love what we’re reading, it feels alive on the page. Whether fantastical, or uniquely ordinary, characters and worlds that ring true make us care. Even in a poem, or a how-to manual, we keep reading for the life that breathes through the author’s voice. How can we coax such life into our words? How do we lift our pages from the imitation of life into lives all their own?
Shakespeare has a suggestion: we must play many parts, not only through the characters we create, but also as writers at our desks. In this workshop (for all genres), we’ll turn to the experts: actors and directors. It turns out they take radically different approaches when crafting stories for performance. Through written exercises, we’ll import these tactics into what we write for readers, trading analysis for discovery, complicating plots with improvisation, and widening the circumstances we’re imagining to animate the stories they inspire.
As is true in any good rehearsal, the vibe will be more playground than workshop. No actual song-and-dance will be required, but come prepared to explore. Bring any ideas or short texts you’ve been messing with, or nothing at all, just a blank page or screen. We’ll practice collaborating with our “many parts” until we’ve written ourselves off the page, and our work can step out on its own.
Amanda McTigue has spent her life writing for the page and the stage. Her debut novel Going to Solace was named a Best Read by public radio KRCB. Since then, her published short stories have earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination and a semi-finalist nod from the American Literary Review. Amanda’s written works for the stage have been produced at Carnegie Hall, the Minnesota Opera, and Sonoma County’s Green Music Center. In previous lives, she was an actor-singer in New York City, a concept writer for Disney Entertainment, and a director/producer for Paramount Entertainment. Since moving to Petaluma in 2000, she’s been staging operas and musicals at Sonoma State University. She also coaches, helping singers act and actors sing. She’s hard at work finishing her second novel, “The Cautionary Tales.” Meanwhile, a commission for a new opera libretto, “The Museum of…” has just landed on her desk.
