I had to flip from cyber bully to serial killer in mid sentence. I got a message from my Vancouver producers that the new scene I wrote for The Bone House wasn't working. It was not giving the audience a break from the storytelling and it was creating more questions than it needed to. Plus, there's a concern that the play has to be under 60 minutes for the Edinburgh Festival. Our solution was to go back to the previous version of the script, which has the video clips of the killer's victims. I went through and cut out the extraneous material to come up with a lean mean scene. My only worry is that in cutting to the bone, I might have taken away the air that allows the audience to relax a bit from the barrage of Eugene's storytelling. I won't know if the scene will work for sure until the cast and crew rehearse the scene. This is a good reminder that what works on page may not always work on stage. I wish I could be at rehearsals to see it for myself, but I'm glad to go back to the video stuff. My original instinct to have video was to break up the monotony of the direct address to the audience.
I have to admit that this certainly gave me a much needed shot of creative adrenaline. I knocked off the revisions in a couple of hours, and now I feel recharged. I was feeling pretty sluggish on the book. So sluggish in fact that I think I'm going back to outline so that I can map out each chapter. Right now, I'm cranking out pages and more worried about meeting my quota than thinking about where the story needs to go. When that happens, best to put on the brakes and check the map (or in this case, draw the map).
Back to the book.
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