A bit of re-ordering for the sake of Entropy

Work on Entropy is proceeding rather well, I think, with a solid amount of progress in the last week. There was a bunch of “low-hanging fruit” in the script that I wanted to address — fleshing out character interactions, for example, and improving connections between scenes — and the next phase of the work is about digging into the “middle bits” I talked about previously.

In the draft that I created last fall, one of the most consistent bits of feedback I got was that the play took a while to get going (which is a polite way to say that, in the old draft, very little happened for a very long time). Today I pulled some of the most interesting plot developments from the latter half of the script and moved them as “early” into the plot as I think the script will bare. This opens up the field for new writing and new action that can build on the base I have. Additional plot points that escalate the action and dynamics have been brainstormed, and I’ve begun to put the bones of those events into the script.

At 34 pages and counting, part of the act of managing all this is keeping track of how new plot elements impact other areas of the script, and how the seeds for those elements are planted. I had the idea today that Adam is going to get caught raiding the desk in his father’s home office while he is looking for the answer key to a mathematics practice test. Aside from the issue of how to present this action on stage, I now need to answer questions like “is it the first time Adam has done this? Exactly how does he get caught? Has his father suspected that someone has been snooping in his desk? If so, how do I show this elsewhere in the script? How does Adam’s getting caught propel us into the next plot point? How does the confrontation change their relationship, and how do I demonstrate that shift?” and so on. One idea creates a ripple effect that can alter almost everything else.

I have a stack of notecards that I’m using to keep track of all of this, but the fact that they’re in a stack is becoming a problem. I started creating the cards because the script itself was too “linear” to manage (too hard to locate and manage plot details in a 34-page tract of prose). I need to be able to see and manipulate “the big picture”, so I’m going to end up with the cards plastered all over an empty wall in my almost-empty house. Eventually I’ll need some kind of database, it seems, to keep track of how any one change can impact what’s already in place. It makes my head hurt. How do writers do this? Entropy, indeed!

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