A journey of a thousand words begins with a single font choice.
At last I come back to Contraption, my Neo-Futurist primetime show due to go up in ten months and ten days. Vox is deeply into production and my last round of rewrites should have fixed any extant script problems that came up in the lengthy discussions of character motivation, plot holes, and, strangely, the hypothetical existence of carp scientists. So I re-assign my brain to the business of considering inventors, inventions, and the madness that traverses the distance between the two.
I still need to get cracking on some good solid research. I’m hoping to pay a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry in the next few weeks to reacquaint myself with…well…Science and Industry. I have books to find and check out or purchase and then read carefully. I need to take an inventory of what I need, what the theater already has, and what my vision for the piece can therefore do without. Before I do that, of course, I need to solidify my vision. Thus far all I have are staging ideas and set pieces; I have yet to write the script behind these images. I know for sure now that there are four voices in the piece, and I know who will be supplying those voices, so now the key is to give those voices something of substance to say.
I have still not done any of that this evening. Instead, I began the script with my usual ritual–deciding the aesthetic appearance of the title page.
After about ten minutes of looking at the word CONTRAPTION, it loses all meaning no matter what font it is in. Despite that, however, I have managed to settle on a 48-point Italic Footlight MT Light, with the title all in caps, above the subtitle “A Neo-Futurist Play,” which tickles my ignition switch in a very pleasant way.
I attended a reading of Neil Gaiman’s some years ago, and of all the answers he gave to all of the questions he heard after his recitation from American Gods, the one that has stuck with me more than any other was his admonition that while any writer can Start, the good ones Finish. Completing a work of writing is not just an act of creativity, it is an act of perseverance–if you can’t go the distance with your own inspiration, then you had best let it go.
The fact that I now have a cover page and a saved document living on my computer is the first step to making it real. Now I need to work on Finishing.
Creative Control 