stalkingart

I’m using a lot of different methods to get to the character of my guitar player. I’ve been searching videos of the SRC and reading more about play writing. Also, I connected with Dick Wagner’s editor and ordered his book. He’s playing at the Clio Ampatheater on Tuesday this week, so I’m hoping to go see him. Maybe his book will come by then and he’ll sign it.

The reason I’m following the Dick Wagner lead is because he’s another lead guitar player, and I need to create a character who is not as successful as he is, but his more likable than Gary or Harvey. The details! The protagonist has to be flawed, however, he can’t be a big asshole either. The audience needs to like the guy, not think he’s totally pathetic. We need to see his flaws, relate to them and root for him to let go of them, outgrow his adolescent fantasy and grab one last chance at loving something else besides his guitar. BB King named his guitar “Lucille” so my character needs to do that same. The name will have to have some significance because she gets damaged in the “flood.” I need to research the different kinds of instruments, too. Perhaps Marshall can help me here.

Indescribable grief….can’t write.

When I don’t know how to move forward, I start over. New sketch books, new notebooks, a new calendar.

My new iPad is a new beginning for my garage band project. I’m collecting black and white photos, reading about play writing and I attended a “concert reading” in Chelsea that gave me a number of ideas. The new year is coming and work will consume me for the first few months…but I will keep going.

Recently, my work is swollowing me and I have no time at all for anything creative. I know what I need to do, but I don’t have time to do it. Hoping to get beyond the most recent push of work projects and begin again–as I always do….

Miller says: ” I gravitate toward people who are aspiring even wrongly to some spiritual engagement and are being held down to the earth by the situation or by part of their nature.”

My main character, Harry, finds a kind of transcendent experience in his music that he has never found in any other aspect of his life, and those fleeting moments where he is one with his music are becoming further and further apart and harder to achieve. His relationship to his music has preventing him from having any other relationships and he is terribly alone now with fewer and fewer options. Yet, he is more stubbornly committed than ever to reigniting his fading career while at the same time, closed to the possibility that his future is not rooted in his past. Ironically, meeting his daughter presents him with the opportunity to go forward with music by not going backward. Yet, to do so, he has to change–something he’s scoffed at and resisted for 40 years.

“There are two ways a central character’s dominant need is frustrated or thwarted, thereby creating the play’s conflict/dilemma. First, the character is often his or her own worst enemy, and is, in a very real sense, at war with himself. He chases after the wrong things; he thingks he has all the answers; his pride blinds him to the truth; his ambition leads him into troubles; his inferiority complex leaves him helpless, and so on. The second way to set up obstacles is through introducing other characters who, in one way or another, block your central character from fulfilling his need” (p. 25).

My central character is a gifted  guitar player who peaked in 1969–the summer of love. He’s egocentric, charming, lacking in some social graces while having a cultivated taste for the finer things. He is very opinionated about music, his and others and finds it difficult to be in any band unless he’s totally in charge both musically and artistically. He chases rainbows and doesn’t make practical decisions about how he must make a living. Instead, he seeks out those who might have enough money to send him on the never materializing “European Tour.” He’s stuck playing at retro tie dye events–forever looking backward at the halcyon days when he and his band were on top. Doing anything other than his music is selling out–and he refuses to do so–nearly becoming homeless in the process.