Drawing Outside the Lines

Adam Bock's play "Swimming in the Shallows" won the 2000 Bay Area Theater Critics awards for Best Original Script, Best Production and Best Ensemble. Here are some excerpts from his talk at the March 2001 meeting.

To break out of old patterns of writing, try focusing on form rather than content. Instead of letting character drive or create the action, begin with a formal convention or stucture and follow it to new characters and different actions.

For example, Paula Vogel used driving lessons to introduce/inform scenes in "How I Learned to Drive." Adam used pictures from a pile of National Geographics as inspiration whenever he was at a loss for ideas in "Swimming in the Shallows." You might use a license plate number, the letters indicating the first letter of a vegetable to use in each scene, the numbers indicating the number of characters in each scene.