Today was a good day. In addition to writing, I spent some time mapping out action plot points in my story on a large piece of cardboard. It helps me begin to visualize the overall structure of the piece. As I begin to fill in additional elements--song placement, settings, etc.--it helps me to have a visual map of what I'm doing.
Thanks for the generous comments yesterday. As many of you said, you just get back up and go at it again. No sense dwelling on yesterday. Staying in the present.
Intentionally blurred...
Today's Tibits: Yesterday, I was reading the story of how James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim came to write Into the Woods (if you are a musical theatre fan, Sondheim's two volumes of collected lyrics--Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat--are a treasure trove). I went to the pages not because of my musical, but because I had a voice lesson last night, and decided to sing "No One is Alone" from Into the Woods. Sondheim writes that when he and Lapine were "looking for a quick way to make a buck," in 1985, Lapine had the idea of creating a television special "involving TV characters from situation comedies (for example, Ralph and Alice Kramden, Archie and Edith Bunker, Mary Richards and Lou Grant, etc.) in a car accident which brings to the scene characters from the cop shows (T.J. Hooker, Joe Friday, Cagney and Lacey, etc.) who take them to the hospital where they are treated by Dr. Kildare and Marcus Welby and Ben Casey, etc." Sondheim and Lapine presented the idea to Norman Lear, who loved it and wanted a script. But when S & L explained that they didn't want to write a script, they just wanted to sell the idea, Lear said he didn't want to buy the idea, he wanted a script. And that was that. One year later, Lapine came up with the idea of "applying the TV idea to the Brothers Grimm. We would write a story in which the lives of famous fairy-tale characters would collide and intertwine in a mutual meeting ground, and where else but the woods, where so many of the stories take place?"
Love that story. Oh, and if you saw Into the Woods in tryouts at the Old Globe in 1986, you may remember that there were characters there that did not make it to Broadway and beyond: Snow White and the Three Little PIgs.