Ghosts, Poets, and Narcissists: A Look Back at My Creative Thesis Process

If you know me, as my friend Kim does--remember Kim? She helped me meet Seattle Guy a few posts back. Same Kim.

dis mah Kim.

Anyway, if you know me like she does, you know that sometimes when I say things that sounds really British-Upper-Crust-y, I'll finish the thought by saying, "Oh, Charles." Which sounds like some sort of mentally-unstable non-sequitur. That's not to say I'm not crazy, but it's not actually a non-sequitur. Charles is the main character of my thesis. And I know, it'd make more sense if I said "that's something my main character Charles would say," but it's far too long and doesn't carry the same notes of exasperation and endearment.

I wrote a play for my thesis. That's right. My undergraduate career culminated with a play. Maybe it's just because I'm a nerd, but I think that's kinda cool. Well, cool or not, it was actually no mean feat to create something with what I hope is Stoppardian dialogue and interesting characters, but we writers all suffer the like: insecurity, need for validation, and some sort of deep-seated mental imbalance.

Trust me on this one. Writers are cray-cray. Adorable, lovable, smart, cuddly, but craaaaaaaazy. Some of the most innocent looking people I know (who are writers) will bust out the most unbelievable stories, and I'm sort of left wondering how someone who resembles an adorable kitten can write a believable story about a serial killer (if the person who wrote that story is reading this, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE and I love you).

I'll stop talking about the insanity of writers and get on to telling you what I'm sure you're all dying to know: the content and process of my thesis.

My thesis was born from a full-length play that I also worked on and revised this past semester in my playwriting class--and if you think revising is hard, try cutting and expanding basically the same piece at once and see how many headaches you get in a day. Ahem. The full length play is called the Ghost Paradox. 

Where it came from: I despise ghost hunting shows. They are the bane of my privatized cable channel viewing experience. Actually--that's a lie, any and all TLC shows take that spot, but ghost-hunting shows are a close second. Every time I watched one of these shows, I thought, man. If I was a ghost, no way in heaven or hell would I ever try to communicate with these people. I'd be downright insulted, watching them poke their heads into my private home/place where I died and talk down to me.

So that got me thinking about writing a story about a ghost who is in that situation. And then I thought, what if that ghost, when it was alive, didn't believe in an afterlife? It just woke up one day and its body was dead, but its consciousness was still kicking around, bored out of its nonexistent skull, until one day, this team of people shows up and pisses it off? 

That's how I met Charles. Charles kind of came into my brain fully formed, once I'd established the basic parameters of the story. I knew he would be British, snarky as all get-out, and that he would probably be a poet. Poets--especially Romantic Era poets--had the most astonishing egos, and Charles was definitely one of the more egotistical characters who had wandered into my brainspace.

So I started writing the story, but it kept coming out wrong. About a year after I had the initial idea, I had the bright idea to try it out in play format. So, last summer, I sat down in my writing chair and wrote for two weeks straight. That was my first draft. I had thought that Charles existed solely in a contemporary space, until he basically knocked me over the head and told me that the best way to learn about who he was when he was alive was to include scenes where he was alive.

Side note: Yes. He told me. Writers have voices in their heads. No, it's not clinical. Should it be? Maybe.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a writer, not a doctor.

So I started writing about Charles in the past (1870's England), and I discovered that he had been in love with the girl next door, Clarissa. Yes, discovered. Sometimes Charles wasn't forthcoming with all the details, and so I was really discovering some things as I went along, but it was like I had always known those things. Charles is a sneaky bastard that way. It was actually a really sweet love story, but like lots of other sweet love stories, my main characters didn't get together in the end. Clarissa had her reasons, and they were all incredibly valid reasons, but it kind of broke Charles and shaped a lot of the way he handled be ing dead.

Fast-forward to this January. I had known for a while that I wanted to make this play my thesis, because it was my baby and the best thing I had ever written. So I started the process, handing out drafts to my peers and advisor, and getting notes on how to revise it.

For the sake of brevity--I was only allowed 25 to 35 pages--I was advised to cut out the afterlife stuff for the thesis version of my play, and make it a one-act about Charles and Clarissa. This one act is called No One Guides Me--it comes from one of the lines in the play. And I realized something. When I cut out the parts where Charles is a 200-year-old ghost and has had a lot of time to look at things in retrospect, the character becomes an absolute. . .well. . .

We'll go with really intensely unlikable, though I can think of a few more choice phrases to describe him, and typing them out may offend some of you readers who haven't been spending lots of time in dockyards listening to sailors and pirates have animated conversations. So just picture a lot of the non-numeric symbols on the top of your keyboard in sentence-like format. With exclamation points at the end.

Anyway. Charles got a lot more unbearable without his ghostly self to provide commentary, and spending a lot of time with that Charles made me really impatient and angry. Clarissa ended up shining out a lot more clearly, and I got to learn more things about her character and her motivations, which was lovely. But Charles is the one that I have the most conversations with in my head (wow, I really do sound unbalanced) because I get him and his struggles. I get Clarissa, too, but I don't relate to some of her choices, even though she's more like me than Charles is. It's weird how that happens.

My classmates helped me with some of the finer plot points--Charles isn't actually as good of a poet as he thinks he is; Clarissa is actually the better writer but she can't make a career out of it--and their relationship got a lot stronger. And finally, before I knew it, I was turning in the whole one-act and doing the thesis reading along with my classmates.

The scene that I chose to read was the scene that I was most proud of at that point (yeah, I've added scenes since then, that's the blessing and curse of being a writer, you are NEVER done with anything). It's a scene where Charles proposes to Clarissa. And she turns him down. To help me perform a staged reading of this scene I enlisted my friend Mike, who happens to be a really, truly kickass actor and also   a genuinely nice person.

I remember being nervous before our first read-through. Like, paralyzingly nervous. I had no idea what Mike would think of my piece, but I really wanted him to like it and not think it was too girly and dramatic. My goal in writing it was to make it interesting and smart, and for some reason people view "romance" as being girly, but I'm a firm believer in the fact that most men are smart enough to know that stories about love are just as important as Batman or those 300 movies where people are getting raped or beheaded. Or both. I don't know. I  personally have not watched them.

Mike arrived and I handed him the script of the scene, I gave him some background on the story and the characters, and we started reading. And then a funny thing happened that happens when people are good actors.

Mike became Charles. Like, really brought him to life. The character flaws, the charm, the stubbornness, and suddenly I remembered why this character had become one of my friends in the first place. All this characterization that had been in my head for so long just started pouring out into the room, and I had to stop myself from jumping up and down and clapping. And luckily, Mike liked my script and called it Stoppardian without me prompting him to use that word, so I did a little fist-pump and we kept rehearsing.

The thesis reading was the next week, so we met up and read it a few more times before the actual event--I was first in the program lineup, so I was jittery as hell.

And we read it. And it was amazing. Well, Mike was amazing; my nervousness and rustiness as an actor bled into my feet and I had a hard time not wandering all over the stage constantly while I was talking.

We did not rehearse him getting down on one knee. It kind of shocked me. But he followed his impulses and it payed off.
Dude's such a good actor. 

I had so much fun performing that scene. There was something about being in the characters' shoes, saying their words, knowing that I'd picked good ones for them to say--it made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I would absolutely adore getting to see the whole thing acted sometime--or getting to be in a production of it. Like as not I'd find things to revise, but it'd be worth it to give the characters life again.

Well, that's the story of my thesis.

And now I'm realizing how weird it is that I've finished my thesis and am a Bachelor of Arts.

Ew. Weird.