Page to Stage

Last week I took a class at Grub Street called Page to Stage with the fabulous and talented Giulia Rozzi. The concept – writing first-person pieces for performance – appealed to my theatrical side (if you’re not familiar with this side of Susan, check out my other blog). Plus, I hadn’t been back to Grub Street in a while and missed the Grub Love.At first I was a little disappointed that there were only four other people in the class (not much of a performance), but it worked out because we were all outspoken and had a lot to contribute. Ten outspoken people would have made it hard for poor Giulia to teach us anything, even with her six years in stand-up comedy!
Giulia has an interesting approach to storytelling. Basically, any story can be interesting with the right details and presentation (of course, if you’re writing a story for the page, you don’t have the luxury of voice inflection and gestures, but I digress). She made her point by having everyone share the most interesting thing they’d seen that day. It was a rainy Thursday, so no one had anything particularly exciting to report, but it was still fascinating the way people talked about their day, for instance, standing in line at Whole Foods.I’m generally not a writing prompt person, since I usually have too much to write about and not enough hours in the day (no time for writing foreplay), but her exercises gave me some great ideas for stories. One I plan to polish and post as a future blog entry. Anyone have a favorite writing prompt you’d like to share?