Editing My Friends

I made a grave mistake this semester—and I did so twice! The cool leftie theatre group I’m a part of decided to write a play and then stage it, and I volunteered to help whip the play into something that can be performed.¹1. In all honesty, I mostly did it in order to avoid having to write a scene fitting a prompt I didn’t care about. Turns out, this should not have concerned me—barely anyone followed the prompts.

At first, I mostly worried about whether we would have enough text—yes, we have too much even!—and now I worry about whether we can create a coherent²2. I’d be happy with coherent-ish. I’d settle for ‘understandable’ Script from what we have.

At the same time, I decided to help my friend with the adaptation of Dracula she is co-directing for the other theatre group and was happy to do some more editing.

I feel like my foolishness has at least given me some insight into things to avoid doing when editing plays written by groups of people you know and like.

Author’s Intent

In the cool leftie group, we decided to enforce a strict separation between authors and editors while the other group has met and discussed the script with the writers, giving the co-directors ultimate approval rights.

I vastly prefer the former approach because it means that we can just edit without having the authors present and complaining about every cut.³3. Which has been getting on my nerves—it’s fine to have too much fun while writing the script, but that doesn’t mean that the fun needs to be reflected on the page. It rarely should be!

Formatting

The worst aspect of the whole experiences has been the amount of time I’ve had to spend in Google Docs. I’ve long held the opinion that it is the worst text editor ever made: it pretends to be online Word, but it can’t do the advanced formatting you’d use Word for and is far too heavy to use for just writing and editing.

The leftie text lives in Word (and I have been despairing at just how abysmal Word is at handling short documents with a lot of formatting, like a play) and managed to format it into something printable.

I’ll format the other text once I’ve got the final draft from our directors, but I do wonder how people can go about writing long-form texts in 10pt Arial in a browser window.