Anne Hamilton/Hamilton Dramaturgy

Here is the link to my latest Bucks County Women’s Journal Article.

http://bit.ly/StageFebMar15  

Writing in the Winter

By Anne M. Hamilton, MFA

I find it very easy to be creative when it’s very cold or very hot outside. I consider myself lucky to live in a four season climate, where I can experience the changing temperatures as well as the differences in light, which stimulate my senses.

This winter, my muse has been working overtime and I’ve completed a new full-length play as well as a 10-minute play and some poetry.

Something about extreme weather inspires me to delve deeply into my imagination and my emotions, and pull out whatever has gotten stuck there, or happens to be emerging into consciousness. I try to go with the flow, and harness my body’s natural rhythms, rather than fighting them by struggling to write, for instance, a comedy or a drama.

As a practice, I stop what I’m doing and sit down to write whenever I am struck by the muse, which I experience as a phrase, or a scene in my head that I can simply write down. For me, it is like going into a meditative state and transcribing the scene that is occurring to me.

For those who are new to playwriting, or are fine-tuning their writing process, it is possible to gradually train the mind to reveal its stories. This can be done by sitting silently for as little as fifteen minutes at a time, and writing down what appears in the mind’s eye. Then the time can be lengthened. It is useful to look over the writing on a regular basis and try to find a pattern that can be made into a monologue or a short play.

I think that it is very important for a playwright to give herself time to go into “the deep mind” as I call it – a meditative form of reflection which allows hidden gems to emerge.

By nurturing my creative spirit and enabling my imagination to leap in its own direction, I am building a pathway for fluent expression.

(c) 2015

Anne Hamilton has 24 years of experience as a dramaturg. She is available for script consultations and career advising through hamiltonlit@hotmail.com. Her play WHO’S ANDY WARHOL? was performed at The Lost Theatre in London in October, 2014. She will teach a playwriting workshop at the Philadelphia Writers Conference in June 12-14, 2015.