Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 49

Brand new stage play! New Year’s Thieve, a holiday comedy for all ages in one act, coming soon

I am incredibly excited to announce that I have a new play coming out and it’s actually only one of two new plays I have coming out this summer.If you took advantage of my offer in this post, you probably knew this was coming but let me officially introduce you to the play formerly known as The Play With the Talking Coat Rack… New Year’s Thieve!

It’s New Year’s Eve at the North Pole but the work of the holidays isn’t over. Father Time’s warehouse is under renovation and Santa’s Workshop is bur...

The Muppets on writing for commedia dell-arte

OK, not really. But close enough, right?

The Muppet Show – Fozzie is writing the script for this weeks show – YouTube.

The post The Muppets on writing for commedia dell-arte appeared first on Hillary DePiano.com.

You need it all: the harsh truth about becoming a successful writer

Writer’s Block (Photo credit: thorinside)

Writingwell is not enough.

Craftinga solid plot or a good readisnot enough.

Workinghard and hustling isnot enough.

Luck is not enough.

There are thousands of people out there who can do each of those things above that will never find success as a writer. Talent is common. Writing well isn’t necessarily good storytelling and vice versa. Hard work can’t make up for a complete lack of ability. Most of all, luck isn’t everything.

You can be the best writer in t...

Three quick examples of the classic writing advice Show Don’t Tell

Show and Tell (Photo credit: musgrave_archive)

I was having an email chat with a friend about the classic writing advice, to show, not tell, and I wrote up three super quick examples of it. And then I thought, heck, since I took the time to write them, maybe I ought to just share them here too in case anyone else might find them helpful. So here you go, here’s show don’t tell in action:

Tell: Karen was really pissed that she had to make dinner.

Show: Karen stormed over to the fridge and yanked i...

The Love of Three Oranges Mailbag: Teaching commedia dell’arte, movement, masks and more

Commedia dell’arte mask. We didn’t use anything even remotely like this for our production of The Love of Three Oranges.

I frequently get emails from students who are studying or performing The Love of Three Oranges in school and have some questions. I love to hear from people about the show and I welcome messages of any kind. If you’ve got a question or just want to say Hi, please don’t be shy.

Manyare pretty simple questions, mostly from actors looking for some clarification about a part. Oth...

Reviews are in for R.A. Long High School’s production of The Love of Three Oranges

The Love of Three Oranges opened this weekend at R.A. Long High School in Longview, WA (it also runs May 16-17, with a matinee at 2 p.m. May 17 if you’re in the area but busy this weekend) and two reviews of their production have already gone to press. I wanted to share them here. First up is this review from Tom Paulu of Washington’s TDN aka The Daily News. Needless to say, the first sentence is my favorite part.

Student cast brings silly characters to life on set of ‘Love of Three Oranges’

A...

I Am Big Bird. OK, I’m not actually Big Bird but I saw his new movie at least!

Not the right Hillary but you get the idea. (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

This Saturday, I dragged my husband to the US premiere of I Am Big Bird, a documentary about Carrol Spinney, the man behind Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. The film itself is fantastic and not in wide release so, if you hear about the chance to see it, take it! You will not regret it. They found some amazing behind the scene footage including some home video shot during the filming of Muppet Family Christmas....

April Camp NaNoWriMo 2014 Winner!

I split my April Camp NaNoWriMo desperately trying to finish this never-ending nightmare and polishing this. I basically broke every one of my own NaNo rules just to prove that it could still be done and, boom, here I sit having written over 50,000 words this month.

With going back to edit. With writing really slowly and choosing each word carefully. Without attending a single write-in or doing a word sprint. With a little darling who is possibly allergic to napsor otherwise opposed to themfor...

Would you like to read the infamous Talking Coat Rack Play?

Back on October 4th, I mentioned on Twitter that I was working on a new play. People were very interested for whatever reason and, every time I mentioned the play I got a couple of replies/retweets/favorites so I kept talking about it which I never really do on Twitter with works in progress. You can see some of the tweets below. It actually shows a pretty good timeline of how long it took me to finish it with the little bit of time I get here and there. (Tweets are in reverse order because...

I’m in an endless loop of rewriting this book. Is this finally the end?

The Infinite Loop (Photo credit: kurafire)

Back in 2006 I wrote a book called, The Trading Assistant’s Assistant. It was about being an eBay Trading Assistant, as you likely guessed from the title. It sold pretty well for a little while and then eBay totally revamped the TA program and the book became woefully out of date.

I started to rewrite it and, in the process, realized that it was organized stupidly. Instead of just making a few changes, as I’d originally planned, I decided to completely...