Alexandra Silber's Blog

“A Vision of Dame Barbara Hepworth Told Me to Dump My Girlfriend” - an AFOOT story

Once again, another AFOOT story. 

As part of the Edinburgh version of Whisper Walk from the "AFOOT" series, I give you one of the monologues/short stories I have composed for this deliciously Scottish incarnation (that we on the creative team refer to a "whispers.") 

From the press release:  

Confessional stories, unuttered truths and personal memories are whispered through headphones in a documentary-style walking tour through Edinburgh. Whisper Walk is partly inspired by the Japanese Kaze n...

Mistakes to Avoid When Writing: Part 3

Welcome back to Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Part 3: The Hot Mess Never Ends Edition. This is the post where we will address your descriptions that read like an instruction manual for beige paint, your deeply toxic relationship with “just tweaking this one sentence” for 11 hours, and your insistence on writing in total solitude like some haunted widow scratching poems into the walls of a lighthouse. 

 Let’s dig in.


7. Editing As-You-Go (Like a Masochist)
Every time you stop to “just tweak that on...

20 Years on

 

TWENTY years ago at the Palace Theatre in London, this barely 22-year-old made her professional debut in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘The Woman in White’ as Laura Fairlie.

It would be absolutely impossible to explain how much I did NOT know, and how generously those around me lifted me up and escorted me not only in to the professional theatre industry, but in to adulthood itself. Many of those wonderful folks are still close friends and colleagues to this day. 

I look at this itty bitty girl...

The "Drammatical Sabbatical" — 25 Tips for the Burnt-Out Creative

We’ve been taught that real artists never stop.
That if you’re not always producing, you must not be serious. That’s a lie.
 
I welcome you, dear reader, to honor the sacred pause—the breath between acts, the quiet before the curtain rises again.

Look. I love art. I love making it, thinking about it, being dramatic about it. But sometimes? Art is the reason I’m lying face-down on my carpet Googling “how to get out of literally anything.” If you’re reading this, there’s a 92% chance you’ve got a half...

Books-by-the-Month: July

July is the month when time both expands and disappears. The days are thick with heat, the air smells of grass, salt, and sunscreen, and the hours unfold like an old quilt—faded, but beloved, patched with both stillness and motion. 
July is made for reading the way winter is made for soup: the two seem biologically destined for one another. It is the month when reading can happen anywhere: under a striped beach umbrella, in the stifling cocoon of a tent, on a rickety porch swing, or simply sprawl...

Mistakes to Avoid When Writing: Part 2

So you read the first list of novel-writing mistakes and thought,
     “Okay, fine, I won’t let my main character have violet eyes, a tragic violin backstory, and absolutely no flaws.” 
Growth! 
But unfortunately (for both of us), the disasters don’t stop there. You’ve merely arrived at the second layer of the flaming lasagna that is writing a novel.
Because guess what? There are still more ways to mess up your writing—and yes, GUILTY, I’ve made every single one of them (while eating cereal out of...

42

PRIME TIME.  Here’s to one great trip around the sun, and raising a glass to what  feels like juuuust might be the best year yet.  Something deep, ancient and crucial has shifted in me this last year— it feels like the greatest act of “becoming” and of true maturity I’ve ever experienced. It was? Uncomfortable! But it was also—as all expansions are—worthwhile. I’m grateful for all the “teachers”that appeared around me.  If we accept the notion that life itself is a gift, than that means it...

“The Curious Case of ‘The Other Iain’ - an AFOOT story

As part of the Edinburgh version of Whisper Walk from the "AFOOT" series, I give you one of the monologues/short stories I have composed for this deliciously Scottish incarnation (that we on the creative team refer to a "whispers.") 

From the press release:  

Confessional stories, unuttered truths and personal memories are whispered through headphones in a documentary-style walking tour through Edinburgh. Whisper Walk is partly inspired by the Japanese Kaze no Denwa (“wind phone”) and explores ...

Ask Al: The Power of Saying "No" — Part 1

Let’s talk about the holy word every artist needs to learn to wield like a bedazzled machete: NO.
This post is for every tender, brilliant, creatively exhausted soul who has said yes to an unpaid reading again, agreed to do someone’s weird indie podcast at midnight for “exposure,” or joined a 12-person devised theatre project because "you felt bad."  There’s a moment—just before you type “Sure!” or say “Happy to!”—when your stomach drops.
You know that feeling. That little whisper that says, I...

"Take My Hand and Let's Go Roaming..." — A New Adaptation of Brigadoon

Friends, I humbly share with you all: I made a thing. Well. I RE-made a thing. And what an honor it is.  Inspired by the giants of Alan J Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and with the support and encouragement of their families and estates, a new Brigadoon is coming in to the world, and it is making its world premiere in my birthplace, Los Angeles, at the Tony-Award winning Pasadena Playhouse helmed by the man who was there for my first American job Artistic Director Danny Feldman.

I love Scotland. I ...