Leave Your Presciptions in the Medicine Cabinet

At the beginning of every meeting I read the meeting guidelines. The fifth guideline states:

Don't be prescriptive.

"What does that mean?" That means we ask that people who participate in the feedback sessions give the writer's the dignity of discovering for themselves the story they are trying to write. The way to do this is by not prescribing to the writer what we think as a participant they need to do to improve their script.

"Um... wait a second. This is a feedback session. Aren't we supposed to be telling the writer what we think of their work?" You are very curious today Mr. anonymous, make-believe, inquisitor but I'm glad you asked... The answer is, "sort of." The way I have set up meetings to be run is to ask the group questions to help the writer and explore their work. The reasons for this approach are multiple.

People don't like to be judged; especially when trying to be creative. It's a basic fear - right up there with being devoured by a mountain lion. That dynamic pisses all over the creative process.

When someone is bringing a new piece to share, it's like they are bringing a new born child to introduce to the world. When a scenario arises where you have one person in a submissive role of taking direction from another, the situation shuts down the participants intuitive mind. People become guarded. Everyone enters the realm of the critical left-brain and people's egos take over. My goal is to make sure that feedback sessions do not become a place for folks to jockey for displays of competency or to show everyone that they have read more books then everyone else in the room.

A technique that William Ball author of, A Sense of Direction, and founder of the American Conservatory of Theatre used with actors is to put feedback in the form of questions. In tailoring feedback sessions with Drama Foundry participants in a similar way, we are working to get folks to trust their intuition. By learning what questions to ask the writers and actors in the group will inherently learn to trust their intuition and come up with the right answers to fuel their own creative processes.

For me, another aspect to framing feedback in a non-prescriptive way is that I know that I am very guilty at times of wanting someone to tell me how to do my art. I'm scared I'm not going to do it perfectly. When I get like this I am not having to take responsibility for the choices I make and that usually also means I am not mindful of why I made the choices I made in the first place. When I get in that space, then I'm not owning my writing. In order to be successful in life people have to own their territory. That's true whether someone is constructing a narrative or they are an actor making decisions in how to interpret a character. In feedback sessions where their is a dynamic of participants being prescriptive it will foster a dynamic where the writers and actors will be looking over their shoulder to see whether or not they are doing their art "right". When caught between the book ends of right and wrong nothing is ever finished creatively. We have to give ourselves permission to do things messy so we can get something finished.

Why is this so important? The experience a writer has at one of our meetings after bringing a piece to share may determine if they continue working on the piece. Or worse, their experience may determine if they continue writing. My hope is that who ever runs a meeting, whether it is myself or someone else, that they understand that they are there to protect the dynamic of the group and the creative process of the writers and the actors. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly nor is it one that can afford to be tarnished by self-serving intentions.