This morning I return for the third time in two days (and not the last time today either) to the part of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area north of the Columbia River in order to help out a friend in my local congregation with her desire for a puppet show. For someone who writes as often as I do (and readers of this blog are well aware of how much that is), it is perhaps a bit surprising that I have not done more writing for others, and that most of my writing has been largely for myself and my own purposes. This is not to say that my writing for myself has always had its desired purpose, but rather that it has been more for me than for others. As it happens, the knowledge of my being a writer in this case has led to me spending a fair amount of my morning writing what amounts to a short commissioned skit for a particularly anxious and fretful puppet.
There is something that is unusual about writing commissioned works that is not present when one writes for oneself. Commissioned works often have a great deal more constraint to them in terms of their creation, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. There is either limits as to the content or other aspects of the work, or there is a constraint on one’s expression because of who is commissioning the work. For example, Jane Austen was given what amounted to a demand to write a novel dedicated to the Crown Prince of England, a man whom she loathed because of his ungentlemanly behavior towards his wife and his own dissolute morals. The novel she wrote, Emma, contains a great deal of subtle criticism about people who have a great deal of money but are somewhat dissolute in their habits, although it is rather constrained on this point, while presenting a heroine whose complicated attitude to marriage (in that she is a matchmaker who does not seek a match for herself, at least consciously) are not that different from the attitudes of the Crown Prince itself. It is, nevertheless, a very subtle work operated under difficult constraints. The same is true of works of genius such as the operettas by Handel [1], works commissioned and supported by the king and by the cultural elite of England.
The puppet show I am writing (which is rare in that I am not writing myself any explicit role in the skit) has similar constraints. Particularly, it has the constraint of being written for a particular group of people (in this case one puppetmistress whose puppet is an anxious but decent-hearted puppet girl as well as her older and wiser friend, who is another wife and mother within the congregation) as well as having a time limit of 5 minutes, which means I will have to be very condensed in my writing. There have already been a few ideas bounced around about the play, and this morning, when I head off, there will be more ideas from the people performing, which is also a constraint. These constraints need not be a bad thing, though, as what is probably my most lighthearted and popular work, a skit I wrote about a “Biblical Reenactment Society” was itself written with someone else present to bounce ideas off of, and had edits and creative input from all of the classmates at the Ambassador Bible Center that I wrote that skit for. Given that my writing tends toward the melancholy and serious if I write by myself for myself, some input from others is necessary to keep my works lighthearted. I suppose I cannot be lighthearted very well alone, which is not too surprising. Let us hope it goes well, as I must be off.
Edge Induced Cohesion 