I’ve always wanted to tackle the NaNoWriMo challenge (“National Novel Writer’s Month”), where authors commit to writing a thousand words a day for a month. For various reasons, I have not.

That doesn’t mean I can’t create my own, however.  As I mentioned yesterday, my daughter’s high school is performing Hamlet November 16-17. That’s a week and a half away. My goal is to produce a summary/guide/cheatsheet to the play that could be circulated among the 11yr olds (my daughter’s friends) that would meet two goals:  first, that they could actually understand what’s going on, and second, that it might prove interesting enough that they want to go see the play.

Last night I knocked out 1382 words on the subject.

I’ll report back daily until my task is complete.  Unlike NaNoWriMo where the goal of the entire month is word count (with editing presumably to follow), I have a hard deadline of next Thursday (allowing them time to read it before show time!) for something that’s at least acceptably edited and formatted.

Wish me broken legs!  Because if I broke a leg then I could stay home from work and write more about Shakespeare. 🙂

Back in April 2011 I told you about Still Dreaming, the next project from Hank Rogerson (who brought us the award winning Shakespeare Behind Bars). At the time they were looking for funds to start filming, and they easily hit their goal and went off to do just that.

Fast forward two years and filming is complete! But it does take a great deal of effort (and, ahem, resources) to see a movie through to completion, and they’re looking for funds to complete the work on “hiring a composer, doing a sound mix, titles, and final polish.”

What I think is amazing about the potential for this story is that they’re not just walking into their local nursing home and sticking a script in front of a bunch of people who’ve never acted a day in their long lives (although that would be a story in itself, albeit a different one). These are people who have been entertainers for decades, and who aren’t letting age get in the way of their ability to continue being entertainers. 

“What is it like to lead a creative life, even at the end of your life?” Spitzmiller asks in voiceover. It works on a whole bunch of levels. We talk an awful lot about the universality of Shakespeare, and I think we’re about to witness another demonstration of it.

The mission statement for Shakespeare Geek has become, “Shakespeare makes life better.” I think that if Hank has his way we’re going to see a demonstration of exactly that.  If you’d like to see Still Dreaming become a reality, please consider donating to their fundraising campaign.

For years, loyal readers know, I’ve been telling Shakespeare stories to my children. Sometimes as a bedtime story, sometimes by request, and sometimes to entire classrooms of elementary school children.  Thus far it’s been fairly straightforward, and I’ve been able to tell most of them off the top of my head.

This month is got complicated.  My daughter, at 11yrs old, is in middle school (sixth grade) and starting down the theatre road (she’s playing an orphan in their production of Annie next month).  What’s interesting is that in the high school, just three short years away, they do Shakespeare.  This year it’s Hamlet.

I thought, “I know! I’ll write up a Hamlet intro/guide/summary/cheat sheet that’s not just an off-the-top-of-my-head summary, but an actual short ebook that would be advanced enough for middle school kids to understand. My goal : a middle school student reads my book, then goes to see Hamlet, and actually gets a better experience because of it.” I even told my daughter that I’d have something for her, and that if we thought it was good enough, maybe she could forward it around to some of her friends. My true goal would be to go straight to her teachers, of course, and distribute it that way.

And here I sit, word processor at the ready, half a dozen attempts started and restarted.  How do you summarize Shakespeare?  At one end you just collapse it down to the essential plot line, leave out most of the interesting bits, and end up with something that could as easily be the Lion King. But at the far end of the spectrum you get something in the “modern English translation” category where you’re so afraid to leave out even a single bit that you go through the play word by word, “updating” it in the hopes of making it easier to understand? Does that ever work?

I’m looking for advice.  I don’t want to do some sort of novelization where I’m reinventing setting and dialogue.  I want to tell enough of the play, presumably to an audience that’s not yet seen it, that when they *do* see it they’ll recognize what’s going on and be able to pay attention to details that I’ve told them ahead of time to watch for.

Right now I’m going scene by scene, almost as if they were on flash cards.  That at least gives me a baseline to treat the entire play on equal footing (rather than front loading it with all the introductory stuff and the whipping through other scenes too quickly).  I’m not sure how that will format in the final version.  I’d also like to something more character driven.  I definitely believe in the “short attention span” approach, and would like to serve up Hamlet in a number of bite-sized, more easily processed bits.  If my reader wants to absorb them in random order, that’s fine with me.

How would you summarize Shakespeare?  Would you swing more toward the “less is more” side, cutting out everything that gets in the way? Or is every detail important, and it’s all a matter of how succinctly you explain them?

While trying to explain all of Hamlet’s characters to my daughter I found another interesting spin I’d never considered.

Poor Francisco is in the play entirely to hand over the watch to Bernardo and Marcellus (and Horatio, but he’s not technically one of the guards). 

How come one guy is being relieved by two?

Second question – do you think Francisco saw the ghost? 

Think about it. He has no witnesses to back his story. Who is he going to tell?  At least Marcellus and Bernardo have someone else with them so they can do that whole “Did you see what I just saw?” dance.  But Francisco’s just out there by his lonesome with no one to talk to but himself.

I got a laugh out of the image of the ghost appearing before Francisco, and Francisco just staring blankly back at him.  The ghost, who is here to get a message to Hamlet, gets more and more frustrated at Francisco’s refusal to tell anybody that he eventually throws up his hands and tries Marcellus and Bernardo.  Meanwhile Francisco’s all, “Yeah, I’m not saying a word about this.”

You could even work it in here:

BERNARDO Have you had … quiet guard?

FRANCISCO

(wait for it…..wait for it…..) Not a mouse stirring.
“If you’re asking whether I saw the ghost of dead king Hamlet then no I most certainly did not thank you very much, I’m going to bed.”

Ok, so. I’ve had this review copy of Ian Doescher’s “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars” for months, given to me by the publisher, with the intent that I post a review.  And then I never did it.  The more time goes past the more I tell myself I should, and then I feel guilty that I’d be forcing myself to review it out of guilt and thus not give it a fair review, and then I put it off even longer.

So it’s only fair that I give it to someone who is going to review it.

How To Enter

1) You must be a Shakespeare blogger.  You can prove this by posting something on your Shakespeare blog, linking back to ShakespeareGeek.com (the homepage if you please, not this specific post).

2) You must not have previously reviewed the book. I don’t know why you’d want another copy if you already have one, but I need to put this in.  I’d like the book to go to someone who has not yet read it, and would like to.

3) In your post, make a Shakespeare/Star Wars reference of some sort. Be creative.  Here’s a whole bunch of ideas to get you started.

4) Contact me and let me know you’ve done this and where I can check.

5) Do all of this before end of day Saturday, November 9, 2013.  That’s this Saturday. End of day for the detail-oriented folks means midnight in the Eastern Standard time zone, counting for daylight savings time. I’ve never had anybody run it down to the minute before but my lawyers insist I say that.

6) Continental US residents only, please.

Obviously I am hoping that the winner will succeed where I failed, and post a review of the book. I can’t force that ahead of time, I can only ask nicely.  So whoever does win, please post a review of the book?  Thanks 🙂