94 - May to December 2015

From my Dorian Gray diary:

6 May 2015

"Finished my last final today - playwrighting - and with it, my first year of grad school. In typical me fashion, I came home and sat at the piano. I've been thinking of what to do for my thesis proposal. Turning The Chronicles of Percy Pickwick [the play I wrote for class] into a musical is one idea. BUT, I keep coming back to Dorian Gray. Why? There is something about the story that I can't turn away from. I tried to conjure up how I felt when I saw the newest film version and turn that into something musically. I think this is a great idea - a great way for me to try adapting a novel into a play, or in this case...a musical!!"

That night, I wrote what would become Dorian's theme. Over the course of the next month, I began working on the plot. If you are familiar with the novel, much of the dramatic action happens all at once, so how can you spread that around into 2 acts, offering 2 climaxes? This was suddenly clearer to me than it was back in 2013/2014 when I watched the film.

I talked

with my professor in June about adapting. I was hoping to try to adapt the novel into the book of the musical over the summer. I tried while on the Aran Islands in late June and failed. Was this going to be a reachable goal? Should I try to do something easier?

On July 5, while in Paris, I had a nice chat with Oscar, and asked him to help me do this - to not only turn his amazing work into a musical, but to guide me in doing it the way he would want it done.

In August, I purchased an abridged audio version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, hoping to hear a condensed version of the novel, so I could perhaps hear only the important parts - or at least one editor's interpretation of those important parts.

More melodies flowed through my mind and fingers. I recorded them on my phone to preserve them. Only a few were actually written down on manuscript paper.

That's about all I really had time to do during the fall semester. By November, I was meeting with my advisor and trying to narrow down a plot structure along with a few song ideas, but nothing was very clear. I was really starting to have second thoughts.

Over Christmas break, I went home to North Carolina and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote - adapting as much of the novel into script form as I could and I felt essential to the plot.

12 January 2016

"Today, I finished my first draft of Act 1...at least the book. My goal is to work on Act 2 this week, finishing it by the end of next week."

Act 2 took awhile to finish...but more on that tomorrow!

94 days to go!