RULES FOR WRITING LIBRETTO II

CONTINUED FROM: Rules for Writing Libretto

9. Know your ABC’s

Suppose A, B, and C represent three different emotional states. Within your libretto, a character might feel enraged that so-and-so did such-and such (A). They might also have lots of ideas about how to fix the resulting snafu (B). They might also feel quiet but unbreakable resolve to finally confront old so-and-so (C).

In a first draft, most of us will draft a character’s text so that these contrasting feelings come out jumbled up: ACBBACCBA. This jumble can create a really nifty effect in poetry, prose, and plays. But when writing libretto, arrange the inner states in a first-this, then-that line: AAABBBCCC. No matter what musical form your composer is working in, it will likely be easier for music to digest text when it’s sectioned out in this way. The music can commit to one gesture completely before moving on to the next.

This straight line may seem pedestrian to you, or even dumbed-down; but remember the audience only gets one pass at your text. They will perceive its inner structures more clearly when those structures aren’t presented in an ambiguous swirl. Of course you can deploy informational ambiguity for plot purposes, but with libretto you don’t have to deploy much emotional ambiguity. In opera, the best emotional ambiguity arises in the space between the words and the music.

10. Know your numbers

Section your scene by discrete musical number: this is an aria, this is a duet, this is an ensemble, etc. This sounds obvious, but my own first drafts tend to assume that a) arias, duets, ensembles, etc. are painfully obvious features of the genre, and b) I should therefore start complicating, obscuring, dovetailing, and challenging these formal conventions as much as possible. So I’m talking to myself here when I say: go easy on the subtlety.

Again, your audience only gets one pass. You want them to be able to feel contrast when they pass from one room of your house to another. If you blend forms together too smoothly — or worse yet, never make any decision as to what is what — it will flatten this effect. Harness the power of the double-bar line. Make it so obvious that your number could have a big, tacky “#1: TITLE” marking at the top of the page — even though it doesn’t.

A confession on my use of the word tacky: imagine a spectrum of genres with Broadway/MT pieces on one end, and operas on the other. More specifically: a spectrum with herky-jerky start/stop divisions between speaking and singing on one end, and unbroken musical continuum on the other. I have an overwhelming, hardwired, visceral dislike of pieces on the start/stop end of that spectrum. I will always feel in my bones that the Wagner/late Verdi/Puccini/Debussy/Strauss way of making operas — unifying dramatic time into a seamless whole — was a massive technological advance over the dialogue-number distinction in Handel/Mozart/Rossini, et al. I have no clue why MT keeps that clumsy way of doing things alive. Yet even I, in my weird loathing of it, still make myself think dialogue-number distinction when drafting a libretto. It’s like the studs behind a wall, or the rebar in concrete. You don’t have to show your work in the final product, but you do have to do it.

11. Keep society high

Always involve as many characters as you can involve. Make your onstage world as restlessly social as possible. I am a solitary type in day-to-day life, and perhaps because of this my default is to have characters talk to themselves alone. It’s an easy groove to fall into: you draft a thought for a character to have, and then you keep having more thoughts, so you just keep putting them in the mouth of that character. How can you distribute these internal positions among more characters? How many different ways can you have them challenge, affirm, agree, disagree, interrupt, ignore, destabilize, contradict each other?

This adds depth and sparkle to your work. Every time characters move in/out of a conversation, that movement deepens the illusion they are real people. More importantly, turning the interaction dial up to 11 excavates little conflicts in your story you didn’t know existed: aaah yes, if so-and-so overheard this, they would feel x, y, and z about it… For every line you write, consider what would happen if every other character in your story overheard it. Work the cat’s cradle, one-by-one. Even if you don’t end up writing that character into the scene, knowing their position will help sharpen your plot (remembering Shelby Foote’s definition of plot: plot is not what happens; plot is what order information is let off the leash). There’s even a practical concern here: bringing characters onstage as often as possible distributes the vocal burden more evenly among singers, and is a more stimulating use of their rehearsal time.

There’s also a magic unique to opera, where lines can be stone-cold distributed, as-is, to other characters. I once had a director I trust do it for me in workshop: he just took lines I wrote for Character X and gave them to Character Y, lock stock and barrel. I loved it. It deepened the meaning of the text without changing a word. Try doing it yourself, as an easy act of revision. Don’t worry about staging; that’s the director’s job. Dare to get weird. Go ahead and confuse your audience — they’ll live.

There’s a moment in Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied where we’re seeing the protagonist in a North Vietnamese prison camp, and at the same time seeing his wife back home alone in the United States. We’re following a conversation between the protagonist and his captor, which builds to a really threatening last line from the captor — only the really threatening line last is not sung by the captor. It’s sung by the wife, across the stage and across the world. You think you’re looking at literal events, only to realize you’re looking at psychological events. Of course their marriage would be strained by this, duh… but the opera saves itself a lot of time telling that strain by showing it with the one line switch. It’s a nightmarish blurring of character, and a great example of the neurological flicker only sung text can pull off. It totally snaps your sense of time and place — as real life will sometimes do.

12. No line with no why

Compared to a novel or a play or a movie script, the word count on a libretto is drastically low. In general you have to create your universe, populate it with complex people, have them navigate some high-stakes decisions, then clean up and get out with good pacing in under 10K words. There’s not enough square footage in such a house for random clutter. This means every single line in the libretto needs to have a why.

This why shows up on two levels: 1) every line needs to justify its existence on your highly limited pages, i.e. every line needs to be doing something. Every line needs to be turning the narrative gear by one tooth. But 2) every line also needs to have its own why in the mind of the character speaking it. You must know the whole formless, pre-verbal ball of wax in that character’s gut causing them to say what they say.

This is tougher to get right. It’s an enormous leap of empathy and imagination. Get up from your desk and try. Say your character’s lines in your character’s voice. Walk across the room the way they would walk across the room. Microdose a little method acting. No one’s watching. Be a bad actor. See if you can inhabit your character’s brain stem for a minute.

For a while, I even undertook the practice of writing out little acting-motivation cues before every line — parentheticals to show the secret reason a character is saying what they’re saying:

CHARACTER 1

(hoping to be invited in) xxxxxxxxxxx

CHARACTER 2

(guarded, snide, remembering their exchange at the party last night) xxxxxxxxxxx

CHARACTER 1

(still feeling owed because of the b.s. CHARACTER 2 pulled with the estate lawyer last year) xxxxxxxxxxx

CHARACTER 2

(flabbergasted at this bastard’s alacrity) xxxxxxxxxxx

Then, of course, I deleted my parentheticals before sending it on to the composer. But if there was no such obvious motivation behind a line, I didn’t let myself include the line.

A sidebar on librettists and character motivation: no one I know started out being a librettist. We all come at this from some other line of work, and in general those lines of work fall into two categories. On the one hand are what I would call Desk Librettists: poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists, etc., people who write other things and therefore end up writing a libretto. Then there are Stage Librettists: actors, singers, directors, composers, etc., people who work in the theater and therefore end up writing a libretto.

Desk Librettists start with words, and try to turn them into real people. Stage Librettists start with real people, and try to turn them into words. That’s a huge generalization, of course, but a useful one. Desk Librettists (myself included) often have terrible difficulty with Rule 12, knowing a character’s why. Writing comes easy, but with it the danger we will just generate text in a vacuum for no reason. Stage Librettists, by contrast, find Rule 12 too obvious to mention. They may have difficulty sitting down to write, but their game of whys is so clear that the writing hardly matters.

If you’re a Desk Librettist (generally more introverted), try to get more Stage Librettist (generally more extroverted) energy in your life: call a friend, grab a drink, gossip, flirt, gab, stir the pot, talk to strangers, make them tell you stories — sacrifice your own writing time to a gonzo study of homo sapiens in the wild. Whatever people say, give no attention to how they say it. Give all your attention to why they say it.

If you’re naturally a Stage Librettist, see Rule 13.

13. Make it well

Please, fellow librettists, please, by all that is holy, please, FFS, please: craft your text as well as you possibly can.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King recalls a conversation he had with Amy Tan about Q&A sessions after readings. They both noted, to their own amazement, that their audiences never ask them about language. Which, if you think about it, is crazy. Not asking a writer about language is like not asking a mason about stone. Language is all we actually control. The rest is projection, association, hallucination by the audience.

W.H. Auden defined a poem as “a verbal contraption.” Cleanth Brooks described great writing as a “well-wrought urn.” Contraption, urn, whatever image you like: think of your text as a physical object. Your job is to build it so it doesn’t break. Build it so it hangs together snugly — no plastic, no gaps, no scotch tape, no guesswork. Don’t throw a first draft at people just because the language conveys good events or ideas. Revise until it’s good as language. Show respect — not only to your collaborators, but also to the genre. It’s true some librettos are bad writing, but that doesn’t mean yours has to be. Work harder. Work smarter. Be obsessive. Make your text into a luxury product.

If you don’t, it affects people. Singers have to repeat your text hundreds of times: in practice learning it, in coaching refining it, in music rehearsal memorizing it, in staging rehearsal absorbing it into their bodies, and in repeated performance. Don’t make them eat junk. The delivery of your text also involves composers, pianists, orchestral players, conductors, stage directors, costume designers, lighting designers, stage managers, and more technical support than you will ever meet. The delivery of your text costs real people real money. It will be delivered — thanks to the music, in slow motion — to an audience more or less trapped in their seats. Your text is spending down an hour or two of other people’s lives. You have a moral responsibility to craft it as tightly as you can.

What exact word would this character choose — given their birthplace, their schooling, their profession, their personality, their age, their culture, their goals, their circumstances, their current emotional state? Which word sounds best, as sound? Take meaning out of it — hear the word as noise, as vowel and consonant. Which word makes for the easiest sing? Which word creates the most compelling rhythm within the sentence? (Given what the character is saying and why, should they say it in a smooth, even rhythm — or a spiky, destabilizing one? The librettist is the first composer here.) Which word is the most shocking? Which word is the most memorable? Which word makes for the sharpest turn in an aria? Which word achieves the most with the fewest syllables? Which word packs the most double-meaning into your sentence? Which word has the most ironic etymology? Which word ties into the images and concepts you’ve already set up? Within the game rules you’ve established, there’s usually a right answer to these questions.

Does every line of your dialogue cause the next line, so the conversation cracks back and forth like a Newton’s cradle? Does your libretto hold up to multiple hearings — so that while it’s clear on the first hearing, it will nonetheless be giving new meanings, on new levels, on the umpteenth hearing? Did you make the most text out of the least material? In music, this is called motivic saturation: the way a Bach fugue secretly builds an entire piece of music out of the opening subject. You’re three minutes into the piece, thinking you’re hearing new music, only to discover that you’re hearing the subject turned upside down, plus the subject run backwards and slowed down at the same time. It’s making new stuff out of the given stuff. It’s not wasting any part of the animal. It’s the fractal joy of the matryoshka doll. Does everything in your text cause everything else in your text?

Some easy processes for revision:

• Print your draft out. Something about reading on a glowing screen speeds the eye up, and makes it accept fluff. Every single time I read a draft on paper, I find new things I want to cut or tweak. Dead trees are magic.

• Read your draft aloud. Stop reading on every line, and make sure the line snaps. Slow yourself down. Every syllable will have its effect in the concert hall.

• Search for places where you’ve restated the same thing multiple ways. Compress these lines, or keep the most poetically suggestive line and cut the rest. Cut until your meaning isn’t explicit. Let the audience fill in some meaning of their own. If you don’t, it feels like a lecture. If you do, it feels magic — because the audience is plugging their own connections into your text.

• Recruit friends to take turns reading your different characters. Hearing a line in someone else’s voice can spotlight all kinds of problems. If you don’t like what you hear — even if you don’t know why — cut it right away. Deal with the missing material later. When it comes to this gut reaction, it’s first thought, best thought. So many people aren’t vicious enough towards their own text. If you don’t like something, kill it.

• To level up the killing idea: take a totally random passage and destroy it. If you’re typing, delete the passage and don’t paste. If you’re writing by hand, pour ink over it. Shred it. Actually destroy your own writing — then reconstruct that passage from memory. 99% of the time, you’ll reconstruct it better. This is not just tweaking the first draft and calling it a second draft. This is doing a second first draft — which improves text at a deeper level. The fear, of course, is that a great line might get lost. Guess what? If you don’t remember the line… it wasn’t memorable. This process is not for the faint of heart, but it’s character-building. It helps you get over the basic danger baked into writing anything, where you fall in love with something simply because you wrote it. It helps you be less tense, and more objective.

Running such processes — and you can invent more for yourself — produces refined writing. Please understand that word literally: refined isn’t an adjective meaning highbrow. Refined is a participle; refined writing has been refined: filtered, cleaned, clarified, boiled down, reduced like a sauce, reduced like a fraction.

14. Make it good

Of course, it’s not enough to make it well. You also have to make it good. Make your libretto a force for good in the world. Make it something you personally believe in. Take a hard look at the society around you, then make your work into something that helps.

Please don’t take this as a finger-wagging social responsibility sermon. I’m as art-for-art’s-sake as they come, and I have not always followed this rule in my own work. I’m also not saying that you have to write a “social justice opera.” These have been the fad in new opera for a while now, and they sometimes fail to connect with audiences.

What I am saying is: don’t stop at showing people a problem. Don’t let the libretto itself — the authorial position of the whole show — whine or pout or worry or despair. If you show a problem, show a solution. People want to leave the theater a little higher than they came. We live in a uniquely downer era. People need positivity, encouragement, fight, optimism, pluck, vigor, transcendence, lightness, humor, hope. When the lights are down and the music is in the pocket, opera can summon these energies from inside us.

You only have enough lifespan to write X number of projects. No matter how long you live, X will never feel like enough. So make each shot count. Why be shy? Try to make art that changes lives.