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The wonderfully named Indigo Moore is three artists in one–at least. He’s a poet and a playwright who is now writing the screenplay for a play that was optioned for film. (Not to mention that he’s got a high-tech day job we talk about a little bit.) He’s also an editor–and we were sure to get that perspective on submission and what he learned as a writer from editing.When we caught up with him, he was also writing a new play on commission, and we talked about having that kind of external deadline, the art of submitting, as well as the different mindsets required for different genres. He described playwriting as a language-driven medium, as compared to the image-driven medium of poetry. In addition to laying out the process of calling or stripping a poem, he gave us a terrific description of a scene that you might see in a novel and how it would be written for a play and then how to make that same scene imagistic and wordless in a screenplay. Since writing is rewriting, we also looked at revision in different genres. We also got into following the character and trusting the process. He urged us to hunting inspiration down with a stick rather than sitting around and waiting for it.
Books/ Authors/ Artists/ Screenplays Discussed:
Henry Dumas
Desiree Cooper
Jimi Hendrix
Paul Robeson
The Pulp Fiction screenplay
Indigo Moor
Indigo Moor is a poet, playwright, and author with 12 years’ experience teaching creative writing. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem Prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series.
Three of his short plays, Harvest, Shuffling, and The Red and Yellow Quartet debuted at the 60 Million Plus Theatre’s Spring Playwright’s festival. His full-length stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award has been optioned for a full length film.
Indigo is an honors’ graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program, where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting. In addition, he is a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, former Vice President of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and a distinguished Cave Canem alumni.
An engineer by trade, Indigo emphasizes ingraining elements of poetry as tools for the writer’s arsenal. His students learn the “how” as well as the “why” of effective poetry, enabling the individual to better understand how their own work can be refined. Indigo encourages emphasis on the conciseness that drives powerful, evocative poetry.
Indigo received the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers and the 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest. Other honors include: 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist finishes for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.