Writing Prompt

From Yuknavitch’s Male Lead;

“It will feature a man whose conscious mind and subconscious mind are in reverse order. So that everything he thinks and says is as if he is using dreamspeak, as if he’s crazy, as if he’s not entirely here in the way that the rest of us are, but rather somewhere other, where language, image, and thought break back down into arbitrary parts. On the inside will be his order and logic, the distillation of chaos into patterns one can live with, the image by image splicing together of life into a linear narrative one can understand” (26).

People are constantly playing a role with front-stage and back-stage society. They put on their façades for the front stage, appeasing to the general way of thought and trying to blend in. On the other hand they constantly have the back-stage going on whether coming out in more casual social situations or simply being the thoughts that they keep to themselves. However, even though these two stages never mix and rarely is the back-stage called into focus there is the constant interplay between the two stages that mold the identity of the person. Using this idea, write a piece where you introduce a character according to this front-stage/back-stage rational. That is show how a character may act in a certain situation with a front-stage façade while recognizing the back-stage or internal feelings that they may also be experiencing. Then in the midst of the piece switch, bring the back-stage persona to the front and move the front-stage persona to the back. In other words have the character speak, feel, and act as they would normally in a back-stage setting or against societal norms in front-stage situations and have their internal dialogue or back-stage actions be what would be expected from them in a front-stage setting.