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How to Turn Your Book into a Musical (with Eric Elder) · The Daily Writer

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever thought about turning your book into a musical?
0:05
SPEAKER_00: We talk a lot about repurposing content here on the Smart Business Writing Podcast, but I bet you've never heard anyone talking about turning their book into a stage musical.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, stay tuned because you're going to get the lowdown from my great friend Eric Elder, who just did this with his very own book.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Well, hello, my friend.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: This is Kent Sanders from Inquil Ghostwriting.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this episode of the Smart Business Writing Podcast.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: This is the show that helps you grow your business, amplify your authority, and increase your impact through the power of writing.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you joining me today, and I'm really excited for this episode because I get to feature my great friend Eric Elder.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Truly he's one of my very best friends in the world.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Eric is many things.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: He's a pianist, a music producer, an author of well over 20 books at this point, an online pastor, a writing coach, and the list could go on and on and on.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: As you can see, Eric is pretty much a creative genius.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: One title that he was able to add to his list recently is creator of the hit musical, his name was Nicholas.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, Eric has been a guest on the show before.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: Back on episode 69, he talked about why you should write a book.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: On episode 80, he shared why it's important to think like an entrepreneur and to take control over your destiny.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: And those conversations in many ways helped shape the context of this episode, which is taking those themes in a bold new direction by taking an existing book of yours and creating a whole new creative experience from it.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: And as you listen to this conversation, Eric is going to share why he decided to turn his book, St.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Nicholas the Believer, into a musical, what that process was like, all about his collaborators, and so much more.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: But also, you get a special performance of one of the songs from the musical, which is pretty cool.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you from experience that Eric is completely the real deal.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: Eric and I, along with another friend of ours, Al, we've met in a weekly writer's mastermind for the last, gosh, I don't know, at least five years, I think, maybe six years.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I've been amazed at Eric's creative output.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you with 100% sincerity that my life is better in countless ways because of my friendship with Eric.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: So without further ado, let's get right to the conversation with my good friend Eric Elder.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Eric Elder, welcome to the Smart Business Writing Podcast for your second appearance.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad that we were able to set up this time to have a chat about your book and your musical.
2:37
SPEAKER_02: Always a good conversation with you.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: So what most people don't realize is that we've actually both of us have been a part of a mastermind group that meets almost every week.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: I would say probably every week of the year, except maybe three or four weeks, probably.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: And we've been doing this what the last five years or so.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Something like that.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: So this is like just another conversation that we have because we talk and then with the the third guy Al in our group, of course, we're texting constantly back and forth.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: So pretty much on a daily basis, we're all talking on some level.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: Which is fun.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: So I love it.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I guess this makes it official.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: This is an official conversation.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: So we're here to talk about um about your book.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Um the book is called St.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Lin St.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Nicholas the Believer, but the musical is called His Name is Nicholas.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And I'm really excited to have this conversation because this is different than a lot of the stuff that we normally talk about in the show.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Most of the guests that we talk about that I talk to on the podcast, you know, the almost all of them have books.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're normally talking about things that are more businessy in nature, but I'm really excited because uh what you're doing is a blend of uh creative arts, music, book, and business.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of things that mix into this at once.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: So let's start out with a story of first of all, the book that your musical is based on.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: The book, again, is called Saint St.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Nicholas the Believer, and I'll have links to that in the show notes.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: Walk us through how this book came about because I know this was a long journey, and it's a really, really fascinating story.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: Uh thanks, Kent.
4:10
SPEAKER_02: It is actually a long journey.
4:12
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh and yet it it's uh it's just an exciting journey, so it makes it not seem like a drudgery.
4:18
SPEAKER_02: It's been uh it's been exciting all the way through it.
4:21
SPEAKER_02: And so uh, but it was really 25 years ago.
4:23
SPEAKER_02: My wife had an idea uh when we had young kids at home, and uh she knew the story of the real Saint Nicholas, the Nicholas who lived back in the third and fourth century, uh, who went on to uh greater fame as Santa Claus, uh Sinter Klaus in uh Dutch, and so it became Santa Claus in our language, and uh throughout the world uh he became known as Santa Claus.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: And so the Saint Nicholas uh really was a real man, and his story was fascinating.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: And so I think uh she started telling me parts of his story, and I thought that was great.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: And she she said it wouldn't it be great to have an annual uh movie or a Christmas show that people could see and uh be able to tell their kids about this man who really loved Jesus very much, because we even as a as a young family we were trying to decide about Christmas and what we wanted to celebrate and not celebrate, we're making our own new traditions, and uh it was really something to navigate uh as new believers to say, where do you want to go with Santa Claus?
5:20
SPEAKER_02: Where do you want to go with Christmas trees?
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Where do you want to go with the whole uh everything surrounding Christmas?
5:25
SPEAKER_02: And so, anyway, our our desire was, you know, how can we really make sure that this is about Jesus and his birth and uh and keep it fun and light and interesting as well?
5:34
SPEAKER_02: So uh she thought it would be a great thing, like It's a Wonderful Life, or The Nutcracker, which you know, there those are movies and a ballet that are performed every year all around the world and seen on TVs all around the world.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: And so it's uh it was something that she thought this would make a great movie, the story about this real man's life.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: And so we talked about it and we uh you know started looking into his life more and doing some research, reading some books.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: And so there's a whole process that went through all this, but eventually uh we decided to go ahead and write a book about it to sort of flesh out the story and then uh turn it into a script and a score uh with music and turn it into a musical that could be either a movie or a stage production, and communities and churches all across the world could do it, plus have a movie that could be something that people could watch every year as well.
6:22
SPEAKER_02: So uh that's sort of what we where it started, and just trying to turn this uh this idea into a uh an actual going uh concern here.
6:33
SPEAKER_02: And so it neither of us were filmmakers, neither of us were writers or authors at the time.
6:38
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and uh it was just an idea what my wife had that uh I thought that's that's a great idea.
6:43
SPEAKER_02: Let's see where we can go with that.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: So for those who have not read the book yet, uh okay, I'm looking really quick here.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Are there 50 chapters?
6:51
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm sorry, there's 37 chapters.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: So did you write the book with a potential musical or adaptation of some kind in mind?
7:02
SPEAKER_00: Was that in your mind from the very beginning as you were constructing the book?
7:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was actually.
7:08
SPEAKER_02: So this is the book, uh St.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: Nicholas the Believer.
7:10
SPEAKER_02: It's on Amazon and our website and other places, but uh the idea was to write a book that we could then use to turn into uh a movie.
7:18
SPEAKER_02: And so writing for a movie is very different than writing a book, but uh I'm a writer and I liked writing, and so I I thought, you know, if we could flesh out the stories, you know, what are the 30 main incidents in his life that we know of from history that we could uh turn into a series of stories, string them together in a logical way that builds it, you know, to a nice climax and all uh what kind of story could we tell using those factual pieces that we know?
7:46
SPEAKER_02: And so the book was really a way to flesh out some of that.
7:48
SPEAKER_02: And so I wrote the chapters, they're very short, uh, it's you know of just a couple pages, two or three pages, four pages per chapter, to try to lay out what this story would look like from front to back.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh not with the idea of publishing the book necessarily, but really to move on to now how do we turn this into a movie or a stage play?
8:08
SPEAKER_02: So we did have that all in mind from the beginning, but then when the book was done, I had several people read it to help me edit and you know flesh out the story a little better.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: And they read it and thought it was great just as a book.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: And so we started selling it on Amazon about seven years ago, and people loved it.
8:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's uh one of my best-selling books, and uh people have found it.
8:24
SPEAKER_02: In fact, one ballet company down in South Carolina uh found it on Amazon, they wanted to do a new ballet, and so they created a whole two and a half hour ballet based on the book and the characters in the book.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: And so that was really exciting to see come together just a couple years ago, not on my radar plan, but just because we had a book, and uh other people can find out too.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: But yes, in answer to your question, it was designed to be uh the the beginning steps of what would eventually become a movie.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, I love the book and I love the the short chapters, and in fact, your book has become an inspiration for me to start working on my own parable type story, or really the idea of teaching things through a story.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And I know I know that uh that you didn't write the Saint Nick book with the intention of teaching, you know, like seven steps to blah blah blah, or the five keys to blah blah blah.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: But I'm not making fun of business books that do that because that's the kind of book that I'm working on now.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: In fact, so I'm kind of making fun of my I'm not even making fun of myself, I'm just saying a lot of times in the business parable type of a book you have principles and you build a story around those.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: That's just the way that that works.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: But with this, I know you're not trying to teach specific principles, it was more just to flesh out a reimagin an imagining, an imagining of St.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Nicholas's life for the basis of the musical.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: So you have the book done.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: And interesting, actually, on the on that idea of teaching through it, because I I did find as I was writing it, I wrote each chapter separately, and I'm a devotional writer generally.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: I write a lot of devotions about written a lot of them.
9:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a lot of devotions about Bible passages and probably 25 books of devotional books.
10:00
SPEAKER_02: But uh, so each day that when I wrote a chapter of this book, I had one devotional point I was trying to get across.
10:07
SPEAKER_02: So every scene was different in a different way because I I thought, you know, what's interesting about this scene, what the element is in this scene is hope.
10:15
SPEAKER_02: Or what the element in this scene is how do you deal with grief?
10:17
SPEAKER_02: Or in this scene, you know, how do you deal with uh you know the reality of Jesus?
10:21
SPEAKER_02: Was he a real person?
10:22
SPEAKER_02: And so every every every chapter is sort of like a scene in the movie, but each one is a devotional in its own right.
10:29
SPEAKER_02: And so I actually offer it to people as a devotional uh that they can get on my website at theranch.org and they can sign up and receive it every day for 40 days and get a little devotional storytelling.
10:40
SPEAKER_02: So uh it does have a little, it's it's got some teaching in it.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have chapter and verse Bible verses, but there's probably a hundred Bible verses that I allude to or quote uh in part or you know use as part of the dialogue.
10:53
SPEAKER_02: Uh so there's a lot of uh good biblical truth that's conveyed in it.
10:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, because I am a teacher as well and devotional writer, so it's it just sort of comes out.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: But it doesn't read like that.
11:02
SPEAKER_02: I think it reads very much like a story.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: You don't even know you're being uh uh taught things, hopefully.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: So that's good storytelling, I hope.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I think it's wonderful storytelling.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: I in fact, I mean I've read the book a couple times, but and I've seen the musical and and you know we've been friends for a long time, and so I've been exposed to to the ideas and the content in the book of the musical for years, but it never dawned on me that there were teaching principles in here.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: So you snuck those in in a very compelling way because I never even thought about the fact that I'm being taught something because the story is so much fun and it's so compelling.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: So good job on that.
11:39
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
11:39
SPEAKER_02: That's that's really good to hear.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: And I I plan to flesh those out a little bit.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: I want to do a 40 days reading through my new script and score for the musical.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: And uh, as I read through the script, I want to do a little sharing after I read it and talk about what those devotional points were and what scriptures I'm basing them on and how they can help your life today.
11:57
SPEAKER_02: So that's great.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: Hopefully I'll be able to actually bring out more of that, but uh I'm glad that it wasn't uh so on the nose, you know, so on the surface uh as a reader, you know, that you didn't even notice it.
12:07
SPEAKER_02: So that's great.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: Now I do want to want to get to to the part in this conversation about the musical itself, because this is going to be titled something like how to turn your book into a musical.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: But because this is a book, this was this was a book first, I do want to I have a couple more questions about the book itself because uh the way that you constructed the book was critical to then transitioning that into a different form of entertainment, in this case a musical.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the book itself, can you talk a little bit about the actual formation of the book in terms of why short chapters?
12:44
SPEAKER_00: What is the value, particularly as you're telling stories, what's the value of having short chapters versus long chapters?
12:52
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think in you know writing writing anything, you're trying to go for that one dominant theme.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: So whether it's for the whole book, you know, what's the one-sentence theme for the whole book?
13:03
SPEAKER_02: Uh I try to break that down then into scenes or chapters.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: So what's the one dominant theme for this chapter?
13:08
SPEAKER_02: What's the point I'm trying to drive home?
13:10
SPEAKER_02: Where is it headed?
13:11
SPEAKER_02: So so keeping it short helped me just stick to that one theme.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh so it's the same if you're designing artwork or a cover for your graphic or something.
13:20
SPEAKER_02: You you uh stick to one dominant theme.
13:23
SPEAKER_02: And so by keeping the chapter short, it helped me just say, here's what I'm trying to go for.
13:28
SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't, like I say, so so obvious about it.
13:30
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't on the surface.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it wasn't till the very end of the chapter that all of a sudden you see the twist and it's like, ah, boom, and the light bulb goes on, and that's that's what that was about.
13:39
SPEAKER_02: But I think keeping it short helped also just the practical dynamics of uh how I wrote the book, and uh maybe we'll talk about this later, but I can share now using this nano-Rimo, the National Novel Writing Month.
13:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh the first time I'd ever done this, I I hadn't known about this.
13:56
SPEAKER_02: I had heard there was this contest out there, and it was just a contest for yourself.
14:00
SPEAKER_02: But they wanted to encourage people all over the world to write a novel in a month for the month of November.
14:06
SPEAKER_02: And so this organization just tries to simulate people's writing and the thought that everybody uh probably has a book in them, and a lot of people want to write a book, but they never get around to it.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: So they put a challenge out there and say, Can you write a 50,000-word novel in a month?
14:21
SPEAKER_02: And so I'd heard this for two or three years, but I'd never really taken up that challenge.
14:26
SPEAKER_02: And then when the idea of the Nicholas book came, uh I thought, you know, if I was gonna, if I was gonna help my wife achieve this goal, this is one of her, you know, she had maybe five lifetime goals she had shared with me.
14:36
SPEAKER_02: She wanted to do missions work in Africa, she wanted to go to Israel, she wanted to uh do the St.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: Nicholas musical.
14:42
SPEAKER_02: But she was raising uh six kids.
14:44
SPEAKER_02: We had six kids and uh taking care of me, and we had some in-laws staying with us as well at different times.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: And so she was very busy, she homeschooled our kids, all six kids through high school.
14:54
SPEAKER_02: And so uh she was very, very busy, and for her to ever get to these projects was gonna be very difficult.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, so I thought, you know, I'm a writer, so if I'm gonna, if I can help her with any of these goals, uh, I'd love to do that.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: So I tried to think how could I help her get to Israel?
15:11
SPEAKER_02: How could I help her get to the missions trip?
15:13
SPEAKER_02: How could I help her with this project and for this project?
15:15
SPEAKER_02: I thought, you know, I could do, I could write a book version of it, because we'd done a lot of research uh for it, and I thought, you know, I'll just help her by writing the book version of it.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: That'll get her one step closer to her goal, one of her lifetime goals.
15:28
SPEAKER_02: And so I decided to do the national novel writing thing where you write a novel in a month, and all I did was one hour a day.
15:35
SPEAKER_02: I just spent during the month of November for 30 days, and I just wrote one chapter every day for an hour.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: And you can only get so many words in an hour.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, it's five, six hundred words, you know, maybe a thousand, twelve hundred words.
15:47
SPEAKER_02: Uh and so I just wrote uh each we had all the scenes laid out, 30 scenes that we wanted, and I just wrote down what each scene was.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: And so that's also why it was short, because I I had dedicated this time that I wanted to finish this in a month.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: It took me actually a month and another week or so to get through, and it turned into 42 chapters, or 37 plus intro, conclusion, epilogue, prologue.
16:09
SPEAKER_02: And uh, but by the end I had these nice, this nice uh really a short, succinct book.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: This is uh, you know, a hundred and some pages, oh two, two twenty pages, and uh but a nice little uh small book though, that a novella they would call it.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: It's about 30,000 words, so I never didn't even hit the 50,000 word goal that this national novel writing contest wanted, but uh but it helped me to keep the chapter short and to drive home one point per chapter.
16:38
SPEAKER_02: So long answer.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: The other thing that was helpful too, I was always trying to do every scene has to turn in a good book or a good movie.
16:45
SPEAKER_02: It goes from positive to negative or negative to positive, and that that flip-flop back and forth throughout the whole book, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger as you go through the whole story until you get to this dramatic, everything turns really negative, then everything turns really positive, or vice versa.
16:59
SPEAKER_02: And so this these changes have to happen.
17:02
SPEAKER_02: So in each scene, I was trying to think what's the turn?
17:06
SPEAKER_02: How does this scene turn?
17:07
SPEAKER_02: Every to every scene has to turn, uh, or else it doesn't advance the story.
17:11
SPEAKER_02: So how do you how do you advance the story?
17:13
SPEAKER_02: So I think that was part of writing the short chapters too, was you know, you know, to keep it brief, to keep it to a point, and also to see what's turning.
17:22
SPEAKER_02: And and you know, just by keeping it short, it helped me see positive, negative, turn, turn, point, point, point.
17:27
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, it it sounds very structured.
17:30
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't that structured, but it you know, just having a few of those concepts in mind before you write makes a big difference in the end product.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, you beat me to my next question, which was going to be about scene construction.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: We've talked a lot about this, and uh and I've learned a lot from you about this because you're really, really good at constructing scenes in a way that when you finish a scene or a chapter, it's surprising and it makes you want to read the next one.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that is the that is one of the hallmarks of a really good storyteller.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: So if you ever decide to put together a class on how to do all this stuff, I will be the first to sign up for it.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: Because even though I, you know, we've been friends for a long time, I feel like I'm still learning from you about all this because you just have a natural gift for storytelling.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: And for people who read the Saint Nick book, uh that's gonna be very, very obvious because it's it's great and lots of fun.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: Some is natural, some is uh reading good books, I think, like you recommended to me, like Story by Robert McKean.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: The books that uh really help me understand uh it it doesn't take much tweaking, it really doesn't to like my my the a lot of people do call this book a page turner, even though it's not like high drama, it's it's it's very uh it's very sweet and tender, but it it's a page turner in that it it keeps you turning pages.
18:45
SPEAKER_02: And uh there are some simple things, it just just one sentence at the end of a chapter, and it just leads you into the next, into the next, and so there are some simple things you can do.
18:53
SPEAKER_02: You don't have to be a brilliant novelist, I don't think.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: Uh I I don't know that I have any particular gift, but I I appreciate it if I do, but if I I do think there are things you can learn uh to help uh write better and more compelling stories.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Now let me ask about uh the musical part of the book.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: So you have the book, you want to turn it into a musical.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Let's uh let's break this down into a couple different sections.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to talk about uh the process of writing the script from the book.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: So you basically you're adapting your book into a script, but also the musical part and then the performance part.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about each of those things because those are different elements, but all critical elements of creating a musical based on a book.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, walk us through the process of adapting your own book into a into a script for a musical because it's a completely different form of storytelling, but obviously it's gonna have a lot of the same elements.
19:49
SPEAKER_02: It is, it's very different.
19:51
SPEAKER_02: I would have thought that it would have been a lot easier.
19:53
SPEAKER_02: Once I laid out the whole book, I thought, oh, this is great.
19:55
SPEAKER_02: I can just you know cut and paste a few lines from here to there because a script is a lot shorter than a book, and uh I'd be able to have the script done, but it is not that at all.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: It really was a rewrite from scratch because uh my book is very thoughtful.
20:09
SPEAKER_02: So it's uh it's it's in the head of Nicholas throughout the throughout the whole thing.
20:14
SPEAKER_02: He's he's trying to make decisions, he's trying to wonder if he if he's doing the right thing, if God is really leading him this way.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: Uh so he has a lot of uh self-doubt, but he has a lot of faith too.
20:23
SPEAKER_02: And so he's he's trying to take these steps of faith, but he's wrestling a lot inside his head.
20:27
SPEAKER_02: So I explain a lot of that.
20:29
SPEAKER_02: As an author, I can do that.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: I have lots of pages, and I can just talk about everything he's thinking about and what's going into each decision, and then he'll say one or two lines at the end of the chapter, and that's it.
20:39
SPEAKER_02: But when you go to write a play or a musical or a movie, everything has to be spoken out loud.
20:46
SPEAKER_02: So I can't just take two or three lines at the end of the chapter and that's it.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: You have to give him characters to interact with and to share those thoughts with and to have reasonable conversations with, not just, so Nicholas, tell us why what are you thinking right now?
20:59
SPEAKER_02: You know, it can't be that on the nose, it has to be more part of natural, the natural course.
21:04
SPEAKER_02: So I had to introduce new characters.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: I had to, you know, there are there are a lot of people I had to have him bounce off ideas with.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, who would those natural people be?
21:14
SPEAKER_02: And who could be his mentors, who could be his, you know, peers, who could be the people that he's teaching.
21:19
SPEAKER_02: And so I had a number of characters in the book, but I had to add more characters, I had to add more dialogue.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, but this is one interesting thing about a musical that I didn't realize until I read Stephen Schwartz's book on uh his musicals.
21:30
SPEAKER_02: He wrote the musical Wicked and lots of other very popular musicals.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: And he he said that when he saw this the book for Wicked, he really believed that it needed to be a musical.
21:42
SPEAKER_02: And other people wanted the rights to the book to turn it into just a movie uh or a play, but he felt it really needed to be a musical, and the reason was he said musicals allow you to get inside the character's head because they can sing about all their emotions, they can sing.
21:58
SPEAKER_02: That's a great point.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Can sing about the decisions they're trying to make.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: They can step aside after a big confrontation and they can process it in the form of a song.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: And you can't do that in a regular uh movie.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: You can't have you can't have the main speaker just expose it, just start to tell, okay, so this is what I'm thinking.
22:18
SPEAKER_02: So a musical is really a form that helps the characters share their story, share their perspective, and uh gives you insight into what's going on.
22:27
SPEAKER_02: The musical also is is a different genre because you're uh it's different than like Glee.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: What's the what's the movie with a lot of the Glee characters that uh there's a whole series of movies that came out uh by the high school musical?
22:43
SPEAKER_02: Uh no, not high school musical.
22:44
SPEAKER_02: You can tell I don't know anything about that.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: That idea, but it's uh uh but uh the the main one of the main uh characters in that said, you know, that their TV show and the this movie was not actually a musical.
22:55
SPEAKER_02: There was music in it, but the music never advanced the story.
22:59
SPEAKER_02: They were singing songs, so they were like a part of a choir, and so they would sing songs every once in a while, and the the story took place outside of the songs.
23:06
SPEAKER_02: But a musical, the the story is actually advanced in the song.
23:11
SPEAKER_02: So uh in addition to giving you insight into the characters, it's also advancing the story.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: So uh Curly breaks out into song in Oklahoma to say, Oh, what a day this has been.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: Oh, the sun's rising, this is a beautiful place.
23:24
SPEAKER_02: Oh, what a beautiful morning.
23:26
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: And so he's he's uh you know, he's starting off this cheery thing, which later in the show, not to ruin it, you know, the things get pretty depressing pretty quickly.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: And so uh, but you need to sort of set that up, and he he starts explaining why it's such a beautiful day, why it's such a good morning, what he's feeling, and and you get a lot of the story background, but you also advance the story, so when you're done with the song, you know, if you cut the songs out of musicals, uh the story wouldn't really work because uh because the music actually tells the story.
23:54
SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, that was a tidbit that I didn't realize uh before, but it really makes a lot of sense that a musical both gets inside the character's head plus it allows the story to advance.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you just kind of blown my mind because I'm thinking of the musicals that I love, Hamilton being number one, uh Grease is another one I'm thinking of.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Um Wizard of Oz, of course, uh Sound of Music.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's so many famous musicals over the years, maybe in St.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: St.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: Louis, St.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: Louis, however you want to say it.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: And they all do that exact same thing.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: I never realized that before.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: I'd never thought of it that way.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: So then how how did you how did you knowing that, how did you then begin to take your story and adapt it to the musical form, knowing that you were gonna have to write a bunch of songs, essentially?
24:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I I finished the book seven years ago, and a lot of things happened in the meantime that we're everybody listening is like, it's gonna take me seven years.
24:54
SPEAKER_02: Well, and you have to have to know this is not my main thing.
24:56
SPEAKER_02: It's becoming my main thing, but it it it's always been on the side, it's just been a side project.
25:01
SPEAKER_02: I've been dabbling in it, and it's you know, it's been fun, but do I really believe it, you know, it's gonna be this huge production?
25:06
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I do now.
25:06
SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm very convinced that it's gonna be uh huge and a wonderful success and great.
25:11
SPEAKER_02: But um, over the years it's just been sort of dabbling.
25:14
SPEAKER_02: So I I really needed to take the book and uh you know start from scratch.
25:19
SPEAKER_02: It was a it was a reimagining of the book.
25:22
SPEAKER_02: So I still went scene by scene.
25:24
SPEAKER_02: I read the I read each chapter to myself, uh, and then I said, okay, what's happening here?
25:29
SPEAKER_02: How do I bring this all out in dialogue form?
25:33
SPEAKER_02: And then uh, is there a song in this song in this scene or not?
25:36
SPEAKER_02: You know, and so it was uh it was sort of a creative process of trying to lay out where am I gonna go with this.
25:44
SPEAKER_02: And in general, I had some ideas.
25:46
SPEAKER_02: I had written a few songs, maybe four or five songs that I knew you know could fit here.
25:50
SPEAKER_02: This could be a love song for this.
25:51
SPEAKER_02: I'd written it for Lana for our eighth wedding anniversary, for instance.
25:56
SPEAKER_02: And I thought, oh, it's the song is called My Lana, but I have a character in here called Sophia, and I thought, oh, I could just have Sophia's uh boyfriend sing this to her, and it would be you know this love song, Sophia, I love you, instead of My Lana, I love you.
26:09
SPEAKER_02: So I I adapted a few of my songs, but then I wrote a lot of original songs just for it.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: But it it was it was a process of laying it out, and I've heard this from Rogers and Hammerstein and different interviews I've read of other other uh famous musical composers where they they sort of lay out the whole story and then they try to see where would a song fit, style of a song would would that be?
26:28
SPEAKER_02: Um do you have some variety as you go through the show?
26:31
SPEAKER_02: So you know you're not all ballads, you're not all love songs, you're not all high action, high energy, you're not all minor key, depressing, you know.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: So how do you pace that through the story?
26:41
SPEAKER_02: What goes with it?
26:42
SPEAKER_02: And and there were some natural turning points in my book, because there's there's scenes that deal with grief and death, and you can definitely do something in a minor key, which you know means uh you you have more of a uh thoughtful sound.
26:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh and there are some uh that I uh there was one that I wrote uh just a few weeks ago.
27:00
SPEAKER_02: I I've just finished this uh recently, but I wrote a few weeks ago that uh I had tried to decide what to do with this scene because it's uh in some ways it was pivotal, in some ways I wasn't sure what to do with it.
27:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh what it turned into was uh a sort of a uh a quirky, funny barbershop quartet type of song, uh, which I had a few songs that were uh you know lighthearted, but this was the lighthearted, lightheartedest of all.
27:27
SPEAKER_02: It just makes it a lot more fun.
27:28
SPEAKER_02: So it I it actually I think is gonna be the highlight, the climactic scene of the first half of the show.
27:34
SPEAKER_02: The way it comes about, though, is so fun and it's so interactive and it's so god that uh I just I just think it's gonna blow people away.
27:42
SPEAKER_02: And it actually turned into the name of the whole musical.
27:44
SPEAKER_02: I just renamed the whole musical.
27:45
SPEAKER_02: I've been have had a working name for all these years, but I named it his name was Nicholas, based on this song from the end of the first half of the show, uh, with this sort of comedic element because they have this dream, and and in his dream, the man says, his name was Nicholas.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: His name was Nicholas, and they're like, Are you sure not Icarus?
28:04
SPEAKER_02: And no, it's Nicholas.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: And he goes through all these things, and his name was Nicholas, and I thought, you know, this is really a great name for the whole show, too.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: And so uh I renamed the show, or actually finally came up with a name that I like uh called His Name was Nicholas, and uh that's what I put on the cover, and I just got this uh last week.
28:20
SPEAKER_02: So this is my new cover for his name was Nicholas.
28:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh and this is the full script and score.
28:26
SPEAKER_02: So I put all the script in here, and then at the back I put all the songs.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: So there's 25 songs, and it's all the sheet music with a vocal line, so it's just piano and vocals.
28:35
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but that's something that people could buy, and then they could just uh stage it themselves somewhere in their own community.
28:40
SPEAKER_02: They could they could buy a bunch of scripts and the music, they could come up with their own music and orchestration if they wanted.
28:45
SPEAKER_02: But uh, I'm really trying to turn it into a movie that we can we can do too.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: So uh, but I thought, you know, let's make it available and people can contact me.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean it's with with uh author's permission to do the show if you want to do the show, but uh but I just wanted to put the whole script out there and say, here's the script, here's the score, here's all the music, and uh have a finished product that people can people can look at and see is this something that uh we'd want to put on at our church, at our community, at our Christmas time show.
29:11
SPEAKER_02: And uh so I think I think it'll be a nice uh it'll be a nice way to get the book out there.
29:15
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, that whole scene just talking about the Nicholas and why why I uh wrote the wrote the songs the way I did and where I put them.
29:22
SPEAKER_02: And uh anyway, it it it was a whole process to turn into a musical.
29:27
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, way more information than that.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: No, it it's great, that's perfect.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: Now you've had a couple of performances of of a part of the musical, uh the group in South Carolina.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about how that came about and what you learned from that experience?
29:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was great.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: You know, I And that's probably a whole separate episode in itself, but it is, but I can do a quick answer to it because uh they they were searching for they do a Christmas musical every year.
29:51
SPEAKER_02: They had been doing the same one for eight or nine years that they had written.
29:55
SPEAKER_02: And so the one of the artistic directors did a search on Amazon for new Christmas musical or a new Christmas story.
30:00
SPEAKER_02: She wanted a new Christmas story, because it's a ballet, so a ballet company uh only does dancing, uh, musical, singing, dancing, acting, but a ballet company is just dancing.
30:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so they wanted something they could do with their uh dance company.
30:14
SPEAKER_02: And so my subtitle happens to be in a new story for Christmas based on the old story of St.
30:19
SPEAKER_02: Nicholas.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: And so she typed in a new Christmas story and she pulled up mine and she read it and fell in love with the characters and the storyline, and uh, she and her uh artistic partner uh contacted me and said, Hey, could we put this on?
30:32
SPEAKER_02: This was uh end of August, and they said, Could we put this on as a full-length ballet uh by December of this year?
30:38
SPEAKER_02: I said, That's ambitious, that's great, but I love it.
30:41
SPEAKER_02: And I told them I had some music, I was writing a musical, and if they wanted any of the music from it, um uh I could uh I had a friend that could orchestrate it and you know, maybe maybe put together something, we could put together a few songs for them at least that they could use in their ballet if they wanted it.
30:54
SPEAKER_02: Uh, they said that would be great too.
30:56
SPEAKER_02: And so uh we did that, and my a friend and I, Matt Ludwig, he uh orchestrated.
31:01
SPEAKER_02: I just play the piano, but he does all instruments and he he loves orchestrating, he loves film composing.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: And so he uh he said, yeah, he'd do that.
31:09
SPEAKER_02: And so we did two songs for their show, and they used those as the opening number and uh and another number in the middle uh of the show.
31:17
SPEAKER_02: And so that was really exciting to see it all come together.
31:19
SPEAKER_02: 250 students uh of this company uh and uh two and a half hour show, uh, all based on this story.
31:27
SPEAKER_02: And they did their own adaptation.
31:29
SPEAKER_02: It's not the same story as my book, it's not the same story as my musical.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Uh, it has elements of the same story, but uh I gave them liberty.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: I really trusted them from the first conversation.
31:38
SPEAKER_02: I said, you know, you can take liberty and do, you know, you can tell the story whatever way you want.
31:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh Lana just really wanted the story told about Nicholas, that this was a great man who loved Jesus.
31:47
SPEAKER_02: And so uh they said we'd love to do that.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: And so uh they adapted it and adapted it for all kinds of different dances and styles of music, and they used other music, uh popular music and classical music, uh, to go with it.
31:58
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, they used a few of our songs, and that was wonderful.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Now, for those who who don't know the musical side of this, can you talk for just a second about the difference between uh composing, arranging, and orchestrating?
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Those are three very distinct things, but a lot of times when it comes to musicals or music in general, those those terms are um they're not interchangeable, but people who aren't engaged in music or don't have a musical background, maybe those those concepts are not familiar to them.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Because can you break that down a little bit?
32:28
SPEAKER_00: Composing, arranging, and orchestrating, because those were all involved in in your musical.
32:34
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
32:34
SPEAKER_02: So I'd be considered the composer on this.
32:36
SPEAKER_02: I came up with the melodies, uh, I came up with some chord progressions, which just means you know how the layout of the song goes, and I actually did the lyrics as well for uh all but one of the songs.
32:47
SPEAKER_02: Uh another woman helped me with uh lyrics for one of the songs.
32:50
SPEAKER_02: But uh so I was I would be the composer and the uh lyricist.
32:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh so I wrote uh the melodies and uh how I thought a song should go and then the lyrics to go with it.
33:02
SPEAKER_02: Then I gave it to uh Matt Ludwig, who was the arranger and orchestrator.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: So he arranged the songs.
33:10
SPEAKER_02: He's uh he is incredibly gifted, skilled, and trained as uh uh a musician, but also an orchestrator, arranges the songs in a way that really make them flow.
33:22
SPEAKER_02: He does different chord progressions, interesting things with it.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: So he's arranging the song, he's giving it a different style, a different feel, or bringing it to life more.
33:30
SPEAKER_02: And then he orchestrates it.
33:32
SPEAKER_02: So as the orchestrator, he also writes all the parts for the cello, the oboe, the violins, the trumpets, the timpany drums, the piano.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: Uh and so he uh orchestrated all the parts and he wrote all the parts.
33:45
SPEAKER_02: And then since he can do a lot of this on software, uh he performed all the parts as well.
33:50
SPEAKER_02: So he's playing the it's all software, but he's playing the oboe, he's playing the cello, but he knows how those instruments are supposed to sound, uh, what's natural for those, how a flute does little trills and things.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: So he knows all of that.
34:04
SPEAKER_02: So he orchestrates all those beautiful little elements of it.
34:07
SPEAKER_02: And the songs are just so Christmassy, they're so fun, they're so rich, but they're they're classical, but they're contemporary.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: They're I I call it Ludwiggian because his last name is Ludwig, Ludwig.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: But he's got his own style.
34:19
SPEAKER_02: It's a nice mix of John Williams, Disney, uh classics, contemporary, it's like Hamilton, it's like Wicked, it's like Dear Evan Hansen, it's got uh contemporary drum sounds, but it's also got uh classical underpinnings.
34:31
SPEAKER_02: And so it's he's really got his own style, but every song just really shines and brings out what I was trying to express.
34:38
SPEAKER_02: So he took my piano versions and my lyrics and then and my melodies, and then he turned them into these wonderfully lush and rich and uh just just gorgeous uh orchestrations.
34:49
SPEAKER_02: Then we brought in some singers, we brought in a few people to play some key parts, violins, or things, uh, to play live instruments, and then we uh uh produced those.
34:58
SPEAKER_02: So we've done uh six songs from the show already.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: There's 25, so we've got a few to go, but uh uh so far uh we've got these six, and uh I I put five of them out online, uh, and so uh people will be able to listen to those at my uh YouTube channel, ericelder.com.
35:11
SPEAKER_02: And uh so I'd love for you to hear them and hear just uh what they sound like.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: So my understanding is that we have a few minutes left and that you're gonna perform a song for us from the musical.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: Are you still up for doing that?
35:22
SPEAKER_02: I am.
35:22
SPEAKER_02: You know what?
35:23
SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to play just a piece of this song to show the expressiveness of what you can do in a song.
35:30
SPEAKER_02: Nicholas had been wanting to be called by God to do something really special.
35:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh he wanted his life to make a difference.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: But this was sort of out of the blue.
35:37
SPEAKER_02: You know, he shows up in a church and all of a sudden they ask him if he wants to be the bishop of the whole town, and uh he's really young and he doesn't know what to do.
35:44
SPEAKER_02: So this is the song called This Day at the Crossroads, and uh this is where I give some expression to what his dilemma is in his head.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Lord, this is not what I thought it would be when you call to me from the far side of the sea, though I knew I should come without further delay, but was it truly for this momentous day?
36:10
SPEAKER_02: And then he goes through and explains some of the things that I just explained, and then the priests have a little song they come back to.
36:16
SPEAKER_02: But I love this part especially.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: Uh I think this could be one of the keys of the whole of the whole show.
36:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh he comes back and he's he's really trying to grapple with this, and he says, But can I make the sacrifice of loving life of family?
36:30
SPEAKER_01: What is the life of dreams that is different from your dreams of me?
36:37
SPEAKER_01: I want to wonder what you want, Lord.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: I know that you have dreams alone.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: Please help me to understand.
36:46
SPEAKER_01: Please help me, Lord, and then the chimes come off in the background.
36:56
SPEAKER_02: It's coming 9 o'clock in the morning.
37:06
SPEAKER_02: And he just hears from God, and he says, God, I think this is it.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: I think this is what you want.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: And he sings again.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: In the end of the message.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: What we give upon earth of present, the blessing of friends, and love of friends.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: My answer is yes, the question to you my first of my love and affection.
37:40
unknown: Seal this on my lips.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: Help me never to waver.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: Stay at the crossroads of forever savour.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: And then the song goes on.
37:53
SPEAKER_02: He tells the priest, yes, and they all say, His name was Nicholas.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas, his name was Nicholas, and they're also excited.
38:01
SPEAKER_02: The ship load of people come in, and they're all saying, It was Nicholas, it was Nicholas.
38:05
SPEAKER_02: And it's a big climactic scene where they uh crown him as the new bishop of Myra.
38:10
SPEAKER_02: And so uh I just think it's a nice, thoughtful piece.
38:12
SPEAKER_02: You can tell I'm just choked up, just thinking about saying, God, my answer is yes, no matter the question.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: And uh to you, I want to pour out all my love and affection.
38:22
SPEAKER_02: It's just uh, God, I am surrendered fully to you.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's gonna have a powerful moment in the show where people just say, Man, I want to do that.
38:30
SPEAKER_02: I wish I could do that.
38:31
SPEAKER_02: What can I do to be more like that?
38:33
SPEAKER_02: And of course, Nicholas was just following Jesus, who in the garden said, Lord, let this cup pass, but if not, let let your will be done, not mine.
38:42
SPEAKER_02: You know, my answer is yes, no matter what the question is, I'll do it, God.
38:45
SPEAKER_02: I'll surrender to you.
38:47
SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's a great way to point people to Jesus and really that ultimate surrender and help them to use their gifts.
38:53
SPEAKER_02: So that's really my point of the whole show.
38:55
SPEAKER_02: One person can make a difference.
38:57
SPEAKER_02: I use this as a tagline uh in the in the book that Nicholas had just one life to live, but if he lived it right, one life was all he would need.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: And in my introduction, I wrote about Lana, you know, and uh Nicholas uses this in the show.
39:10
SPEAKER_02: It says, To the world you may be just one person, but to one person, you may be the world.
39:17
SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
39:18
SPEAKER_02: I love it.
39:18
SPEAKER_02: If you want to touch a life, if you want to touch the world, you just start by one person at a time.
39:23
SPEAKER_02: Touch one life, one life, one life at a time.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: In fact, what that's what they named the ballet in uh South Carolina.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: Uh, we were thinking through some names and uh One Life really struck us.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: So the ballet is called One Life, and we hope to have the uh movie version of that done by this Christmas that'll be available uh online so people can watch uh if you're watching this later.
39:41
SPEAKER_02: This is Christmas 2020, so we'll see if we make that target.
39:44
SPEAKER_02: But uh One Life, uh a Christmas story ballet, is what that's called.
39:49
SPEAKER_02: But my musical that uh I I hope to bring to life in another way is called His Name Was Nicholas.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: Eric, this has been a blast.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: Um there's a a lot of of course we've been friends for a long time, as I've said before, but uh it's it's always so inspiring just to see the projects that you're taking on and uh the risks that that you take in doing new and creative things.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: And I I've learned a lot from this conversation.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the things that I've taken away from it is you know, as you were singing that song just a just a moment ago, and I I had not heard that.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's a good thing.
40:29
SPEAKER_02: That's why I'm good at playing or singing it.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: It's so moving and uh it it just makes me realize that a musical is such a powerful and unique art form because you can get inside as you mentioned earlier, you can get inside characters' heads even when you're talking about historical people who really lived.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton does the same thing, other musicals do the same thing where you realize that, oh, these were just people with the same struggles that we have, they're facing the same questions and insecurities and problems that we have today.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: And it makes them real, but the music gives us a really powerful emotional connection to that story and to those those feelings and those struggles that you can't get through reading a book, that you can't get through reading a biography, or even through a a non-musical.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: I think the music brings that emotional element that you can't get any other way.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: Particularly live music.
41:21
SPEAKER_00: There's something about live music that you can't get just from listening to a recording.
41:25
SPEAKER_02: I totally agree.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: And for a Christmas show, I just thought, oh, we gotta have music.
41:29
SPEAKER_02: We've gotta have music.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, this has been a blast.
41:33
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate your friendship, of course, and um and all the cool stuff that you have done and continue to do.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: How can people get in touch with you and find out more about the book, the musical, and all the cool stuff that you're doing?
41:44
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
41:44
SPEAKER_02: If they go to ericelder.com, E-R-I-C, E-L-D-E-R dot com.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: Ericelder.com, that'll take you to currently it takes you straight to my YouTube channel where you can listen to some of these songs.
41:55
SPEAKER_02: You'll be able to watch uh my podcasts about this.
41:58
SPEAKER_02: I plan to read uh starting uh in a few days.
42:01
SPEAKER_02: I plan to read one scene every day for 40 days and play some songs, play all the songs from this musical.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: Uh so you'll be able to watch those uh at Christmas time or have Christmas in July right now, as we're doing right now.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: So uh but ericelder.com is a great way to find me.
42:16
SPEAKER_02: My other website is called theranch.org, which is a place to seek God and find him, and you can find all about my other uh devotional books and music that I've written, and uh, I help a lot of other people publish things.
42:27
SPEAKER_02: Uh the third would be inspiringbooks.com, and that's where you can find all my books.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, as always, I'll have links to that in the show notes.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: And thanks again.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: This has been a blast.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was a blast.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: I love that conversation with Eric, and I hope that you did too.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: This was something really different for the show.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: And if you liked this, you know, diving into the more creative elements of of writing and business, let me know.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: I I think this stuff is a blast.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: I come from a creative background for sure, as you can tell.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: So this was a lot of fun for me.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, usually I just do three takeaways after an interview, but in this case, there were so many great little tidbits in this conversation.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna indulge myself a little bit.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: And uh really this is more for my note-taking purposes, so I can remember all the cool things that Eric said, but you can still listen in since we're friends and you're already listening to this episode.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: So here we go.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: These are eight great takeaways.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: Number one, and by the way, these are all pretty short, so this isn't gonna go on for you know another hour or so.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay, eight cool takeaways that Eric shared with us.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: Number one, use short chapters in a novel that you're writing.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Number two, have only one dominant idea per chapter.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: This was a great suggestion for Eric, and I actually learned this from him.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: This alone will help you a lot in your nonfiction and your fiction writing as well.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: Have one dominant idea per chapter.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: Number three, Eric talked about how to construct a dramatic scene.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: He said the scene should turn emotionally either from negative.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Negative to positive or positive to negative.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: And I love this.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: This is a little secret that is used by fiction writers and screenwriters, I mean, all the time.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the next time that you watch a TV show or a movie, pay attention because most of the time the scenes are going to turn from one emotion to the to the next by the end of the scene.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, the scene doesn't really propel the story forward.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, if it's going to stay interesting and keep an emotionally dynamic flow, it's got to be, it has to be turning and constantly moving.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: So if you're writing scenes, make sure it turns.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Number four, use nanoRimo to write a draft of a book.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've never heard of NanoRimo, that stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is, by the way, every November.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: So you can use NanoRimo to write a draft of your book.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: There's tens of thousands of other people doing it around the world.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: You know that you're you're kind of in this community of people who are going through this together.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: So it's a great idea to use November to get a draft of your book done in 30 days.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: Number five, if you're adapting a book into a musical, it's a rewrite from scratch.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: You're essentially creating a whole new animal, not just a slightly tweaked or a slightly reworked version of your book.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: That was a fascinating insight, and I didn't know that, so I'm glad Eric mentioned that.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: Takeaway six: a musical is a unique type of theater because the characters can sing what's going on inside their heads.
45:30
SPEAKER_00: And you know, when you stop and think about it, you really can't do this with any other type of drama.
45:35
SPEAKER_00: So musicals are unique because the characters can express their own thoughts and feelings and emotions through a song.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: You can't really do that in other in other types of drama or theater.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: Number seven, Eric talked about the difference between composing, arranging, and orchestrating music.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: So for those of you who are not musically inclined, let me break this down really quick for you, just as a reminder.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: Composing is when you create the chords, the lyrics, the melody, and so forth of a song.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: You're creating the basic elements of the song, which are things like the chords, lyrics, and melodies and so forth.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: Arranging is figuring out the structure of the song.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: And many times this structure of the song is dictated by the genre or the type of musical group that it's for.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: For example, you could take um you could take a pop song and you can make a country arrangement of it.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: You could, you could make an a cappella arrangement, you can make an orchestral arrangement of it, you can make uh heavy metal arrangement of it.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: So the arrangement is basically taking, you know, the the same, usually the same chords, lyrics, the major pieces of a song, and you're adapting that to a different genre, even though the song is probably going to retain its basic shape.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: Orchestration is a different thing, and that is assigning different instruments to the parts that you write for them.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: That's really kind of an oversimplification, but that's the gist of it.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: So orchestration and orchestra, you kind of see the connection between those two things there.
47:07
SPEAKER_00: Then finally, takeaway number eight is find people who can help you.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: It is extremely rare for one single person to create everything involved in a musical because you're talking about the lyrics, you know, the arrangements, the songs, and all those kinds of things.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: Collaboration in musical theater is usually the name of the game.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: So those are eight takeaways.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: Man, Eric shared a lot of good stuff with us.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: I had a blast in this interview, and of course, any excuse that I have to talk with Eric is a good one.
47:39
SPEAKER_00: So I want to give a huge thank you to my guest, Eric Elder.
47:43
SPEAKER_00: You can check out Eric's music, books, devotions, and so much more at his website, which is theranch.org.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: And if you go to the books tab on his website, you can find three very recent book releases, which are My Stories of Faith, Volume 1, 365 daily devotions with Eric, and then finally you can find the score and the script for the musical, His Name was Nicholas.
48:11
SPEAKER_00: So I encourage you to check out all of those as well as Eric's fantastic YouTube channel, where he's currently taking a few weeks to share stories and music from his musical.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: And you can go to Ericelder.com and that will point directly to Eric's YouTube channel.
48:25
SPEAKER_00: And of course, you can also watch live on Facebook by going to Eric's page, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes.
48:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, my friends, thank you so much for listening.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you spending some time with me on this episode.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: You can find lots more resources for writers at KentSanders.net.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: And until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people's lives.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.