Fires in the Mirror Style

Fires in the Mirror Style

Journalistic Drama

Smith's unique style of drama combines theatre with journalism in order to bring to life and examine real social and political events. Each scene is drawn verbatim from an interview that Smith has held with the character, although Smith has arranged the subject's words according to her authorial purposes. She captures the essence of the characters she interviews, distilling their thoughts into a brief scene that provides a separate and coherent perspective on a particular situation or idea.

Poetic Verse

One of the key tools in Smith's artistic process is to render the words in poetic verse; this allows her to arrange each character's words in an aesthetically beautiful form, and to emphasize certain words and phrases that she finds important and that express the rhythm of the interviewee's speech. Smith also includes pauses, breaks indicated by dashes, and nonsensical noises like "um" to capture a sense of character and...
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