• More like a poem than a short story

• A creative way to think about human nature

• Slow

• A cultural lens or mirror

• Harder than you might imagine

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Whenever I think I am ready to write a play - when I have an idea about something that I think could become a play - I do several things: I sleep on it for some nights (or weeks). I plot or outline the essential scenes. I ensure that the play's dramatic question has no immediate solution. Then I write a one-page abstract; never longer than one page because no matter how complicated the concept if I cannot articulate it in one page, I am not ready to begin writing. Finally, I ask myself, "What is the story's crisis? The moment when the protagonist is forced to make a decision that will forever change their life?" 

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Like a Poem? A play has no wasted dialogue or action. Like a poem, it is brief,  meaningful, and each line is necessary.  Unlike a poem, it must also selectively reveal a compelling narrative. Perhaps a Jenga Tower is a more apt comparison -- if any block is pulled out, the tower will fall.

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Revealing Human Nature? Every play I have written (and nearly all those I like), was inspired by a cultural or societal observation (or problem). The Trial of Hamlet came from the O.J. Trial; Brotherly Love from #HavingItAll; Double Faulting from gun violence; Doubletake from the rapid increase of marital affairs; All Her Life from the generational aging of America. Identifying a cultural event or phenomenon that may result in a play is important, but crafting a compelling story that reveals and grapples with the issue is ground zero for the playwright.

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Slow? In graduate school, a wise professor said to me, "If you can write (and keep) just one page of dialogue a day, you'd be able to write 3 plays a year." That seemed simple enough...but, it turns out, it's impossible. No one writes 3 plays a year. Yes, you might be able to write 10 pages one day -- great! But that will not happen very often, and those 10 pages may not even make it into your final draft. Playwriting is slow.

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Difficult? I didn't write a good play until I was 35 years old. One of the most in important ways to learn about playwriting (certainly the way I learned), is to study the art of theatre. I've spent a lifetime going to the theatre; reading plays; thinking about the plays; performing and directing plays; analyzing the ones I like and continually asking myself self, why?  What made that particular play interesting? funny? thilling?  provocative? sexy? compelling? The better I understood the art of theatre the better my writing became. Go figure. 

 

10 cents of advice. Audiences have short attention spans. They get bored easily. They come to the theatre to be "engaged." So what engages them? Mostly, they want to know just one thing: "What happens next?" A good play will continually engage audiences not only with what is happening, but with what is going to happen? When I write, I continually ask myself, "What is the most interesting thing that could happen next at this moment in this play?" Of course, every choice must be credible and supported by the world of the play. It's often a struggle to determine "the most interesting next thing." But I think about it every time I sit down to write.  

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