I started out my training and career as an actor. For a long time, I ascribed to the idea that, if I was ever to find any success, I should keep my head down, stay in my lane and ONLY act. So whenever I had the urge to write or direct or try out material in some other form, the familiar nagging voice would creep up in my head and say “stop wasting time, life is short, you’ve got to stick with SOMETHING.” It wasn’t until grad school when finally, at the gentle prodding of some professors, that I expanded my vision of myself and the work I wanted to do. I started to try out some other baby artistic impulses which I had been squandering for years and bring them into the daylight. I started to explore, I tried out some solo performance ideas, I began to direct and to write. That last one, the writing, was the most intimidating to me because I felt from the start that my ideas had to come into the world fully formed, stage/screen ready and full length. Early on, for me, the length of the piece equated to the seriousness of the work I was trying to make. In my head, if it wasn’t 90+ minutes, then I wasn’t a real writer. Now, a decade and a lot of bad pages later, I wish I had figured out sooner what I know now: writing short plays, even plays only a few pages long, is some of the best training a playwright can get. So much of what I know now as a writer, I learned writing, watching and reading short works. Want to take the dive into writing a ten-minute play of your own? Join me for Write A Ten-Minute Play starting Tuesdays January 12-March 2 through zoom.
Here are 5 of the biggest reasons I absolutely love writing 1-minute plays:
As I said before, I started out my career as an actor. One of the biggest fringe benefits of letting myself write is that I have learned a great deal about acting. A teacher of mine once told me that, as an actor, my job was to tell the story. But writing taught me that my old teacher was dead wrong. A writer crafts a world and experience in blueprint. A director builds from that blueprint. An actor embodies and lives fully, moment to moment, their reality in the larger whole. Writing taught me to worry less about crafting a story and, instead, just live fully within the imaginary circumstances of the role I’m playing. It’s so easy for actors to get caught up in the intellectual aspects of a work rather than the experiential, moment to moment life of a performance. It is the synergy between different characters, the environment, the language spoken where the life of a play takes form. Writing taught me that. I don’t have to do all of it myself when I act. Paradoxically, by taking on the world building role of a writer, I found myself more free to just live out my part in the worlds other writers give me when I’m acting.
Probably the most obvious lesson here is that, when you have only a few pages to do the job, you’ve got to learn to choose your words, your characters, your actions, your setting, and all the developments therein with care and precision. When writing in short form work, you learn that each gesture and word needs to carry meaning enough that the story you’re telling is conveyed without spoon feeding everything to your audience, rather bringing them along the journey through action and character. Getting that balance right is difficult to do in full length works let alone in just a few pages, but struggling to nail it is a worthy and informative struggle. And it teaches you A LOT.
Pretty early on, I learned that I am entirely capable of boring myself to tears. Probably the first 20 short plays I wrote were some version of “Two People Sit in a Conveniently Stageable Location and Chat About Some Ideas They Have.” In short, my first plays sucked. Like Ira Glass once warned early career artists, my early attempts at writing did not live up to my own tastes or vision. There were some flashes of inspiration but I bored myself pretty quickly. That boredom however proved critically important and useful because, very quickly I started to see that I needed to step outside of my preconceptions and just play on the page. I started playing around with setting, with language, with genre, with physical action onstage, giving myself arbitrary little prompts to serve as problems for me to solve. Writing short work took the pressure off me and made me feel like following whims wasn’t a waste of time. Since I was only writing a 10 minute piece, I could afford to spend the energy playing around and not freak out if the result was never read aloud. The experimentation made writing fun and, as a result, made me better.
A few times, in the course of writing what I thought were 10-minute plays, I realized there was something in the short work I was making that opened a door, a vein of gold that compelled me to write a longer piece. Two of my full length plays started as 10-minute works and I’m working on expanding a third. In my head anyway, writing a short piece feels like a completable task, something I’m up to getting done. The beauty is, when I start writing that short piece, I find myself inspired in unexpected ways. The creative act is like that. You sit down and put pen to paper and suddenly a play shows up. I find myself more likely to sit down and put the pen to paper when I think I’m just dropping by to write something short. If, in the end, I write something bigger and deeper than I initially set out to write, well I’ve tricked myself into being more productive and that’s not a bad thing.
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