We all know the feeling of impending doom that comes when you feel your creative resources have been drained. (And if you don’t, stop reading right now! You’re making the rest of us look bad.) Here are some strategies for the next time inspiration ghosts you.
Micro Problems (“I can’t finish this page, scene, chapter, etc.”) This is your everyday, garden-variety writer’s block. You know what you want to do with your script overall, but you just can’t make it to the next step.
1.Give yourself a mini-deadline. For example, I will finish this scene in the next two hours, and quality does not matter. All that matters is that I make it to the end. Set a stopwatch if you have to. You might be surprised by the quantity (and hopefully, quality) of material you generate under pressure. If you’ve ever written something the night before a deadline (no one’s ever done this, right?), you’ve already used this method.
2.Write the end of a section (scene, act, etc.), then work backward. Sometimes it helps to get where you want to go then retrace your steps. Plus, if you are a by-the-book person, you might feel the thrill of getting away with something. Think of it as literary jaywalking!
3. Use improvisation. I know, I know. This is many writers’ worst nightmare. I understand your concerns, but this is my personal favorite kind of improv. The hovering-over-my-computer-with-the-door-closed-so-the-haters-can’t-judge-me kind. We’ll call it “desk improv.” Here are three magic words: Initiate. Copy. Heighten. These are tools that improvisers use to propel a scene or game forward, and it works for playwriting, too. Here’s an example: A: I love you. (A initiates a motif, pattern, or, in improv, a “game.”) B: I love you, too. (B copies A’s move in the “game” and shows agreement.) A: You’re my everything. (A heightens the game.) B: Yeah, you too. (B copies, but there is some serious subtext here.) A: Sorry? (A initiates something very different. Uh oh!) And we’re off! The drama! The angst! The psychological realism! And all from a little desk improv.
4.Take a break. Sometimes you have to practice self-care, whatever that means to you, in order to move forward. Take a walk. Eat a snack. Netflix and chill. This does not mean abandoning your project! But do give yourself some breathing room, if possible, and come back to your play with fresh eyes.
Macro Problems (“I can’t finish this play, screenplay, pilot, novel, etc.”) These tips are for when you are having trouble with the piece as a whole. Your issues are bigger than a single scene, and you are considering calling it quits on the whole project.
1.Go back to your outline or create a reverse outline. Review and adjust your game plan, if you have one. Or, if you don’t, reverse engineer your script and create an outline from the pages you’ve already written. This will give you a more detached way to figure out what is holding you back. If your script is presented in chronological order, take a look at how each event leads to the next.
As Trey Parker and Matt Stone famously said in a lecture at NYU (watch it here), each beat is deeply connected to the beat before it. Think cause and effect. A happens and therefore B happens OR A happens but then B happens. To use Romeo and Juliet as an example: Romeo is rejected by Rosaline, therefore he goes to the ball, therefore he meets Juliet and is enthralled, but then he learns she is a Capulet.
2.Discover your influences. Think about the story you want to tell and how it relates to similar stories that have gone before. Is it a love story? A cautionary tale about the abuse of power? A memory play about a messed-up family? It can help to read works by other writers with similar themes. To use the second example, how do the writers of Richard III, Frost/Nixon, or ENRON deal with the same themes of power and corruption? How would you? In what ways do you think they succeed or fail? How does their work reflect your own struggles with this particular project?
3.Get a little help from your friends. Reach out to your crew, whether that is something as formal as a monthly writer’s group or as simple as a friend or two whom you trust, and enlist their aid. Some of the best ideas I have gotten have been from other people who have provided much-needed perspective. Never be afraid to ask for help! Even if the ideas you hear don’t work for you, they might lead you to one that does.
The next time you get stuck, take a look at these tips and keep writing! I know you’ve got it in you.
(Photo: OF SERPENTS & SEA SPRAY by Rachel Bublitz -Custom Made Theatre Company production from 2016)
As you’re getting through the month, you might be wondering what you can do with all the work you’ll be generating over the days of August, and I’m here to tell you about one possible place for you to share them: The New Play Exchange.
The New Play Exchange, also called NPX or @NewPlayX on Twitter, was created by the folks over at the National New Play Network, and is a new avenue to get your work read and to connect with new play advocates. As the National New Play Network puts it, the New Play Exchange is, “A cloud-based script database, enhanced with a robust search-and-filter mechanism, crowd-sourced recommendations of plays, and personal script and coverage information storage, plus the connectivity of a social networking site.”
Once you create a profile and upload scripts, you’ll be emailed opportunities as your plays qualify and you’ll have the chance to “tag” your work. Once your play is tagged, the theater or festival that put out the call can include that script in what they’re considering for the project. Gwydion Suilebhan, project director of the New Play Exchange and fierce new play advocate, wanted to give some of the power back to playwrights when it came to submissions. To create a space in which playwrights had more options for production and development, where theaters found us, instead of the other way around.
And, while all of that sounds pretty great, it took me a bit to figure out how to use the site to its maximum benefit. I’ve had a membership with the New Play Exchange for years, and it wasn’t until last Fall that I felt I’d really cracked into its true potential. Because, while it is a place for theaters to find plays, it’s also a place where new play lovers to read thousands of scripts and promote the work of other artists. And that to me, is the biggest boon of the New Play Exchange, with their recommendation system they have created a vibrant new play loving community.
Anyone with a membership has access to all the plays on the site. You can download and read as many as you’d like, and recommend any that strike your fancy. Reading a ton of new work has been so beneficial to my own writing. It’s inspiring, thought-provoking, and even when I don’t love the play, I feel like I learn something new about the craft of writing for the stage. Through the New Play Exchange I’ve been introduced to a ton of new artists, and new styles, and the funny thing about writing recommendations is that once I started writing them for other plays, I started to get them on my plays. The New Play Exchange is a magic place of karma, apparently, and, for me at least, the more I put in, the more I get out.
(Photo: CHEERLEADERS VS. ALIENS by Rachel Bublitz at the Egyptian Youtheatre 2018)
But that’s enough from me…. Here are some other wonderful playwrights and their thoughts on why the New Play Exchange is the cat’s pajamas:
Hannah C Langley (playwright): “The community. I’ve met so many amazing writers and artists from around the country that I now consider friends and colleagues.”
Emily Hageman (playwright and educator): “Having incredible current playwrights posting their work to be read, admired, and studied! New friendships, networking opportunities, and being able to get your work out there.”
Shaun Leisher (producer, director, dramaturg, and nominator for The Kilroys): “NPX has made it clear to me that Broadway is not representative of the state of today’s theatre. New York isn’t representative of today’s theatre. Without NPX I would have no true grasp of how rich, diverse and vibrant the state of theatre is today.”
Andrew Roblyer (director, acting coach, playwright, and actor): “My favorite thing is that it levels the playing field a bit in several ways. First, ease of discovery and access makes it more appealing for small theatres to produce new work. Second, search parameters make it harder to argue that lack of exposure is the reason playwrights from marginalized communities don’t get exposure. And third, it just makes it fun to read new plays!”
Diana Burbano (playwright, actor, and teaching artist): “Feeling heard and paying it forward. It’s a golden age of new plays and the @NewPlayX is leading the way.”
Rachael Carnes (playwright and educator): “NPX is a wonderful way to read new work, and build community. Through sharing my plays on NPX, and reading other writers’ work there, I’ve developed meaningful and supportive collegial connections with writers all over the country. I’ve made friends through NPX! So much so, that when I’ve seen these same playwrights in real life, it feels like we already know each other. NPX has been an incredible resource for me — I take better care of updating and archiving on my NPX profile than I do my personal website.”
Jessica Austgen (playwright and actor): “Not only is it a great way to make your work available to a national network of theaters, but it’s a powerful tool for community building among playwrights. On NPX, I can read and recommend the work of my peers, make connections with playwrights around the county, and feel like part of a community.”
Caroline Cao (playwright): “Getting stuff done, playing with content.”
Hope Villanueva (playwright and stage manager): You don’t need to be famous or established to be on NPX. All playwrights are welcome and, if you show dedication to the craft, you will be embraced.
Jordan Elizabeth Henry (playwright): 1. COMMUNITY – 2. reading brave/strange/wild work encourages me to make brave/strange/wild choices with my own work – 3. totally changed the way I think about scarcity and abundance re: submitting/rejection/etc
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I could go on and on and on, seriously, I got a LOT of messages from folks telling me how excited they were about the New Play Exchange. So head on over to the New Play Exchange, get a profile, put up your plays, and dive in, the water is fine!
Lacan says somewhere that “love is giving what you don’t have … to someone who doesn’t want it.” He might have been thinking of The Seagull.
Reading this play for the first time in my thirties was like being a lodger in a boarding house who is finally taken into the kitchen and given a piece of onion, or garlic – “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been tasting.”
Hey guys! Sorry I’ve been absent for the past little bit. I’ve been very busy stage managing for a local musical. Luckily I’ve been able to get some reading in, in-between shows. I’ll get back into a regular posting routine ❤️
Finished reading the grisha trilogy in a week. It was amazing, I couldn’t put it down. I would highly recommend it.
Friend sent me this photo. I don’t know if I’d be able to see the marquee turned off in person. I cried when I walked by the theater the morning after Caissie and Patti left. Idk if I could handle this…
You’ve learned the basics of Eos Augment3d. But do you have what it takes to apply your knowledge to a real production?
Welcome to TheHamiltonProgramming Project, a collection of exercises that use actual touring paperwork from the Broadway musical Hamiltonto help you practice in Eos Augment3d – and learn how Broadway tours operate!
You will be playing the roles of Associate, Assistant, and Programmer as you finish prep on the provided show file. This will involve getting ready for focus, preparing conventional and moving light gobo loads, focusing fixtures, and, finally, checking your work with real cues from the show – all with Eos Augment3d as your virtual venue.
The Project Guide will help you through some of the basic tasks, but it is not designed to be fully instructional. This project mimics professional‐level operations, so it is up to you to figure out how to complete it with accuracy and speed! You can make magic sheets, record new snapshots, merge in your favorite macros – the file is yours to grow. With Howell Binkley’s Tony Award®‐winning lighting rig at your fingertips, what programming or design ideas will you come up with?
if you’re a member of the ETC Eos Programmers Facebook group, you can also get access to a (free!) Hamilton design discussion with Howell Binkley & the lighting team on this Thursday 7/9 at 11:00am EDT.
There are still parts of Hamilton that are amazing.
It’s also amazing and wonderful that so much of Hamilton is NOT revolutionary. The cultural conversation is on the move. And the arts play such a huge role in that movement.
On Friday the 13th of March of this year, the NYC theater industry closed for the foreseeable future. Theaters elsewhere in the country have followed. On a human level, almost everyone involved in the industry is unemployed: actors, dancers, singers, musicians, stage managers, backstage crew, electricians, carpenters, stitchers, props artisans, designers, writers, directors, choreographers, box office staff, ushers, janitors, security, marketing, scenery building shops, and more. Adjacent businesses, whose clients are theatre workers and theater audiences, are affected as well: restaurants, bars, the bodegas with the cute cats, materials suppliers, and more. On a cultural level, even if there were enough “other jobs” for everyone to go to, what will be left when performance is able to resume? I fear that the “unpaid internship” will become writ even larger than normal: the people who will have the means to stay in the industry will be reduced down to an even more exclusive class than they are currently.
This has not been the case globally. In some countries, the pandemic is sufficiently under control for even professional productions in big cities to continue with safety measures in place (e.g., The Phantom of the Opera in Seoul). In some countries, the government is giving robust financial support to the arts (e.g., Britain announcing a nearly $2 billion stimulus for the industry).
The Arts in the U.S. need your support. If you can donate, then donate. But perhaps even more important: contact your senators and other officials to encourage them to support measures that will keep artists and the arts going. And be the change within your own families and communities to help fight the view that the arts are disposable. If someone has read a book or listened to music or Netflix-and-chilled or watched a Marvel movie, then they are benefiting from the arts – not just the material that they are directly consuming, but the community theater or PBS broadcast that led that movie star to start acting in the first place. (To say nothing of: remember all of the tweets of people saying that the Watchmen series was how they learned about the Tulsa Massacre?)
& I’m sure that A.Ham would appreciate the fact that the Arts & Entertainment industry accounts for $877.8 BILLION in value and 4.5% of U.S. GDP.
Check out See Lighting Foundation to support immigrant theatre artists, who are particularly vulnerable right now. Between their specific risks/futility in applying for government benefits, the increasingly onerous visa processes, & the simple fact that theatres in other countries are not facing the shitshow faced by theatres here, many immigrant theatre artists are looking at leaving the U.S.. It will be, truly, our loss.
There is a lot of work happening within the industry right now that isn’t a product for immediate public purchase. Grassroots groups organizing for more equitable labor practices. Forums hosted to root out and start healing the racism within the industry. (The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, of which Hamilton alumAmber Iman is a co-founder, has been doing great work.) Works in the early stages of creation that hopefully have actual stages ready for them when the time comes. Be proud to support all of this.
Also: if you are a young BIPOC stage manager (or even just stage management curious!), please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to chat about the profession, including grad school and NYC specifics.
Black lives matter. This land is stolen from Indigenous people who are still here. Stonewall was a riot. Wear a fucking mask.
The existence of algorithm-driven, non-chronological “timelines” is very bizarre right now. On my Facebook feed, I see posts from March 10 talking about starting the second week of previews or celebrating good box office returns. On March 12, my job ceased to exist, as did the jobs of hundreds upon hundreds of people as an entire industry shuttered over the course of one day.
The cancellations and closing of events and arts/entertainment venues, while important for public health, have left many people (who earn on a gig basis rather than salary) very suddenly and entirely without expected income. There is no work-from-home option, just their job disappearing entirely. Some people will be able to collect unemployment insurance, but many won’t even get that, as they work as independent contractors who are paid a fee for work delivered or vend their goods directly to customers at such events.
This is a tough time for arts/events organizations and those who work them (which includes not just artists but all of the ushers, custodians, etc. whose work is tied to the event itself). I’m compiling ways to support those who have been impacted (pass-the-hats for donating to individuals, funds that are accepting donations, ways to purchase people’s goods/services, etc.) and resources for those who have been impacted. The industry community is coming together in a heartening way right now, but it would mean a great deal to me if those not in the industry could take a moment to glance through and maybe even to share this information. Even if you can’t make any sort of donation yourself, it means something to have this hardship be seen and acknowledged.
Additionally, if you have tickets to events that have been canceled and don’t immediately need your funds returned, I encourage you to wait a bit before reaching out to the theater/venue/etc.. Box office workers have been overwhelmed. And particularly if it was a ticket for a non-profit or grassroots organization, if it’s possible, I’d encourage people to consider donating the cost of their ticket rather than demanding a refund.
While I’m aware that there are many people in many sectors taking a hit right now, I am putting my focus on where I am and would like to keep that the focus here. Please share any relevant updates, additional resources, etc..
Support Those Who Have Been Impacted
A general pass-the-hat for individual theatre workers (in process, they had names alphabetically from A-I up as of the morning of 3/14): I Lost My Theatre Gigs
NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief Fund: “We seek to provide support for low-income, BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods are being effected by this pandemic in NYC. Whether it’s from cancelled gigs, lost jobs, or a lack of business due to coronavirus scares, we hope to orchestrate an egalitarian approach to crowdsourcing.” [Note: their funding applications are currently closed as they make sure that they have enough resources to cover the 500 people who have already applied.] https://www.gofundme.com/f/nyc-lowincome-artistfreelancer-relief-fund
“The Philadelphia Performing Artists’ Emergency Fund was created amid the COVID-19 outbreak to assist performing artists whose income has been impacted by show cancellations, slowing ticket sales, and/or low turnout during this pandemic.” https://www.gofundme.com/f/philly-performance-artist-fund
“The Boston Artist Relief Fund will award grants of $500 and $1,000 to individual artists who live in Boston whose creative practices and incomes are being adversely impacted by Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).” https://www.boston.gov/artistrelief
Boston Music Maker Relief Fund: “Small grants of up to $200 will be paid rapidly on a first come, first served basis to affected artists and groups. Please see grant guidelines below. Donations will be accepted from individuals and corporations in order to replenish the fund and continue making payments to eligible music makers in the queue. The Record Co. is covering all admin/processing costs so 100% of every donation goes directly to music makers in the community. Please consider donating using the form below or contact [email protected] to get involved.”: https://www.therecordco.org/relief
Durham Artist Relief Fund: “Funds donated here go directly to artists and arts presenters in Durham who have been financially impacted by cancellations due to COVID-19, with priority given to to BIPOC artists, transgender & nonbinary artists, and disabled artists”: https://www.northstardurham.com/artistrelief
A pass the hat for individual SXSW workers: “Update 3/10: We have received over 400 submissions - thank you! We are working diligently to verify each submission and get them posted. As of today, the total amount of reported income lost is $2,108,835. Your stories are heartbreaking but we know them all too well. We appreciate you, we see you, and we love you, Austin. Hang in there.” https://www.ilostmygig.com/
2020 ECCC Artists Alley: An unofficial compilation of Eccc2020 artist alley online shops. Browse the goods of artists who won’t have the opportunity to sell directly to their anticipated customers: https://ecccartistalley.tumblr.com/
Artists Alley Online: A directory for some of the artists who would have been at Emerald City Comic Con (March 12-15, 2020) had it not been moved due to the corona virus. https://artistalleyonline.com/
NYFA Emergency Resources: “Artists who experience personal hardship or who are impacted by a large-scale disaster, or who need funding for a last-minute opportunity can find critical resources in NYFA’s Emergency Resources Directory.”: https://www.nyfa.org/Content/Show/Emergency%20Resources
The Indie Theater Fund: “Rapid relief grants of up to $500 will be awarded to support our community, prioritizing the consortium of companies, venues, and individuals working in NYC independent theater (Off-Off-Broadway in theater houses of 99 seats or less), operating with budgets under $250,000. We will award grants on an on-going basis until our funds run out. Grants can be requested via a simple online application and will be reviewed on a first come first serve basis.” https://forms.gle/pLm7bLhKQE8AbpDn6
Philadelphia Performing Artists’ Emergency Fund: Emergency Funds can be requested by any Cabaret, Drag, Burlesque, Theater, or performance artists facing a financial hardship caused by COVID-19. Performance artists who need aid can apply here: https://forms.gle/SwsMERPM1CTivFyc7
A production of The Winter’s Tale but when the stage direction says “exit, pursued by a bear” a hairy gay man (who appears no other times in the show) chases the actor off stage
