On Blowing Up Your Practice

You always start the same way.

You open a doc and begin to write. Coffee on your left. Water on your right. Feels familiar. Comfortable.

I suggest that comfortable isn’t exactly a rousing way to start a new project. And by now those habits probably don’t work the way they once did. It’s like that sparkly sweater you once loved but now…  maybe not so much. And you can’t be bothered with deciding whether or not to keep it so it still hangs there.

I say chuck it.

The way you worked in the past may not fit who you are today. And it might be worth asking yourself if it’s time to cut some old habits loose.

A couple of years ago, I reached out to Daniella Topol.  At the time she was still a director, and the artistic director of Rattlestick Theater. (She’s gone on to become a nurse, bless her.)  We met over a bar of dark chocolate and talked. We met again and talked some more about stories we thought might make great plays. Nothing really stuck though. After that second meeting I realized that I needed to do something different, so I started to write.

I wrote 8 pages of a script, a one-person show. What I imagined might be my first full-length solo work. I brought them to Daniella, and she asked me to read the pages out loud. I had never done that before, but I did it.

When I was finished, she asked me what I needed to keep writing. I told her I needed rehearsal space, an actor and a director. She instantly gave me all three which included her signing on to direct.

Here comes the part where I blew up my process.

Until then, it always (there’s that word again) took me three months to write the first draft of a play. When that first draft was finished, I’d share it with a few people and get some notes. (See: Sharing my Work)

But now I wanted to work the way I imagined a choreographer did. I wanted to stitch the play on an actor. I wanted to write ten pages and bring them into rehearsal. I wanted to avoid being lonely for three months while I immersed myself in writing. I also wanted to hear the pages out loud by someone who knew how to act. 

So that’s what I did. Daniella and the actor Andy Polk joined me in every rehearsal over the course of ten months as I wrote Moses. Yes, it was frustrating to work around their schedules, but it was worth it. After a virtual reading at Cape Cod Theater Project during the lockdown summer of 2020, Moses was produced last fall by Theater J in Washington D. C. 

I don’t think I’ll ever go back to finishing a first draft of a whole play before I find a director or actor(s) to work with me. I now want to hear everything I do while it’s in process.

Maybe blowing up your process isn’t so much a challenge as an invitation.

  • You always work in Final Draft?  Start your play in a Word doc. You can always transfer it into FD later, right? Throw your lines down on the page without worrying how it all looks. 

  • If you always start a screenplay writing in longhand, grab your computer and open a doc.

  • You always write in silence? Next time you sit down to work, play music. 

  • You never talk about the story you’re writing because you think you’ll jinx it? Start talking. Pitch it to colleagues you respect and admire. See what their reaction is.

  • Write your first ten-minute play for fun.

  • Message that composer you met at that Dramatist Guild class.

  • If you’ve been working on the same scene for a week and it still doesn’t work, start backwards. Start with the end of the scene and keep going. 

  • If you are tempted to end the scene, make yourself sit in front of your computer until you’ve written at least two more beats.

In fact, you might write a whole lot more if you blew up your practice. You might feel more inspired, too.  Change up your practice and write something that makes you sweat a little; the play or screenplay or TV pilot you never intended to write in a million years. 

Boom.