What are your two most burning questions about writing?

12/10/2014

I learned to write by teaming up with an established writer to write my first play, Liberty City. We then spent four years going to writers's retreats, developmental labs at New York Stage & Film, The Culture Project, New York Theatre Workshop and many others learning not only how to generate documentary theatre material, but how to spin that into the solo play form while still retaining the values of a well-made play.

I majored in English in college, but that was literary theory. Writing, is real life and a far more elusive skill set to master. In short, I learned how to write, by doing it, but also by doing it with the help of writing mentors (along with voraciously reading the work of great writers). Great playwrights, novelists, developmental producers who turn screenplays into films have been my mentors. All of these steps have led me to producing, writing, developing and producing screenplays and plays in my position as SimonSays Entertainment's Director of Development.

I had great mentors: Jessica Blank, Lynn Nottage, Marcus Gardley, Darci Picoult, George Eliot, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Mary Karr, Naguib Mafouz, Jacqueline Carey, Robin Hobb. People whose work I studied meticulously and asked them questions (the ones I knew personally, the others I stalked their work reading page after page, again and again... and listened to their words of wisdom and guidance. So I'd like to give back because that journey has been the grandest of my life. Learning to write has taught me how to live, love and laugh. Ask me your two most burning questions about writing in the comments below. I'll answer.

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10 Comments

Soyini Crenshaw

12/12/2014 01:57:13 am

I'm working on writing my one woman performance piece. I want to write it as a choreopoem and have a choreographed piece at the end. How to do I go about crafting my play for the stage; I'm dealing with a heavy subject.

April Yvette Thompson link

12/12/2014 03:10:03 pm

Hi Soyini:

Take a look at this link from Julia Cameron: http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

I started doing her exercises in the Artists Way and that gave me the courage and structure to begin putting my story down on the page without dredging up to much pain, but reveling in life, survival and beauty. Storytelling is telling story, not reliving our pain or therapy.

So, I believe spending some time, just writing and learning what the story is that wants to be told is the place to begin. Now you have an agenda of what you want to write about, but if you open the space for the real story that's in your heart, that story won't have questions, it won't have fears because it will begin pouring out of you.

I'll be sending out some exercises in podcast form over the next week that you can try. Generating tons of pages is the first step and not worrying about what the story is the best way to get great raw material. I wrote 600 pages to get a 60 page script of Liberty City my solo show (you can read about the process here:

http://aprilyvettethompson.com/liberty_play.html

I started by recording myself telling stories and then I edited that into a script. Your voice, how you explain things is your writing so use a recorder. And when you record, make sure you're talking to a group of people. That will force you to put the story out there in the world that accessible for people. Then, if you've never written before and been produced or published. You must either take a writing class with a master, send your script to an established writer and pay them to give you notes or team up with a co-writer. I've done both and all of the above. The second play, I knew I wanted to write about childhood abuse, but I ended up writing Good Bread Alley which is an epic story of a family and the lifelong struggle of protecting girl children. In the end, I got that catharsis and was able to talk about abuse without it becoming a therapy session for my audience but instead this gorgeous story of the struggle that all women face in getting their voices heard and balancing femininity with safety and the demands of a man's world.

I say all of this carefully as I have in other posts. Lots of folks approach me about how to write a solo show that will get produced. And I've not met one single actor who didn't come to me with an agenda for why they were writing a solo show. I don't teach agenda-driven writing and it's also why it's so difficult to get a solo piece produced. They have a bad reputation in the entertainment community for being either stand-up or someone talking about their dyfunctional family or abuse. All of which are viable things to write about, but it is the story that wants to be told that will easily fall into the natural structural rules of a well-made play.

The solo shows that get produced are the ones that read, not like a solo show, but a well-made play. Daniel Beatty, Whoopi Goldberg, Heather Raffo, Danny Hoch, Nilaja Sun are all solo artists, but they are rarely talking about themselves in their work (at least not directly, but indirectly) The reason their solo shows are successfully produced for years is that the play structure is so tight, that their solo plays are often produced as traditional mulitple actor plays.

So, the short is, begin doing your morning pages daily. That teaches you how to stay on the page. If you find that difficult, move it to 5 pages daily. The second step is to begin telling your friends stories and taping yourself while you do it, then transcribe those tapes. Then, if you're serious, you need to get in a writing class and meet the committment full-on.

Thanks for writing in...

be well,

April

April link

12/18/2014 09:23:59 am

Well, first you need to get a team of professionals onboard and there are several ways to do that. What other work that's been produced successfully (great reviews, awards and nominations) off-Broadway or Broadway are similar to your solo show? Find out who the creators (director, writer, dramaturg) of that show were and begin studying their work by picking up a class with them or hiring them to collaborate with you or read your script and give you notes. Or study with whoever trained them. That's first off. If you want to do something you've never done, the best way is to learn from someone who's done it well.

Once you've taken the script through this route and have a co-writer or director or strong dramaturg onboard, that person can leverage their professional connections to get your script read by producers.

In the interim, you should be submitting your script (once your experienced collaborator has said, it's ready) to every single script developmental opportunity you can find, but especially the prestigious ones: Sundance, The Eugene O'Neill, Playwrights Conference, New York Stage and Film, The Public Emerging Playwrights, New York Theatre Workshop Fellowships, The Women's Project and any other developmental labs that you can find that support your kind of work.

After you've done that, depending on what happens, you research theatres that have produced work similar to yours and start submitting directly to them by going to their websites and submitting via their specific parameters. Some theatres won't accept unsolicited scripts, others want only a 10 page sample, others have an application, etc.

And then you are in the game. Keep doing readings so folks have a place to see the story on it's feet and don't be afraid to invite important decision makers to these readers. They will become your champions in getting this baby produced. Readers are not just for chilling...they are a way to get your work out in the world.

Good luck and godspeed and thanks for such smart, thoughtful questions.

Tiffany

12/18/2014 09:22:14 am

Tiffany's 2nd Question: I wrote and performed a solo play with music over the summer but it needs a lot of work. How do I produce the play in an off broadway theater in New York after making the revisions?

Espii link

12/22/2014 03:24:05 pm

Hi April!

I recently got accepted to a playwright's group for next year. I'm a beginner playwright. What are some ways I can best take advantage of the next year with them? Is it better to focus on one play or try a hand at 10-minute plays? Does it make sense to take classes alongside the group or is just diving in with them each month a better way to gain experience?

12/22/2014 05:11:20 pm

Hola Sweet Sadah:

Write. Always write. Write on 10 min breaks. Take a writing class so that each day you are writing. Do not wait for a group to teach you how to write. Learn to go to the page daily and stay on the page. Do you do morning pages? If so, double the amount you are doing now. And check out the writer's ritual here:

http://thedreamunlocked.weebly.com/blog

Then give yourself writing assignments that force you to go to the page and stay there for a set amount of time each day. What you do with the writer's groups should be icing. Your job as a beginning writer is to generate raw material. The technique will get fine tuned in the writer's group (maybe, no clue who's teaching or who's in the class). But here's the barometer: Are the folks in this writer's group successfully doing in their careers what you want to be doing? If not, they can't help you. They can take your money and your time. However, if they are successful and advanced in their craft, they can mentor you which is invaluable. That's your call.

Take a look at the other writer blogs on this site. Just click writer in the topics to your right. There's lots of valuable advice from screenwriters, novelists, playwrights....

http://thedreamunlocked.weebly.com/blog/category/writer/2

You should be writing at very least 25 pages a day. Need to find some exercises? Pick up the "Right to Write" by Julia Cameron and On Writing by Stephen King. They are fantastic and will give you some exercises to keep you writing, reflecting and giving yourself to write without an inner editor or an agenda. Learning to stay on the page is the single most valuable gift you will every learn. Remember it takes about 600 pages to get to a 60 page play. But the raw material is often the best and you can decide what form it will take later. Right now, stay on the page and once you've done the morning pages, then start to recall events and stories. Just write down every story real or imagined you can think of ....and write it as if you're telling someone this story over the phone for the first time.

What's in the other 540 pages that don't get used for the first play are the seeds to 2 or 3 other screenplays, novels or plays....Write, my dear...30% should be long-hand (it feeds the brain and makes your writing on the computer faster), 30% should be recordings of what you're thinking about writing or stories) and the 40% should be on the computer. It will all come faster after you've written long hand first.

If you really learn how to generate raw material well, then the only thing you need a writing group to teach you is form. I prefer an academic class room setting or a writing master teacher to learn the intricacies of form. But that's just how I entered the game. Good luck and keep me posted on how you're doing.

Be well,

April xoxox

12/22/2014 03:30:00 pm

Hi April!

My 2nd question:

How do you sort through theatre submissions for solo plays if they ask for full-length plays and one acts? Do they have to explicitly mention solo plays in order for them to accept them?

12/22/2014 05:22:43 pm

Hey Sadah:

Look at the first question from Soyini at the top of the thread re: solo shows. It is easier to get a 5 character play produced than a solo show. For the most part theatres abhor them because they are often bad writing or stand-up disguised as a play designed to move an actor's career forward instead of being a great piece of writing.

So, I would target theatres that have done work like the piece of work you're pitching to them. If they have, more than likely, they have very heavy hitters that they work with for solo work and those people are generally only solo performers and playwrights: Nilaja Sun, Danny Hoch, Whoopi. Solo work is it's own beast. So unless you have some serious street cred as an actor or serious street cred as a writer, it's very difficult to get a professional theatre with a good reputation to produce your solo play.

They have all kinds of unspoken criteria about solo plays. For example, the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference will sometimes accept solo work, but only if the playwright isn't the performer. Sundance will accept solo plays, if a theatre has already decided to produce the play. Find places that do work like yours and at your level and submit only there to begin with.

And before you can do that, you have to know what kind of solo show you have. Is it monologue-based or scene based like a well-made play so it could easily be done my multiple actors like "No Child" or "Syringa Tree?"

Does the writing or the acting drive the play? Because if it's not writing, then you need to turn your attention to non-traditional venues as opposed to theatres. The professional American theatre exists to create great playwrights. The actor is only a tool towards that end. So they don't produce solo shows that are mediocre writing that relies on the performance.

Either way is a viable route, but you must be clear about the specifics of your solo show's genre and market (submit) in very targeted ways.

That's all I got, chica...

xoxoApril

Victoria

1/5/2015 01:08:55 pm

Is it possible to be a writer if writing is a physical challenge? You speak about volume as a way of finding the heart of your story, but what if one page of text takes a massive amount of time to type, and what about Morning Pages? Is speaking text or using a dictate program the same as writing?

1/7/2015 03:45:41 am

Hi Victoria:

Nice to hear from you. Morning pages should be written long-hand pen to paper and not computer. The thought process of journaling by hand is different from the computer and much closer to the act of creating story.

I understand you have circumstances that make that process difficult, so I'd suggest going to the tape recorder and then having someone else transcribe the recording for you. Dictation programs are unreliable and take your head out of writing, because you're going back to the page to make sure the software transcribed correctly. It tends to put a writer in their heads because technology is in the way.

Having coached with you before, I would say this is less about how you get the writing done and more about doing it every day without fail and making room for it in your life daily. And to lose the technology impediments, if you're learning how to write, then also learning new technology at the same time gets in your way. Grab an old fashioned tape recorder that you know how to use and start recording. You cannot miss a day of making that quiet time to do the morning pages (whether by hand or recorder)...you have to do it daily. It doesn't work if you start and stop, you have to decide to steal the time and stay with it. I'd also suggest a class or a coach to get you writing with a timeline in mind and to provide structure. That way as you continue to create raw content with your morning pages and recordings, you are also learning how to structurally put together story.

You can do this, my dear. Good luck and godspeed. You have a wonderful story in you, let us hear it.

Be well,

April

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