This month’s guest post is from someone I knew in my previous “before-burnout” life. I’ve been admiring her work as a playwright for a long while and I remember the days she describes: when plays “exploded” out of her. So I’m delighted to get this glimpse into how her process is changing, AND into how she’s taking care of herself along the way.
I’ve just returned from a brief, self-imposed, self-financed writer’s retreat. As a playwright who’s been working at this craft professionally for 30+ years, you’d think I’d have been on many a writer’s retreat, but you would be wrong. This was my first one. Why is this the case? A combination of not feeling like I could take the time and not feeling like I deserved the time, being the primary caregiver to my child, being the primary caregiver to both of my elderly parents. Now that my child is an adult and my parents are dead I have fewer excuses, but I also haven’t been working on anything. I’ve been in a bit of a writing lull since my father died two years ago.
Somewhat out of nowhere, a regional theatre I worked with 2 decades ago offered me a commission to write a play.
There’s a mix of feelings about such an offer. On one hand I feel very lucky to have been chosen. Being paid money to write a play is a privilege. Most of us playwrights just muddle through, coming up with ideas, writing them, and hoping someone will help develop them and produce them. A commission typically comes with some development thrown in, and occasionally a guarantee of production, but the latter is rare. Overall, a commission is a wonderful opportunity, and, in my experience, comes with very few strings attached (i.e. the theatre isn’t telling you what to write).
On the other hand, this theatre isn’t paying me very much. Not because they don’t want to, but because developing new work is not a top priority of this institution, and they don’t have the budget for it. At this point in my career I’d like to be making twice as much, but when the alternative is not making anything at all…? There’s an argument that I’m making the wrong choice, taking less money than I’m worth, but being a playwright pretty much always means making less than you’re worth. It’s not awesome.
Anyhow, I decided to use this commission as an excuse to take my first writer’s retreat. I help run a zero-waste general store, so I knew I couldn’t leave for long. I’ve gotten so out of the practice of writing, that I hoped even a short getaway would jumpstart my writing. A friend offered her Airbnb in Tucson, so made reservations and headed to the desert for five days of writing.
I proposed to the theatre that the commission be a play I’d already started writing during the pandemic. I hadn’t gotten very far because my father announced he couldn’t live alone anymore, had moved in with us, and then proceeded to decline and die in fairly short order. The problem with picking up an old play is that we change so much from year to year. A play that we would write in 2020 is not at all the same play we would write in 2024. And anytime we go through a change as fundamental as having a child or losing a parent, we’re not the same person on the other side of it.
I was a tad skeptical that I could pick up this play and successfully make it through a first draft. I’m still a little skeptical, but I made a lot of progress on my writer’s retreat.
Here’s what I did to push myself through:
- Before the retreat I did a lot of reading on the subject I’m tackling in the play. I read articles, watched interviews, and devoured an entire book on the play’s theme. When I was younger and had plays exploding out of me, research was something I picked up when I hit a rut, but now, trying to find my way back into an old idea, it felt necessary to absorb material about my topic before I picked up my pen.
- I began my writer’s retreat on the plane. I wrote a synopsis of what the play might end up being (because synopses are much easier to write early on). I finessed old character bios and wrote one for a new character.
- I wrote a “scene bank” of all the moments I could already picture happening, even if they were just fragments of a scene or one line of dialogue. The purpose of a scene bank is when you think you’re out of ideas, you go back to it and see if there’s anything in there that you feel like working on.
- Once in Tucson, I scheduled outings for every day. A hike in the mountains one day, a trip to a botanic garden another, a trip to a museum, a visit to a zero-waste store in Tucson. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have it in me to write all day long, especially not first drafts. I need breaks, and my brain isn’t very functional until at least 11am, so having morning activities that involved moving my body and absorbing new things was really helpful.
- I did all the things I tell my students to do when they’re writing, including making a diagram of what all my characters want from one another.
- I allow myself to write badly and I don’t reject any ideas. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a first draft and it’s not supposed to be pretty – it’s just supposed to get done. I don’t ask if I’m using too many theatrical devices in one play or if this scene or moment belongs in this spot. Those are rewrite questions.
- I write scenes longhand in a notebook so that I have the opportunity to clean it up a little when I type it up. And also, if I’m creatively tapped out, I can always type pages and still feel like I’m being productive. I didn’t do this with the novel I wrote, but I always do it with plays and screenplays. An exception might be that I’m typing up a fragment of a scene that I wrote and I keep going, composing directly on the computer.
One of my hard and fast rules is to not start rewriting before I’m done with a first draft, and I had to break this one a bit. As I said, I’m not the same person I was when I started this thing, and writing exactly the same play I would have written then is impossible. I’ve changed the occupations of most of the characters and completely altered the voice of one. I only had about 20 pages of the play typed up in 2020, so it’s not a massive amount of rewriting, but it’s still more than I like to do at this juncture. Rewriting is a completely different mindset than first draft writing. It’s much more left brained.
I have about 53 pages now, after five days of being away. I’m hoping that prioritizing my writing for the better part of a week will make me better at working on it now that I’m home and back to my life. There’s a lot of value in getting away. After the first full day, I felt myself reset, somehow. A lot of alone time was really good for me too. New scenery. Brain space. This writer’s retreat thing is a good idea. I’ll have to do it again.
Mia McCullough is a playwright, filmmaker, former teacher, visual artist, and occasional stand-up comedian. Her plays have been produced around the country and in the UK, and have garnered various awards. Her book Transforming Reality: Overcoming the Difficulties and Dilemmas of Creative Writing is available on lulu.com. She is a co-owner of the zero-waste store The Eco Flamingo in Chicago.