And we even had a lot of questions and comments about my play Safe and Sound during the talkback session. (Usually there aren’t that many.) To my surprise, we won third place again! (It had been looking like one of the other plays was pretty solidly in third.) Not to mention that the play I assistant directed, Prodigal Son, won first place. It was a very good night.

Anyway, on my walk back home from the theater, I realized that I already miss it. And it had only been five minutes! (Well, plus cleaning up the building afterwards.) The cast and crew are great, the project is great, the audiences are great, and the plays are great. I love New Play Project so much. Seriously. It’s like my new extended family. And I already know that I’m going to be going through withdrawals within a few days. Time to write some more plays… (Yeah, I kind of haven’t done much of anything on my Script Frenzy piece.)

Oh, and thanks to all of you who came! I really appreciated it. And to the rest of you, well, there’ll be plenty more to come.

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Thus far, my dialogue tends to be mostly “It’s this way,” “No it isn’t,” “Yes it is,” “No it isn’t.” Which is repetitive and quickly monotonous. I’m not entirely sure why I write that way, but I’m trying to grow out of it. (I’m not always like that, of course, but it’s noticeable. Very noticeable.)

My plays also seem to be more focused on the entertainment end of things — getting laughs, mainly — which is good and quite important, but I’m yearning to write something that’s great. Great in the noble, larger than life sense of the word, something that stretches people’s souls. Part of me wonders if the emotional shallowness of my plays is because I haven’t really experienced any of the poles — I’ve never had somebody really close to me die, and I’ve never been soaringly in love. Which isn’t to say that those things are necessary to being a good writer, but I can’t help but feel that there’s something lacking.

Eventually both will happen, of course. And we’ll see if I become a better writer for it. In the meantime, though, I’ll see if there’s a way to fake it. :P

Zooming out a bit, I’m getting completely flooded with ideas for plays now. Almost every day something that happens or something someone says sticks out at me as a good prompt for a play. More than I know what to do with.

But sadly I’ve hardly been writing at all these past couple of weeks. (I blame it on getting ready for Lost and Found, but I’m sure I could have made time to write. It’s just laziness.) And we’re already a third of the way through the month and I haven’t started writing a single word of my Script Frenzy play. ~sigh~ What I need to do, seriously, is just set aside that thirty minutes a day (or even an hour) and write, write, write. No matter what. That’s the only way I’m going to write all these plays I’m dying to write. (Which reminds me, the other reason I’m still very much a beginning playwright is that I’ve hardly read any plays. And so I’m reading Wit right now and have a long list of other plays to read.)

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Speaking of right before the deadline, I wrote most of the second play, Safe and Sound, in the hour before midnight. (Backstory: I went to the library Saturday afternoon and checked out some Jorge Luis Borges. On my walk home, I decided I wanted to write about something verging on supernatural. While Safe and Sound doesn’t actually have any supernatural happenings, it’s about that.) Granted, I spent a couple hours over the past few days freewriting and thinking about the play, and then earlier this evening I spent an hour writing a quick draft of what was originally the first scene, so it wasn’t completely done in this last hour. But most of it was. It’s been a madcap dash to the finish line, and again, I wish I’d had some time to revise. Oh well. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

And I’m getting excited for Script Frenzy next month.

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