February. The shortest month of the year. It felt like the longest at some points.
I have just completed the “28 Plays in 28 days” challenge
set up by The Space Theatre - yes that’s
correct, I wrote 28 plays in 28 days. I
made the decision to enter very last minute – I saw it advertised on Twitter,
had a quick look, fired off an email and half an hour later had committed to
the challenge. I think if I’d thought
about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I am so glad that I did.
At 10pm each evening
an email from “Sebastian” appeared in my inbox with that day’s task, which had
to be completed and emailed by 10am 36hours later. The tasks ranged from writing a murder
mystery, to being inspired by a song, a play with no plot, a play with no actors,
personal pieces, biographical stories of fictional people, finishing a play you
never finished and so on. Each task was
different and challenging.
What I found fun was that there wasn’t a lot of time to
think. I mainly had to just start
writing as time was always against me.
So the things I wrote about I think were quite instinctive and uncensored. I was able to write about characters who have
been dancing around in my head for years and create completely new people. I was forced to think about what kind of
audience I was aiming at and how each play would be staged. I am quite a visual person, so I always
included some kind of description of the staging, lighting and sound as it
helped me to focus on the space and the story.
As I’ve been telling people about it, I’ve had a lot of the
same questions, the most common being: “How long is a play?” I think that is very much a piece of string
question. Mine ranged from 3-16 pages
long and had anywhere from 1-10 characters involved. They were set in schools, in space, on a cruise
ship, in a gym, a hotel, a bus, a tomb… My
aim with each play was to try to tell a complete story (except for the
challenge of writing a play without a plot…) so that was my bench mark for
completing each of them.
Some of what I wrote was pretty ropey but I think a couple
of them were quite good. There are
definitely some that I will come back to and develop further – one or two I can
see being full length plays, one I’d turn into a book and I now have a little
library of ideas which have already been developed and are full of
possibilities.
However, the overriding thing for me was the confidence
which it has given me. Although I’ve
been writing for years, I’ve never had the assertion to say “I’m a writer” but
I now I think I can. And I will.
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