Student Blog: Telling Stories: How I Became a Playwright

I wrote my first play down on paper when I was in the third grade. It was about this group of friends with outrageously unique names, I think one of them was named Cookie Dough, trying to put on a play. I hand-wrote four pages with my little 9-year-old hands and then stopped and didn’t write anything else until my freshman year of college. But, I like to think that play from the third grade really gave me my start. I of course wrote small things here and there, scripts for class projects and things like that, but I didn’t really even fathom writing my own play till spring semester of my freshman year. Now I’m not quite sure where I would be without it.

Freshman year of college, I had never really thought that new work was going to be something I wanted to be heavily a part of. I did two new plays in high school, but other than that I hadn’t really done anything with it. Then, my Best Friend at college wrote a play. And did readings for it and talked about writing it and wanting to put it on, and I remember thinking how cool that was. Then I got an idea for a play. So I started to write it down. It is the only full-length play I have attempted and still haven’t finished. A lot of the playwrights I have met talk about the plays that you have to write. Like it is just inside of you and you have to write it. Even if it is terrible, even if it sucks, it’s what you have to do. This play was that for me. So I started writing. And it is not good. And I don’t think I will ever let it see the light of day. But it’s not for anyone. It’s for me. I called it figment. I think I have a total of five scenes of it wrote and maybe I’ll finish it one day and maybe I won’t. But Figment is my first play ever, well after my third-grade one of course. It got me started. I haven’t stopped writing since.

Over the summer, I started writing short plays. Just little stories that would pop into my head. I like short plays a lot. I love little stories that can have a beginning, middle, and end all in 10 pages. I wrote plays about my life, things I wish could have happened, and things I still want to happen. My freshmen year, my friend wrote a play and submitted it to Player’s Theatre’s Short Play Festival, LUV Fest. It got picked and she got to go to New York and produce it and I thought that was really cool. Player's also does a short play festival called NYC, and it is all plays that take place in New York of have themes surrounding the city. So, flash forward to my sophomore year and I had just gotten back from a trip to New York, and I remember feeling so overwhelmed and scared. Scared about the idea of wanting to move to the city once I graduated and even more scared about all the money I was going to need, everything I was going to have to learn, and I was terrified. I realized that no one really ever talks about that. No one talks about how scary it is being a musical theatre student and wanting to move to New York. So I thought that I would. I wrote It’s For the Plot, a short play about two college girls getting ready to graduate college and one of them is moving to New York and is having doubts and doesn’t know what to do. I then submitted it to SPF NYC, and it got picked. I was over the moon. This would be the first time one of my plays would ever be done or produced, it would be the first time anyone would see my work. I was so scared but so so excited. It was a great experience and I loved getting to be a part of SPF.

Since then, I have continued to write short plays, my plays have been in nights of student-written one-acts at my school and I have also now been a part of SPF’s LUV fest. I am still writing plays and I have found that I like writing plays about things we never quite have the courage to talk about. I also have found myself being a part of the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival which is a week-long festival that surrounds new plays, writing new plays, and everything in between. It is by far one of my favorite weeks of the year and I love being a part of it. I owe a lot to that festival.

That’s how I got started writing plays. I have never taken a playwriting class, I’m about to next semester, and I still don’t quite know what I’m doing. But I know that I love it. For a long time, I was really worried that if I wrote a play, I would just end up embarrassing myself and that people would make fun of me for what I wrote. I am still so insecure and scared when people watch my play for the first time, but it also brings me so much immense joy. And that joy outweighs the fear for me. So don’t let your fear inhibit you from doing what you love. Write a play. Do the things you have always wanted to do but haven’t had the courage to do. It is so so freeing. And as always, go do great things.