Have you ever written a play?

It's a literary form that's primarily meant to be spoken and heard. There's little prose in between, except stage directions, to explain or elucidate. So most everything has to be expressed in the dialog and in the interplay of dialog. The dialog too has to be written in character of course.

I haven't written a play, but I studied creative writing (fiction) and I've written a lot, almost none of which has been published, so I am probably a terrible writer. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Still, here's the info:

—Studied English with a concentration in film and media studies and then went to grad school for fiction writing.

—In between undergrad and grad school, I wanted to be a screenwriter or TV writer. I applied to UCLA and USC and got into neither. I did get my first screenplay read by a Miramax producer, who rejected it. I remembered the rejection as dismissive, but my dad recently found it and it was very complimentary and encouraged me to submit other work but I had no other work to submit.

—After that, I turned that screenplay into my first novel-length fiction. It was an exercise more than anything. A screenplay can be a great outline for a novel, so it made the effort less painful than drafting a novel without an outline. Anyway, it wasn't good, but I kept writing on my own. I then took a fiction class at my alma mater and the instructor urged me to apply for the MFA program, which I did, and I got in. We wrote mostly pastiches and short stories and I'm not good at short stories. All faculty were encouraging and told me to "keep doing what you're doing" and eventually I would break through. Grad school actually exhausted me and made me overthink everything to the point of paralysis.

After grad school, I became very ill and though I wrote on and off, I mostly stopped for a decade because of the impact of my health and I only recently got back to thinking about and beginning two novels, but I feel very unmotivated these days.

All in all, I wrote three original movie screenplays, several spec TV scripts, four novel-length stories and a smattering of short stories over the years.

And overall, for what it's worth, writing fiction is a lot like acting from a financial perspective: there are tons of both authors and actors, making the fields exceptionally competitive, and the vast majority of people who do both tend not to make much money on it while a small number break through and attain celebrity status and skew perceptions. The average novel advance is about $15,000, and from that, the author pays their agent 15%, self-employment (15%) and standard income taxes (25-30%), and the publisher expects all but superstar authors to pay for their own websites and other marketing. So it's really a passion project for the majority of writers. Screenwriting is obviously a lot more lucrative for people who can pull it off; TV writing is a day staff job that pays well and film writing can pay a lot but involves constant self-promotion and opportunism, which a lot of writers are not very good at by nature.

All that said, writing (and painting, which I also do, and probably any creative endeavor) is worth it for the magic of doing it. It really is. Once an idea starts coming to you, you tend to get a thrill from building the story in your mind. Once you put pen to paper, whatever you write *always* takes on a life of its own and begins to "write itself" regardless of your plans for it. All authors report this; when you get "in the zone," at some points it feels as if the story and the dialogue are not even coming from your mind, just through your hands, as the project seems to be just downloading from the ether. There's really no more thrilling feeling than those periods of time when your writing is writing itself.

I work in communications and have been a professional business writer and editor all my adult life, and I've published a lot of nonfiction writing in various capacities and have edited some nonfiction books and other publications, just not fiction.

If you write or want to write, dive in and give it all you have. But I would encourage you to expect nothing and to hope for the best insofar as becoming a 'successful' writer just because everyone wants to be a screenwriter or author and that makes it an incredibly selective endeavor.

I recently heard a couple of agents say that of all people who start writing a novel, an estimated two to three percent finish writing their novels and of those, an estimated one percent get an agent, and of those, something like 50 percent get one book deal. I imagine screenwriting is even more competitive because screenplays are much easier and less time consuming to write since they are effectively story outlines. HOWEVER, that said about screenplays, successful ones have to of course be written technically well, formatted according to standard script format, and they need to consider costs associated with production locations, etc. Every new location is more money; every new character is another actor who has to be cast and paid; every new location is new city permits or a new set that has to be paid for; every bit of action requires its own specialized crew, explosions require safety teams, etc. So scriptwriting is specialized and requires knowledge of film production, including expenses, at least by the time they are in shooting shape.

Thanks r2/r3

I've written lots of plays and had them produced. After establishing a relationship with a producer I started directing my own plays after some bad experiences of other directors input. I know that a director has a different skill set to a playwright but the director also needs to respect the writer's work by asking permission to change any of the text. When I was directing my own plays I would also change the text since the play is basically a draft until you get the actors working on it but it was also learning to direct other living writer's plays. One refused to change the lines so as the director I decided I had to respect that and just had to just make it work.

I've written a few. Never had them published or performed in a fully staged production, but I've had lots of readings that have gone well.

[Quote] A screenplay can be a great outline for a novel,

Good point. Good idea. If I don't get my screenplay produced by 2024, I might just do this.

In 7th grade - it was phenomenal

Yes! A semi-autobiographical work titled "Rhapsody and Requiem". It wasn't well-received in its Seattle run.

R8 oh you too? 😂 I wrote one in the 5th grade too. The girl I had a crush on made a withering critique. It destroyed my writing ambitions for decades.

I wrote a play about Datalounge and even posted about it here.

My friends and I used to write plays together and perform them for each other at sleepovers. When camcorders came out we graduated to filming them.

One friend was the one whose family had the camcorder and she kept the tapes. She uploaded one on Facebook years ago and I was shocked at how witty it was. Funnier and edgier than anything SNL has done in the past couple of years.

Yes, I wrote it. When I was 12...

I wrote a musical comedy with two friends a number of years ago. It’s been done a few times since then and had an Equity production but I think that’s about as far as it goes. I’m still proud of doing it and it was a highlight for me.

Mostly wrote on commission so I got spoiled. Then that dried up and am writing on spec which is harder.