JUNE: What do you ache for Alice?
(Beat.)
ALICE: To be seen…?— ALABASTER, Audrey Cefaly
What if you never make another dime off your writing? What if you never get a single production? What if every theater were to close tomorrow?
Would you still keep writing?
DO THIS:
Add up all of your writing (not just your plays)—your notes, your letters, your social media posts, your short stories, your poems, your blog posts, your artistic statement—imagine them all sitting on a big table, all spread out like a puzzle. Now ask yourself, “What’s it all about?”
Is any of it connected?
Can you see a pattern?
A theme?
A consistent style, more or less?
Everyone always asks, "What do you write about?" Such a useless question. I don't give 2 fucks. I want to know WHY you write. What moves you? What specific element of the human condition demands every heave of your heart, every spasm of your soul, every ounce of your resolve?
Tell me you write comedy; tell me it's to keep people from retreating into the crawlspace of hell.
Tell me you write family dramas; tell me it's because it's the only way through.
Tell me you write love stories; tell me it's so the loneliest among us have reason to hope.
Journal-keeping aside, to write without a deep and very personal intent, is to write for an audience of one.
PREVIOUS ARTICLES BY AUDREY CEFALY
52 Vocabulary Words for Playwrights
A collection of weird and unusual words for the things we do as playwrights.10 Things Playwrights Wish Their Actors Understood
A love letterTo Speak or Not to Speak?
4 Ways to Create Indelible Non-Speaking Roles for the Stage21 Things I Know About Playwriting
I wrote my first play twenty years ago. I wrote my second play one year later. Here are 21 things I learned in the year between the two.
LEAN MORE ABOUT AUDREY
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Audrey Cefaly's plays (Alabaster, Maytag Virgin, The Gulf, The Last Wide Open, Trouble) have garnered the Lammy Award, the Calicchio Prize, the NNPN Goldman Prize, the Edgerton, and a Pulitzer nomination. Her works have been produced at Signature Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Barter Theatre, Merrimack Rep, Florida Studio, Florida Rep, Gulfshore Playhouse, and countless others. Cefaly is a Dramatist Guild Foundation "Traveling Master," an Arena Stage playwright cohort, and a recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is published by Concord Theatricals, Applause Books, Smith & Kraus and TRW
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