31 Plays in 31 Days 2014

Last August, I discovered 31 Plays in 31 Days randomly through the glory of Twitter. I participated. I was afraid of it, knowing the commitment that it would take to write a play every single day for the month of August. There were days when I had great energy and days when I had absolutely no energy. I wrote good plays, okay plays, bad plays, but I wrote 31 of them. This year it took me by surprise when I caught a tweet about this year's 31 Plays in 31 Days. I wasn't ready!

In a previous blog post, I wrote about Burning calories versus running miles as a metaphor for the way that I approach my playwriting currently. 31 plays in 31 days is a lot like PX 90 or one of those crazy fitness short-amount-of-time-extreme things. You don't know if you're going to get through it, you know that you'll be better after it, but it's ridiculously daunting. And that's a good thing I think. I think we need to do things that we're scared of. We need to challenge ourselves beyond our comfort zones. It's like doing a personal study of the kinds of topics, characters, themes, and styles that we use. It's like having a small representation of your work. A case study of who you are as a playwright. I'm looking over it last year, I started looking at the gender of my characters, Their voices, and I learned a lot about who I am. I was looking enough that one of my players that I rose ended up in Matlab theaters Theater roulette. I was completely not expecting anything concrete to come love writing 31 plays other than simply having written 31 place. It was a personal strengthening saying and not something that I was working towards doing. I wasn't trying to create 31 plays to submit. I wasn't running 31 players in order to fulfill a commission or two do anything specific with them. I just wanted to be able to say that in the month of August I wrote 31 plays.

So this year, I'm back at it. My friend gave me 31 words to help ignite some creativity and I feel mostly ready. Just like last year, I'll be posting all the plays here on my website for you to look at. These plays are rough. I will do no editing beyond the writing and editing that I do on the day that I write the plays. Is will be rough sketches, but there's a nice accountability enjoy I'm just letting these sketches go out. It's like an artist posting their daily sketchbook online. So enjoy.

Are any of my fellow theatre makers out there joining in? I invite you to give it a shot, Even if you're starting late.

Happy writing, happy making, and, as always, be excellent to each other.