It had a great Valentine's Day, and not just because I enjoyed a delicious filet mignon and Cotes du Rhone with the most wonderful wife in the world. I also--finally!--received a publication offer for Lights! Camera! Murder!
Followers of this blog know that many of my plays could serve as a testament to persistence. But Lights! Camera! Murder! is a real doozy.
I've always been obsessed with old movies. And so, when I started writing plays in 2006, this Hollywood-based murder mystery was one of the first I worked on.
I'd never written a mystery before, and I soon found myself way in over my head. Plotting a mystery is hard, and my original concept didn't make things any easier.
The concept was to have the play take place on the set of an Errol Flynn-like swashbuckler. The murder weapon was to be the villain's sword, and the murderer would accomplish the dirty deed by poisoning the tip of that sword. The victim--the womanizing leading man--would then be killed during the filming of the film's big fight scene.
From there the script went... well, nowhere. I had no idea what clues to plant or what alibis to put in the characters' mouths.
As a novice playwright, I never realized an even bigger challenge, at least from a marketing viewpoint. Few high schools--and no middle or elementary schools--would produce a play where the young actors have to handle swords.
I soon abandoned the script. But over the next few years, I would return to it again and again, tweaking the dialogue, swapping out characters, maybe adding a gag or two, but never getting one iota closer to breaking the story.
I finally cracked it in 2016--AKA The Year I Was Laid Off. Because I was out of work, I had a ton of time to write, so I tossed out the script and started fresh, refusing to even glance at the original version in case it contaminated my thinking.
Instead of a swashbuckler, I made the movie a hardboiled detective story, a la The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep. The murder weapon? A much easier-to-deal-with poisoned cup of coffee.
I finished the script in a couple months and quickly sent it to my publisher, Pioneer Drama Service. They almost as quickly rejected it, saying they didn't think it would thrive in their particular market. Although the play is a very lighthearted comedy, I suspect that the specifics of the murder and the fact that the victim dies on stage were a little too grim for their customers.
Shortly after it got rejected, I managed to snag one production of the play. Johnston Heights Church of Vancouver, British Columbia had been hitting me up for another play (they've now done five of mine), and when I told them about this homeless little waif, they were more than happy to give the play its world premiere (see photo above).
From the feedback on that, I gave the play one last polish and sent it off to other publishers.
The response was the same. Dramatic Publishing rejected it. Eldridge Publishing rejected it. YouthPLAYS rejected it.
I finally sent it to Heuer Publishing, a company I've long respected but which had rejected three of my previous submissions. And then I went on to write other stuff. Plays. Screenplays. Novels. After a year of waiting, I still hadn't heard anything from them and had completely written them off.
Then yesterday, thirteen months after I submitted Lights! Camera! Murder!, Heuer told me they wanted to publish it through their affiliate Brooklyn Publishers.
I was thrilled. Not only did it finally find a home after eleven years of writing and three years of submitting, but it will be my first play published by someone other than Pioneer.
I still love Pioneer and plan to submit to them again, but I'm looking forward to establishing a relationship with a new publisher. The play comes out in August.
So I guess the lesson is don't give up. I know it's a cliche, but it really is true. No matter how many rejections you get, no matter how many people ignore you, just keep sending your stuff out. Again and again and again.
It only takes one yes to change everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment