Belmont Diary: Laying the groundwork

My mind was buzzing.

Ever since my first discussion with Belmont Day School about the play they're commissioning me to write, I was eager to get started, ideas of plots and characters swirling in my brain. But there was no point getting ahead of myself. I wouldn't know what plots or characters would be usable until the school told me what they were looking for.

That came today. Chris Parsons set up a Zoom meeting with fellow theater arts teacher Susan Dempsey and myself so they could go over their requirements and together we could toss around some ideas.

From our initial discussion, I knew that the play would have to meet the school's DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) requirements, but I didn't know what that would entail. In my plays, I've always tried to stay clear of gender and ethnic stereotypes. In Trouble in Paradise Junction, I even provided a production note stating that the characters weren't meant to be real people, not hillbilly caricatures. But I didn't know what else the school would require.

It turned out to be pretty straightforward. As I expected, there are to be no stereotyped characters. And the female roles needs to be strong. I wouldn't dream of doing anything else.

Also there are to be no guns, which brings up an interesting point. When I started writing plays, I tended to use guns as a crutch, including them in four of first eight plays. Since then, I've made a concerted effort to exclude them, with the result that none of my next ten plays have included one. It hasn't always been easy (I really, really wanted to give one to the border guard on Babka Without Borders), but it's definitely a worthy goal.

Finally, any murders would have to occur offstage. As a matter of fact, only one of my plays has shown on an onstage murder (Lights! Camera! Murder!) has shown an onstage murder, and while that death is a relatively non-violent poisoning (at first, the other characters are convinced he's just acting), I can understand why it may be inappropriate for some schools.

The play needs to be full-length, between 80 and 90 minutes in length, with one act break. They already have 36 or 37 kids signed up and expect a couple more so they'll need a part for each them, with a healthy mixture of large, medium, and small roles. And the roles needed to be meaty. In fact, Chris and Susan said they liked Babka Without Borders because although the play was funny, it gave the young actors plenty of drama to sink their teeth into.

Beyond that, the kids have come up with their own wish list of items. They wants the play to be a comedy/mystery. They want it to be set in a mansion. And they want it to center on family and relationships.

Check, check and check.

The only real challenge is the number of roles. The largest cast I've ever written for was the 25 from Trouble in Paradise Junction so this represents a huge increase. And the fact that the play primarily takes place in one location adds another whole level of complexity. Not so much from a logistical viewpoint but from a story one.

What would be the rationale for that many characters meeting in one house? That's the challenge.

But then, I love a challenge.

Ten years and counting...

Well, it almost slipped by me without a peep, but I just realized that today is the tenth anniversary of this blog.

When I started it, I'd just received my first offer from publication. It came from Pioneer Drama Service and was for my one-act comedy The _urloined Letter, which had received its first production just eight months earlier.

I wanted to start the blog because I was excited to share this news (I'd been trying to get published for fourteen years). But I also figured now that I was a big-time published author (cough!), people would be clamoring for my insight, much as I'd clamored for insight from those writers who had come before me. 

Ah yes, The naivete was thick.

Of course, I quickly ran into Hurdle #1 for the new blogger. What to write about.

So many baby bloggers rush into their first few posts, flush with enthusiasm and buzzing with ideas. And then they discover that they really didn't have as many ideas as they thought. And they didn't get as many hits as they expected. And that writing is hard work.

I've never had a problem coming up with ideas. I just write about my career as it develops: new plays coming out, new countries where those plays are being performed, mentions in the media. And yes, the occasional piece of writing advice.

I also don't worry about hits. I get ten to thirty a day. Not as many as I'd like, of course. But I get enough emails from followers that I know the blog is proving useful to teachers and directors looking for additional information on my plays and seeking advice on their productions.

Of course, I also ran into Hurdle #2. Finding the time to write.

This has been more of a struggle. With a full-time engineering job and an hour and a half of writing every day--not to the mention the normal daily and household management stuff--my brain is often too mooshy at the end of the day to put together two more words. 

But early on, I made a promise to myself that I would write at least one post a month. And I'm happy to say I've kept that promise.

Ready for some stats? Sure, you are!

Over the last ten years, I've received a total of 86K page views. And sure, a lot of those were bots . I know this because, for a while there, they were spiking like clockwork every two weeks. But those have largely subsided now. Why, I don't know. Maybe Google has cleaned up their Blogger counter algorithm.

My most popular post of all time is The Enchanted Bookshop is Now Available with around 2300 views. It's the post that announced the release of my bestselling play and describes my process for selecting the six famous literary characters around which the play is centered.

I have no idea how people are finding this post because it doesn't show up very high in search engines. Maybe they're finding the blog first and then searching for "enchanted bookshop" within the blog. A good reason for those of you with your own blogs to add a search field, if you don't already have one.

After that, the number of views drops off dramatically. My second most popular post is The Hero's Journey in Star Wars with 563 hits. It's based on a popular talk I gave at the Colorado Thespian Conference and is one of my free really hard-core writing advice posts. If you need a quick intro to the three-act stroy structure, I highly recommend it (it even includes a downloadable 

My follow-up post, The Hero's Journey on Legally Blonde, has been more popular lately. I don't know. Maybe I should write a series of those. 

My third most popular post is Trouble in Paradise Junction to be published with 472 hits, no surprise there because that's another one of my bestselling plays. The post describes my three-year struggle to finish the play and ends with Ted Lasso-like hero Joe Goode's monologue.

Another post that isn't quite as popular as these but that I'm still proud of is So You Want to Do a Staged Reading with 301 hits. In it, I offer some advice from having produced the first staged reading of my play The Butler Did It! If you're in a similar position with your own play, I recommend you check it out.

So, will this blog last another ten years? Who knows? I don't even know if I'll last another ten years. And with the onslaught of Facebook, Instagram and other social media time sinks, blogs seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur.

But I can guarantee you one thing. I'll still be writing something.

Oh, and if you're interested, here's that first post.

Naivete indeed.

Belmont Diary: Out of the blue

You never know where a play might lead.

When I was writing Babka Without Borders, I almost gave up halfway in. At that point, I knew it would take me a couple more months to finish and the fear started to gnaw at me that the play would never get published. Or if it did, nobody would produce it. Its costumes were too challenging (it's set in the early 1900's), its language too stilted.

But the story wouldn't let me go. The characters begged me to bring them to life. So I took a gamble and finished it.

It turned out I was wrong on both counts. Pioneer Drama Service snapped up the plat and, while it hasn't gotten a ton of productions, it's done all right (11 productions in its best year). And it is, so far, my only play to have been performed on the African continent (the stunningly beautiful Knysna, South Africa).

Most importantly, the schools that have done it really love it. Its themes of love, world peace and pastries seems to resonate with a lot of people. 

Which leads me to Belmont Day School in Belmont, Massachusetts. They liked the play so much that they arranged for me to do a Zoom call with the students (the first hour is always free for schools and other theater groups that perform my plays!). I had a great time meeting the cast and crew and they had a great time firing questions at me, like where do I get my ideas and what is my favorite flavor of babka (chocolate, of course).

That was a couple years ago. And I hadn't heard anything more until this week, when out of the blue, Christopher Parsons, the school's theater director, emailed me. He He explained that the school has very specific diversity requirements, and that he's had a terrible time trying to find a play that meets those requirements. Would I write one?

I only needed about a half second to answer that one. It's been four years since I've developed a play in partnership with a school, and I miss interaction. Not only do I get feedback that helps make the play better, but the sheer energy of the staff and students pumps up my writing.

They would pay me my usual fee and I would own full rights to the play after they perform it. The only challenge was the time frame. They originally wanted it done by August 10.

Now I'm a slow writer. I usually take four to six months writing an hour and a half a day to finish a full-length play. Even if I squeezed an extra half hour of writing in each day, the soonest I could get it done was October.

Fortunately, they were willing to give me until the first day of that month as the absolute drop dead date. Of course, I promised to send them partial drafts along the way so they could start planning sets, costumes, that sort of thing. And having a deadline will force me to stop wasting so much time second-guessing myself in my writing.

Deal done.

Now all that's left is to discuss are the parameters of the play: Cast size, length, possible themes. But that comes next week.

I can't wait.

My 10th year sales

Pioneer was right.

In their annual letter to writers last year, they said that as tough as last school year was (I saw a 13% drop in productions, with nearly all shows cancelled in the second half of March and April), they warned that the coming year would be worse.

I'd hoped it wasn't true. Like most people, I'd thought that the pandemic would peak in the summer but that things would be back to normal by the time school started up again in September.

Of course it didn't happen that way. As everyone knows, we had a whopper of a wave that started in November and didn't end until we started to see the effects of the vaccine in February. (Thank you, researchers!). The result: almost an entire year's worth of school and community theater productions were wiped out.

Fortunately, there were a couple bright spots. One was the growing popularity of virtual theatre through streaming apps like Zoom. The other were all those brave directors and students who managed to maintain all those social distancing procedures necessary to keep live theater, well, alive.

Still, things weren't great. I had a total of 158 productions--a 49% drop from the 310 productions I had last year, which was a 13% drop from the 361 productions I had in my best year of 2018-2019.

That's not as bad as it could have been, but most of those productions were for shorter plays or fewer performances than my usual mix, resulting in an even more painful drop of 69% in revenues.

For the fourth year in a row, my bestselling play was The Enchanted Bookshop with 39 productions. That's a huge drop from the 121 it got last year and the record-setting 156 it got the year before that, but it's still pretty impressive for a large-cast play in the middle of a pandemic.

It was the first full year for the musical version of that play, The Enchanted Bookshop Musical. With 21 productions during the year, it moved into second place. This one actually has 12 productions booked for next year, so I'm thinking it may do very well next year.

You're Virtually Driving Me Crazy! was released in August and came in as my 3rd most popular play for the year, with a respectable 20 productions. That's not too surprising because it was adapted from You're Driving Me Crazy! for virtual performance during the pandemic. It'll be interesting to see how well this and Pioneer's other Zoom-friendly plays do as schools open back up.

An Enchanted Bookshop Christmas is my most recent release, coming out in September. It had 13 productions, which isn't too bad for a holiday-limited play in the middle of a pandemic. It actually was my biggest moneymaker for the year because it sold a ton of scripts. A play's first full year is usually its best year so with schools opening up again I'm thinking it could do gangbusters in the next twelve months. 

You're Driving Me Crazy! also had 13 productions. I don't know if the bulk of these were also virtual productions but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. At the very least, three of the four scenes that make up this driver's ed-themed collection of short plays are very small cast (two or three actors each), so schools who did perform ut live may have chosen it for that very reason.

On the other end of the spectrum, The _urloined Letter, my oldest play, got zero productions, and Babka Without Borders and Wicked Is As Wicked Does each got just one production. Things were so bad, in fact, that because of cancelled productions, two plays--the aforementioned Babka Without Borders as well as The Stinky Feet Gang--actually made negative royalties for the year.

But there is a light at the end of this seemingly endless tunnel. The vaccine is now widely available, cases are way down, and most schools are preparing to reopen for live instruction in the fall.

And this month alone, I made more in royalties than I did in the first seven months of the 2019-2020.

A very bright light indeed.

Wandering back to the Springs

I miss Colorado Springs.

Don't get me wrong. I love Phoenix. In fact, I wouldn't live anywhere else (unless I get really rich and can move to the Amalfi Coast). But Colorado Springs is better in some important ways, and one of those ways is its theater scene.

Although Colorado Springs has a population of only 300,000, the city has a wealth of professional, amateur, church and children's theaters. I've been involved with several of them, but I've never had anything done by one of my favorites, Springs Ensemble Theatre (otherwise known as SET).

Until now.

My 10-minute play The Wanderer has just been selected for their Fatherhood Out Loud Play Festival on--when else?--Father's Day Weekend (June 18 to 20).

The play has only been done twice before (kudos to Springs Ensemble Theatre for not insisting on world premieres): Once at Oakland's Pan Theater in 2012 and once at Connecticut's Stonington Theatre in 2013.

It's my only drama. Opening in the waiting room of a police station, it centers on an old man who was arrested for shoplifting a lady's watch and his workaholic son who's trying to understand why he did it. 

The play was inspired by my own father. And no, he never stole a watch--or anything else, come to think of it. But the thin ice that the father and son tread in their 10-minute very much resembles our own relationship dynamic.

Due to the pandemic, SET still isn't performing live, but that's a good thing because it means anyone in the world can stream the show. You can buy your tickets here (cheap!). But don't wait too long. The video isn't available after closing day. 

And if you're a playwright with a short mother- or father-themed plays, make sure and bookmark SET's website. Their Motherhood Out Loud and Fatherhood Out Loud festivals shows are an annual thing and they accept submissions from anywhere The deadlines are February 28 and March 31. 

Saving the novel

I haven't plugged books here before, but I'm so excited about one I recently picked up that I just have to share it with you. It's Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody.

Regular readers of this blog know that I've been an avid disciple of the Save the Cat! books for a long time. I first came across them fourteen years ago when I tried to break into screenwriting. They quickly became my bible for structuring all my stories, not just screenplays.

Other books have covered similar ground, but Snyder's take was more detailed and user-friendly. He provided specific page counts for each of this fifteen story beats so that you can see how closely your story paces with existing movies. He defined ten popular story genres--from Monster in the House to Fool Triumphant--and described how the beats varied for each genre. And his books were just fun to read, with a jokey, light-hearted style and catchy, unforgettable names for many of the story concepts (I still refer to "Whiff of Death" and "Pope in the Pool" in discussions of my own stories).

I especially loved his second book, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, because it described the specific story beats of fifty famous movies, giving readers an intimate look at how masters of the craft structured their stories.

Sadly, Snyder passed away all the all-too-young age of 51 in 2009. But he left behind a legacy in Hollywood that's hard to match. Blake's template has become the de facto standard for commercial films.

Of course, novels aren't expected to follow this structure as closely as movies are. But you have to give your novel some structure or it'll just drift from event to event with no tension or sense of direction.

Author Jessica Brody
(Photo Credit: Brian Braff)

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel provides that structure. Brody--who's had her own success in the YA field with books like I Speak Boy--offers the same fifteen-beat template as Snyder but adds her own quirky humor while showing how those beats are met in novels like Misery and Bridget Jones's Diary. It took Snyder two books to cover that much ground for films.

Now I'm not one of those writers who believe you have to slavishly follow these templates. Do you absolutely need a B story? I don't think so. Can the Theme Stated come later, say halfway into the story? Probably.

But deviate at your own risk. Over the years, I've read many, many manuscripts for friends and acquaintances, and one thing has become painfully clear to me. Every poorly written story--whether novel, screenplay or play--fails because it leaves out one of those fifteen story beats.

Sometimes it's the Debate. Instead of rejecting the call to adventure, the hero jumps in willingly--even excitedly. Not good if you want to maintain a sense of tension.

More often it's the Midpoint. This is where the stakes are raised, where the hero first gets that whiff of death. Skip this beat and your readers won't even care what happens at the climax because they don't know what your hero is risking.

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel isn't a book you're going to want to read straight through. There's just too much detail, too many helpful tips to remember. Instead, keep it at your side while you're writing so you can dive in when you hit a wall and find out how the masters got around it.

It won't just save the cat. It'll save your butt.

Badger Crazy

A very nice high school student emailed me today saying that she'd played Kat in her school's production of The Butler Did It! earlier this year and wanted to direct a scene from You're Driving Me Crazy! for her theater class. The only thing is she couldn't decide which scene she wanted to do. Could I send her the scripts?

I wanted to help, I really did. But with the pandemic cancelling 80% of all school productions this year, playwrights and play publishers alike are struggling. We really need every script sale we can get.

Not to mention the risk that once a PDF of a script is out there, it's all too easy to make copies and/or forward it to other schools or theaters (not that any of you lovely people would do such a thing). And any electronic script I had would be an early version of the play and wouldn't include all the required legalese. So I had to decline.

But I recognize that many schools are struggling too, so I offered to mail her one of the free printed scripts that Pioneer Drama Service provides me.

I also did a Google search and happily discovered that a high school in Plainfield, Wisconsin posted a video of the play just a couple months ago. (That town, by the way, has a personal connection for me as well. When I was a kid, my family and I would often drive through it on our vacation trips up north.)

Actually, the play they performed was You're Virtually Driving Me Crazy!, the virtual adaptation that Pioneer released last year. But as I've explained elsewhere, the differences between the two are minimal. And this particular production is really good, with lively performances and all of the action being set inside actual cars. (One of the benefits of social distancing: it forces you to get creative.)

So I emailed the student a link to the video. I hope it helps her. And, if you've been considering this play--one of my most popular works during the pandemic--I hope it helps you too.

But if it's at all possible, please buy a perusal copy. Pioneer's E-view system makes it fast and easy. And it'll help keep them and me in business for when the world finally does open up again.

Thanks for your support!