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Just Your Luck
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 @ 2:45 PM
Today in the mailbox I found two copies of Reserved waiting for me. I had seen the proof, and the final version isn't much different, but they did add, as I requested, a "Production History" section to the inside cover. It has a sentence or two about the first production of Reserved and it has the original cast list.
NICOLE McNEIL: Alyssa Huff
MAGGIE SHERMAN: Mandy Finfrock
BARTLETT / JOEL: Dan Oltman
SHADY DOCTOR: Jason Vales
And I started to wonder if any of those actors ever thought that play would get published. If anyone who saw that original production thought it would. Maybe some of them did, but I bet a lot of them didn't, or never even considered the idea. Now, JAC is probably not the most exclusive or prestigious publisher. It's not Sam French or Dramatist. But, still. The point is, a play of mine is published. And a bunch of my other plays are purchased straight from me every month, by strangers, and there are a lot of playwrights who can't necessarily say that.
And so I started to think about what makes artists successful. Is it talent? Is it networking? Is it just sheer determination? Is it the classes you take or the genres you work in or the place you live or the group you belong to? All of these are certainly factors. But more than anything, I feel like it's mostly pure dumb luck.
Don't get me wrong, the successes that I've experienced took work on my part. I slaved away on the Monologue Database for years before Josh suggested that I could make money by selling the plays I had always given away for free. I had to attend more than one painful workshop before Le Wilhelm decided to produce Rage Is Loud. But the point is, I could just as easily have put in twice as much work and never gotten any productions, any publication credits, or made any money at all. There are playwrights who never get as far as I have - and I haven't gotten all that far - and have been doing this for ten years longer. And at the end of the day, it's not because I'm a better writer. It's because of fortunate coincidences - sending the right play to the right company or happening to know someone in a position to help.
Writing, like all art, is subjective. You write a play. You could have ten friends read it, and probably two would think it was brilliant, two would think it was terrible, and everyone else would fall somewhere in the middle. And if those ten friends were also playwrights, six would tell you all the ways that they would change it to make it "better". If all of these friends have their own production companies, the two who liked it might try to get it produced, but they probably have their own ten board members or investors to try to convince. All you can do is cast the widest net possible and hope that eventually, the right play crosses paths with the right group of people at the right time.
And this is what makes the rewriting process so uncomfortable: because you might be able to make your play more "accessible", more logical (or more surreal), more emotional or more subtle - but with the exception of fixing the spelling, you are almost never making the play "better". Someone is going to like it more, and someone else is going to like it less.
When I first wrote Bargaining, Seth thought it was perfect. But Josh suggested changes. When I changed it, I made it better in Josh's eyes, but not in Seth's. When I further changed it because of input from Amanda and Rob, they liked it more, but it moved further away from Seth's vision - and Josh still wasn't happy with it. I think Collaboration is more accessible to more people now than it was in its original draft. But I know there's someone out there who loved it more before I took out the Silmarillion references.
And you cannot please everyone - but everyone who reads it will act like they're the one you should try to please. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I read a script and I think, "This is terrible. I could write this better..." But in reality, all I could do is write it differently. I'd like it more my way, but plenty of people would feel differently. I should probably say, "This play wasn't for me," and leave it at that. Because there's somebody out there who loves it just the way it is.
In the end, what I've concluded is this: Writing the play is the real accomplishment. And if you love it, that's all that really matters. If it gets performed, if it gets published, if other people tell you that they think it's great, you'll feel warm and fuzzy, and you should feel that way. But if it doesn't, you can't beat yourself up about it. A play finding a producer or a publisher is probably a lot like two people meeting and falling in love. It's mostly random, highly subjective, and not within anyone's control.
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4 Comments:
At 11:14 AM,
Josh said…
Was the original design team listed? :)
At 12:46 PM,
Kellie said…
Design team? That would be... me. So... in a sense, yes.
At 6:22 PM,
Anonymous said…
congrats kelz! miss you.
-michelle
At 3:23 PM,
m.e.d. said…
this is so good and true.
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