March 9

This Playwright’s Writing Process (Abridged)

Thanks to the magic of technology, I participated in the Instant Noodles Festival in Seattle as a Writer this weekend, produced by Pork Filled Productions and SIS Productions. I am grateful for the relationships I built during my time in Seattle with some of the same folks who were also participating in the festival. I want to share my writing process for the festival to help illuminate just one version of a writing process, as there were six other writers for the evening who I bet had just as unique processes as mine.

If there ever were a skill to get good at, it’s writing to a deadline and this was a fantastic chance for me to practice those muscles. A TV Writing teacher, Teresa Huang, said this to our TV Pilot Writing class and it’s stuck, with me ever since. There’s also nothing like the creative constraint of having to deliver a new play at 8am the next morning to break me out of my perfectionistic tendencies. Let’s jump right in.

Before the actual writing event:

• I cleared my schedule of all time commitments on Friday night
• I (tried) to get as much rest as possible on Thursday night
• I gently cleaned up in the office where I knew I would do my writing. There’s something about the cleaning ritual that helps me clear my mind. It’s as if my cleaning of the space was a purification of the inside of my brain, preparing it as a vessel for the new ideas and new play I would eventually write.
• I battled with some imposter syndrome…fear of failure…worries of other people’s opinions that my writing was the weakest of my current pursuits. I hadn’t written anything in a while, and I worried that I forgot or couldn’t do it.

I knew going in that…

• It was process over product. The goal was a 10-minute play, and done is better than perfect. I needed to do what can sometimes take years (writing a new play) in the span of a few hours.
• First thought, best thought. Plus some light editing, but making decisions quickly would save my butt. (Ironically, when I was a director for the 14/48 Hollywood Festival, this also saved my butt. More on that later.)
• The more I wanted to hear my words on-stage, the fewer of them I would write. Okay, this is wisdom from the 14/48 Festival so this isn’t mine. But it did stick with me when I heard it 3 years ago as a Writer.
• I would use pomodoro sprints to keep me from burning out too easily. I use a 25-minute on then 5-minute off cycle, but some folks prefer a 50 minutes/10 minutes. Since it was later in the evening, I knew shorter bursts would keep my brain engaged.

7:30pm Attend the Friday night meeting where I learned the theme, “What do you mean, ‘Asian’?” I see so many faces who I collaborated with during my time in Seattle, and even more excitedly, many more Asian/American artists who I do not know. The theme for the evening is picked first, and it is, “What do you mean ‘Asian’?” I write this down at the top of my notebook paper to remind me throughout the process what I’m writing toward.

8:00pm Meet with my director and actors virtually. I asked them specifically what types of roles they play, and what types of roles they desired to play. I asked about fight combat/choreography or dance or movement training, and puppetry… just because. I didn’t think I’d write a play with puppets, but hey. I also asked my director what types of plays she usually directs or likes. This helped me with hints about possible characters and general archetypes, like villains and antagonists.

8:30pm Meet with the other writers virtually. We got an overview from some of the veterans who had done other playwriting festivals like this, including those who had written for a 14/48 festival before. We shared some tools and advice, and I asked about creating a group writers’ chat. Folks also wanted to create a discord, while I knew others would prefer not to engage and work on their own.

8:45pm Noodle time: on a blank sheet of my notebook, I began writing various words, phrases, images, questions, or short notes riffing on the topic. Sometimes there were connections between words or phrases. Other times, a word or phrase seemed to veer off course but it was written down anyway. This is the phase where I challenged myself to come up with as many possible ideas and write them down without committing to one yet. The title and concept I eventually stuck with did get written down inside one of the grid boxes – “World Domin-Asian.” In this phase, I’m usually trying to turn the theme upside down, inside out. I try to define for myself what this theme might mean, so I think about the times when I’ve been asked what ethnicity I am, or the worse question, “Where are you from?”

9:30pm (ish) It’s around this time that I kind of lost track of time. This happens to me frequently when I’m in a creative or generative project like this. It’s a great thing, and it actually doesn’t feel like a slog. However, I know that I need to give my subconscious time to work after filling up a whole page of noodles. I go to walk my two dogs and get some fresh air. By the time I return to the computer, I have a few more new ideas to add to the notebook and settle in for some more noodling. I decide to go with the image that has stuck with me the most in the…last hour and a half or so. The general idea is a play about activating people’s “Asian” genes from all over the world to fight for something. I had previously been thinking about this idea specifically about Filipinos and the Filipino diaspora, and the fears that white supremacist ideologies have about being outnumbered by people of color / global majority folks… which they already are, by the way. Joke’s on them. But the director and cast I am collaborating with represent different cultural backgrounds, so then I got to thinking about what it would be like if all people around the globe who had any Asian genes became “activated.” I was curious, and I decided to follow that curiosity. Now that I had the Big Idea, I felt better about proceeding to the next stage.

10:30pm (ish) I decide to start outlining my play with a very basic, “Beginning Middle End” chart. I pull up a brainstorm document I created for the 14/48 Festival in 2022 when I was a writer, and discovered my template for breaking this down. I love using something I already created and adapting it for something new. So, I write 2 different outline versions. The first version was actually a beat by beat outline, but I wasn’t super enthusiastic about it. I kept noodling, scratching as Twyla Tharp would probably say, including going back to the quick hits word association but now with a focus on the “Sleeper Agent Activation” idea so that I didn’t get stuck. I decide on a version of the story where two characters, at this point, called A and B are trying to wake up character C to come with them and fight for the cause. The actors were super interested in what one of them called, the “Outrageous” stories so I was imagining that this play have an otherworldly quality. I hemmed and hawed about whether that meant space or not, and one of the first images I saw in my head was a Star Trek-esque opening with two characters flying in a futuristic ship. Did the festival have a ship?!? Of course not. I just knew that somehow… through the magic of theater and the beauty of creative constraints, it could be a thing.

10:50pm (ish) I decide to actually start writing. My mantra to myself was, “Shitty first draft.” Get something down on the page was the name of the game. I didn’t have a good sense of names yet so the characters started as A, B, and C on the page. I felt like I was winding with no direction, but I did at least know that the story had to begin with the Asian genes activation, there would be a conflict with Character C who would resist the activation, and then a type of conflict at the end. Along the way, one of my ideas was that Character C might be possessed by some sort of demon that contributed to the resistance. I called it an Assimilation Demon in my very simplistic stage directions, partially because I was thinking about who or what my villain would be in this play. Selfishly as an actor, I also was thinking about the opportunity to bounce back and forth between your “normal” self and a “possessed” self.

12:01am (ish) I pass my very idealistic deadline for myself to have finished the play with edits by 11pm, so I decide it might be time to take a shower and step away from the play a little bit. The shitty first draft was done, I send a quick text to the writers’ group chat, and I step away. I was also counting on the fact that shower thoughts can sometimes prompt something. True enough, after I get out of the shower, I run to my notebook so that I can add in a few images and ideas that popped into my head. Again, who knows how many will actually make it into the play, but the whole time I was thinking about my Shitty First Draft.

12:30am (ish) I decide to start my editing round. I gently try to decide on each character’s wants and needs, but end up just writing a simple sentence for each. I knew that A wanted to win the fight for their people. I knew that B wanted to fight for A. I knew that C wanted to live their life as normal, but that the demon inside of them wanted to maintain the status quo. I decide on “pulling my story up” which is that what I thought my beginning isn’t actually the beginning, and there’s a stronger choice to being with the two characters already on-stage approaching the third character. (I guess my Star Trek-esque opening with alarms blaring and the ship being under attack can be for another play.) I keep looking at my sequencing, too, about how the characters get to the final conflict in which they battle for Character C either succumbing to the Assimilation Demon or to accept their reprogramming, activating their Asian genes. I keep this pretty open and add it into stage directions for my director and actors to brainstorm about. What was clear to me was that I knew A and B had to win.

1:30am (ish) I’ve rewritten most of the dialogue, though there are perhaps 30% remaining from my Shitty First Draft. I try not to think about this too much, but I know that I’ll still probably find things I wish I had written differently after the festival. I decide its time to give my character names, so I consult my old friend, the internet. One of the actors mentioned that they have “gremlin” energy so I google gremlins and find photos of exactly what I was picturing. The character A I was imagining for this actor I had written with a mischievous energy, so this inspires me to look for names for trickster-type characters. I find the names Raven and Fox, and I also appreciated that technically these names could also be gender-inclusive. For the final character, I settle on Storm–no relation to the X-Men Character, but upon reflection it was a fitting choice as this character had battling forces inside of them. I use a good ole Find All > Replace for the names, and voila. I had a play.

2:00am Finalize my editing round and email in my play! I send a quick text to the writers’ group chat to send them good vibes for anyone who was still writing. Not creepy at all, but the candle I lit on my desk also goes out the very moment I make my last edit. I’ll take that as a sign from the Universe.

7:45am After snoozing my alarm several times, I groggily get myself out of bed to walk the dogs and to get on the road. I have a teaching gig that I really should have considered before I accepted the writing assignment haha, but hell, I knew I wanted to write as soon as the email came in so…

8:30am I chat with my director over the phone after she had read my script. I let her know that I was imagining a certain casting breakdown, but during the night I had also wondered if there might be a few other possibilities so I let her know that. We discussed questions we both had, and I let her know I trusted them with edits for clarity. Having worked on festivals like this before, I knew that this was not the time to get mad at actors and directors editing your work. I did know my priority though: A and B had to be the protagonists, and had to win in the end. Hopefully that also meant that audiences had to root for them. Since I was on my way to work (did I mention I had overbooked myself?), we said goodbye for now and that I could respond to texts sporadically.

12:30pm (ish) I see I have a missed call from my director, but I was still at work. She sent me a script lines question that I was able to think about and send some possible solutions to. Hey, considering this was written in a matter of hours, I was down to make edits and honestly a bit surprised there may not have been more. I guess a few additions to a line to help the logic, and we both wish each other good luck.

One of the most powerful lessons for me coming out of the festival is proving to myself that I can do the thing. It’s pushing past what I believe I am capable of, and seeing the proof come to life on the stage.

I really do wish more festivals like these popped up everywhere. It’s probably not sustainable to do it every week (or month…) but there’s something so fun about having a shared goal amongst all the artists collaborating on the project. Give a shout if you attended the festival and tell me what stuck out to you about all the plays and performances!

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To World Domination,

Mara