Letters to a Young Playwright

Practical and Impractical Advice on the Art of Playwriting

Adam Szymkowicz

• Publisher: Applause
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9798765165409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Adam Szymkowicz is that rarest of things: a full-time playwright. In an era when the business of live theatre seems perpetually on the verge of implosion, most dramatists survive only through soul-sucking day jobs, the largesse of patrons or their own families, or writing for television. Szymkowicz has carved out a distinctive niche for himself without relying on big institutions or the brass ring of a mega-hit Broadway production. Each year, his body of work-over thirty sharp, funny, pop-culture-inflected plays animated by an unabashed romanticism-is staged everywhere from big-city theatres to colleges and high schools.
In Letters to a Young Playwright, Szymkowicz dispenses hard-earned, unsentimental, and entertaining advice to early-career dramatists. Modeled on Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, it covers topics like writer's block, self-promotion, and the pluses and minuses of pivoting to Hollywood in insightful and digestible short essays. Perfect for beginning playwrights as well as mid-career writers looking to reinvigorate their craft and career, it contains endlessly useful advice and reflections from one of the most-produced living playwrights in America.

Table of contents

• A Caveat about the Title
• Acknowledgments
• Who Am I?
• Why Make Art?
• Not Magic
• Why Write Plays?
• You Have to Try Stuff
• You Can Do Anything You Want
• On Dogma; or, Be You; or, Sign the Plays or Don’t
• Be You Again; or, Really, Be You!
• On Originality
• Stretch Your Writing
• Look for the Theatrical
• On Magic
• Planning Your Play
• You Don’t Have to Know Everything
• Outlining
• Give Your Characters Names and Give Your Play a Title
• Sit Down to Write
• The Wall
• Persistence
• Consistency
• What Is Good?
• Things Helpful to Know about Besides Playwriting
• People Drop Out
• Read Plays
• Also, Read Other Things and Live Life
• Notebooks
• Writing by Hand
• Generating Ideas
• Ten-Minute Plays
• Being in Rehearsal
• How People Really Talk and Adapting That for the Stage
• Tips for Writing Active Dialogue
• Miscellaneous Writing Advice Posed as Questions that Sometimes Apply to Your Play
• Take the Initiative and Ask Questions
• Speaking of My Blog
• On Writing Monologues
• The Gift Mentality, and Talking About Money
• Writing for Different Markets
• Writing for High Schools
• More on Snobbery
• Saying Thank You
• Cast Size
• Getting that First Production
• Submitting
• Publishers
• Leverage
• Pivoting/Flexibility
• Talking to Donors
• Talkbacks
• Notes on Your Play
• How to Come Back from Destructive Notes
• Have a Writing Group
• Dramaturgs and Dramaturgical Directors
• Revising Your Play
• Workshopping a Play
• The Subconscious
• Meet People
• Whether to Go to Grad School
• After Grad School
• Where Should I Live?
• Ten Years
• Avoid Dating Your Play
• Imposter Syndrome; or, the Question of Confidence
• Writing about Personal Things
• TV and Film or Musicals or Novels or Poetry and More
• On Caregiving
• On Being Married to a Playwright
• Questions Students Ask When I’m Visiting a Class
• Be in the Room
• Write about Love
• You Can Pull Your Play
• Use a Dramatists Guild Contract
• All the Things
• Genre Play My Way
• Something That Can Screw You Up
• Jealousy
• Ups and Downs
• Define Success
• Also, Find a Therapist You Like
• A Writing Exercise
• You Are More than a Playwright
• How to Not Write a Play
• Other Books to Read about Writing and Living: An Incomplete List
• That’s It
• My Published Plays as of this Moment
• More Acknowledgments