Or: Why actors are awesome and should be included in the creative process early and often.

Or: Why writerly hermits (or hermitly writers) need a community.

Or: Why people who don’t own a car or drive are bad at giving you directions for where to park.

On Monday night, we had the first read-through — or “table read” as they call it in the biz — of my new play Ambien Date Night, which debuts at the Capital Fringe Festival this July. The lovely Rachael Murray from Naked Theatre Company organized the reading followed by a discussion, which was both super fun and hugely valuable to my writing process. Plus there was pizza, beer, Baby Cat, and the near constant threat of being towed by my super accommodating apartment company. What could be better?

As a new playwright, I’m still basically in Toddler Learning Mode. It’s a fun mode to be in, and I’ll probably hang out here until someone is like ‘wait, you’ve been doing this for 10 years, why don’t you know what you’re doing yet??’ I’m still really open to learning and growing — and maybe that feeling never stops. We’ll find out.

The writing process is by nature pretty solitary — unless you work on a TV show or in a sketch writing group or live tweet new sci-fi trilogies with your closest friends, I suppose — and after a while it’s hard to tell if what you’re writing is any good. Or, when you know for a fact that it’s bad, it’s hard to see a way forward. Big thanks to the actors this week for showing me what’s working and what isn’t, and in some ways understanding the characters a little better than I do at this point 🙂

Now let the revisions begin!