Playwright Pit-Stop: On Brevity

I never thought I could write short pieces. Has my tune changed?

This is a short piece originally written for First Kiss Theatre’s monthly newsletter for March 2025. Be sure to subscribe to see more like this as well as fun games, recommendations, goings-on, and more!

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Brevity has often been elusive for me– as in, I don’t know how to shut the hell up. Never have! As a performer that has tended to serve me, but as a playwright…I’m not sure it has.

Up until pretty recently, most of my work was long-form, i.e. full length plays. I had obviously written ten minute plays for things like classwork, but I didn’t really have any that I felt represented the best of my writing. As for one acts, I had/have two pretty successful one woman shows (Antidotal and Retail Therapy) but that was sort of it. I was always a little dismayed when I scrolled Play Submissions Helper at the end of every month and saw how many opportunities there were requesting ten minute plays, because I had nothing to really submit to them. After a while, I realized that I was missing a lot of opportunities because of this. So, this year, I became determined to master the ten minute play.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Brynn…it’s only March. You can’t possibly have mastered a skill this quickly.” And you’d be right! I haven’t! But what I have done is broken through the wall that for so many years had me convinced that I couldn’t write a good ten minute play. And now I want to share my discoveries with you all, in case you need help breaking through that wall too.

The thing that really did it for me was both surprising and laughably easy– prompts. But not just any prompts: prompts that sparked within me a clear, dynamic image. This draws back to what successful playwright, Steven Dietz, says about writing in the book Playwrights Teach Playwriting 2: “Don’t make it interesting! Don’t! Make it simple.” Along with this he stresses the importance of ignoring the general notion that one needs an “idea” for a play, and instead “putting an image into action”. Something about this, combined with a prompt that elicited a strong image within my imagination, broke something that had been holding me back.

If you’re curious, the prompt that inspired this revelation wasn’t even all that detailed– it was for a contest in which the playwrights who submitted needed to write a ten minute play with 2-3 characters based on a line from the nursery rhyme “Monday’s Child”. I chose, “Saturday’s child works hard for a living”, because I was born on a Saturday. I had the urge to write something more speculative in nature (it’s what I tend to write anyways, plus I had been binging Severance and reading The Handmaid’s Tale) and I had a sudden image of dates scrawled on people’s wrists in black. From there I started writing, and another image appeared– all three characters standing at the front of the stage, miming hanging themselves. This culminated into a piece called (aptly) Saturday’s Child, the first ten minute play I’ve ever written that I actually love and feel represents my writing well. I loved it so much, in fact, I submitted it to three other opportunities besides the one I wrote it for.

I told my best friend about this opportunity, and she also found it intriguing. She shared another prompt based opportunity with me afterwards, this one requesting ten minute plays with 2-3 characters taking place solely in a subway car. This wasn’t enough for me to create a dynamic, clear image in my mind, so I went hunting for inspiration. Suddenly, I recalled the fluxus workbook pdf I had been given to look at in graduate school for some class or other. I had already used the performance art within as a prompt for my full length play, The Eleventh Star, so I went hunting for another prompt. I found one that, after some distance, reminds me a lot of a Paula Vogel “Bake Off” list, and I followed the first image I got without overthinking it. I once again wrote a ten minute play that I loved and felt represented my style well (called Taking the D Train).

This is when the pattern began to occur to me– that instead of getting some big brained “idea”, I was a lot more successful (at least with shorter writing) when I relied on my imagery to guide the play. It also helped to have a consistent short-play-writing-buddy in my best friend, a phenomenal editor who asks great dramaturgical questions without really thinking about it. I started keeping an eye and an ear out for things that created strong images for me– as I was listening to a favorite podcast, a particular story they told elicited a dynamic image in my imagination that stuck with me for a few days. I figured, “why not try it again?” And that’s how I wrote a 21 page one act called POLT in three hours on a random Tuesday.

Discovering your creative process is a journey you never stop taking, as evidenced by my experiences here in the last 6 weeks or so. I believe, as writers, we often get caught up in the “ideas” (I know I do), and find that our first drafts hit a huge obstacle about halfway to two thirds of the way through. For me, I now know that, for me, that’s because I don’t have a strong enough image that I’m working towards or away from. Perhaps for you imagery works too. Or maybe it’s another sense! Perhaps you need a sound, a smell, or a feeling. Either way, I have discovered that this technique grounds the work in a way that makes the thread of the emerging story much easier to follow (at least for me).

So, after years of having a bunch of “meh” short works I didn’t even want to put on my NPX page, I now have three really solid ten minute plays and two solid one acts that I can submit to things– and I can’t wait to write more! As a neurodivergent with executive functioning issues, this has also been really helpful to get me inspired and motivated to write– so I just hope, in some way, me sharing this discovery within my process has helped you too.

What writing breakthroughs have you experienced in your creative journey? Let’s help each other out in the comments!

Happy theatre making,

Brynn