5-Day Playwriting Workshop

This workshop leads you start-to-finish through a new short piece of writing, using three distinct perspectives on how to approach composing your writing: the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. Each day is guided with a set of exercises. Together these three layers of process create a considered whole that has its own patterns and designs, but that remains open to surprise and improvisation throughout.  

Navigate below to the day you’re looking for. Or scroll down for the workshop overview. 

PDFs of individual days can be found behind the downloads button on the sidebar of each post. Recommended if you prefer to work offline. 

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Workshop Overview

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”

— Walter Benjamin

TL;DR

You can use this however you want, including for something that’s not a play; don’t expect me to teach you Freytag’s pyramid; I hope you stick with all five sessions it because the days accumulate approaches and that’s how you get to the ringing, singing, crystalline whole. If you can, for solidarity, do this workshop alongside a partner or small pod.

WHAT IT IS

I want to help create conditions under which writing gets written. In this workshop, a container for creating a new play from scratch is made from the guided shifts in perspective offered as approaches to each successive day of writing. If you are writing alongside others, the shared group attention creates another ring of that container. Either way, the space within the container of this workshop is totally open and undetermined. Tend to whatever you find growing within that open space.

DAY

The unit of this session is a day. It’s a 5-day microseason; each “day” offers a distillation of something that could expand over much more time. While it was originally concurrent with a continuous 5-day session, there’s no reason why you need to write five days in a row. Feel free to work more slowly or to punctuate the 5 days of writing with nonwriting days—do what you will with this. The value of the sequence lies in the serial approaches. Over the five days, the structure keeps changing its axis of vision, its working vocabulary, and its relationship to deliberateness and intention.

DELIBERATENESS

There is a place for deliberateness in this writing season, but it comes late. You may feel frustrated by that deferral. What I’m aiming for is a generous period of provisioning ourselves with images, events—matter, material—followed by reflective pauses to listen to that material for what impulses, shapes, narratives, or combinations are latent in it or harmonic with it. We experiment improvisationally and at speed with variations of its possible form, then in the last stage, analyze it, arrange it, and compose with intention. It’s important to me that we allow ourselves to now know where we’re going or what we’ll find there. This willingness to go with the responsive, improvisational receptivity to surprising discoveries is, for me, a foundational principle for navigating a creative process.

THEATERY IDEAS

You might notice that I don’t use a normative vocabulary of Western dramatic terms. I prefer to keep wide open the question of what a play/story/essay is and what belongs in one. When I encounter imperatives as to what goes into a play or what makes a play lively, my habit is to widen the aperture, so instead of talking about conflict I might suggest thinking about counterpoint or different kinds of pressure (including, i.e., atmospheric). I salute your kitchen sinks, sinkholes, holes in space, and whatever else you think might belong in your play. What you will find is an entire day devoted to hearing voices, and repeated moments to consider what you’re writing as a convocation, a gathering, an event.

WRONGNESS

My axiom is always to take what comes to mind and get it on the page, even if it’s the “wrong” answer. I also believe that doing the exercise wrong (whether through overt resistance or impulsive veering away) is usually just as fruitful as a rule-bound approach. That includes using this structure to write something that’s not a play, or a play that other people might not think is a play.

STRUCTURE

Each day contains a timed plan for a roughly 3-hour writing session. This was originally scaled for a 5-day, 3-hour live workshop, so everything is scaled to that session length.

MATERIALS

There’s a big reliance on timers. I personally find it really useful to use a timer that’s not connected to a phone (egg timer or physical stopwatch), because my network-adjacent/connected brain is a sad piece of cheesecloth that can’t hold a thought and gets easily distracted. I also recommend having both notebooks for longhand generative work.

STRUCTURE (2)

We’ll go through a series of three drafts: musical, architectonic, textile. The musical and architectonic drafts each foreground different values and take up different freedoms. The textile is a draft built of a careful weave of whatever you want to keep from the first two drafts. Find your willingness to deeply rethink and remake the play in each new approach. I found that instead of a parsimonious, incurious approach to revision (whether from over-attachment to its initial form, general fatigue or actually not knowing where else to go), what this musical-architectonic-textile structure affords is a real sense of the written thing as an emergent, previously unknown object, a collaboration between you and it. The names of the drafts come from this quote from the sad, wise Walter Benjamin in his aphoristic and lovely One-Way Street: “Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”

LENGTH

If you’re working in the 5-day, 2-3 hour frame, you’re probably going to write something short, but who knows. The only thing to keep in mind is that after two days of generative work, you write and then rewrite your drafts each day in that time frame. If you find yourself working on something longer, you can always punctuate your drafts with [scene with X goes here] kinds of notes. That said, it is really satisfying to actually complete something. A 10-minute shortform play, a trio of songs, a 5-page story — these are good goals for this workshop.

GENRE DISAMBIGUATOR

Throughout, I’ll speak of the thing you’re writing as a play, and occasionally of the live experience of being its audience. There is no reason why you have to write a play, though. This sequence works for any genre or medium. Feel free to swap out terms as needed. Story for play. Reader for audience. Page for room. And so on. If you’re writing something that’s not a play, allow the special considerations that belong to live performance to illuminate aspects of your writing that you might not have considered before.

POD

A little solidarity helps sustain you through the vagueness and difficulty of writing. If you can, do this workshop with a partner or a little pod. Each day’s instructions contain notes on sharing and response. But the sharing and response section can be useful to you even if you’re writing solo, especially because learning to read and respond to your own work as a reader (instead of letting your inner critic out for a field day) is a critical to sustaining a writing practice over time. I like to call it wig-podding: put on a real or imagined wig, and answer as if from another chamber of your own mind.

Note: you’ll see that my share and response guidelines repeatedly request that you avoid giving feedback about liking or disliking, working or not working. This is can be a hard habit to drop, as it is so common to many feedback structures, but I consider it a critical ingredient to the freedom to grow something that is not overdetermined by other examples of plays, stories, etc. My request is that you instead try to attend to the task of saying what the thing is that your podmate has shown you. Try not to mark anything for success or failure on your podmate’s behalf.

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Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?