Kicking Off a New Script

The following is my weekly TheaterMakers Studio newsletter, dated June 14, 2023:

Hello, TheaterMakers!

With all the new stuff happening with the TheaterMakers Studio (including our awesome new StageConnect community, which you should definitely sign up for), I’m taking the opportunity to pop into your inbox once a week or so to talk tips, tricks and ‘turgy (dramaturgy, that is!).

In honor of this new beginning, it seems only appropriate to talk about one of my favorite beginnings: kicking off a new script!

Not to toot my horn, but I have written a number of plays and musicals. Some have gone places, some are in development, and some sit in my drawer waiting for their moment (or to be given a proper viking funeral). What they all have in common, though, is that first moment of laying pen to paper or fingers to keyboard… and that inevitable dread of “oh dear god… how do I begin?”

I’m sure you’ve felt it, too. You’re buzzing with ideas, you’re sure you have the perfect concept. But then you stare at that blank page or screen and you just. Can’t. Seem. To. Start.

That’s because beginnings are hard!

Whether it’s starting a new job, going on a first date, or writing your first page… each beginning is exhilarating and terrifying, filled with both limitless potential and also… doubt and fear. What if nobody likes you? What if you have ketchup in your beard and nobody told you (not that that has EVER happened to me)? What if your story… isn’t good?

While I don’t have much insight into jobs or dating (all I’ll say is: thank goodness my wife loves me for all my eccentricities…), what I can share is that I’ve discovered much of this fear of the empty page is caused by the fact that we’re hardwired to begin, well… at the beginning. It is, after all, “a very good place to start…”

But unlike a first date where you’re likely to get ghosted if you jump several steps ahead in the process, writers have the luxury of being able to dive into the work wherever the heck they want - and what I find to be the most satisfying and exciting way to kickstart the creative process is to start anywhere but the beginning.

Personally, I know that when an idea really starts to gel in my head, there’s usually a key moment that encapsulates much of what is drawing me to the idea in the first place. A real world example: I’m currently working on a musical called Rise (with the fantastic composer / lyricist Scott Wilkinson) about the theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who faced off against the Nazis and was executed for his involvement in Project Valkyrie, the attempt to assassinate Hitler (amongst many other amazing feats). The thing that I found so compelling about Bonhoeffer was that he was a man of the cloth, devoted to life and joy and peace… yet he aligned himself with a group plotting to murder someone (a monster of a someone, but a someone nonetheless). How does a person square those conflicting viewpoints? How can you preach peace, but work toward the ending of a life? That dissonance fascinated me.

When I first started writing the show, I had no idea where to begin. But I latched onto that dramatic question that so compelled me… and I skipped to the middle of what would be Act 2 and wrote THAT - a scene between Bonhoeffer and his mother where he faced head-on this ethical dilemma and made the choice that would seal his fate.

Once I had that… I knew I had the heart of the story, and I wasn’t scared of the page anymore.

So if you’re ever at a beginning and don’t know where to start, just remember what compelled you to become so invested in this story in the first place and write that. It could be the climax of the story. It could be the first time your lovers meet or heck… it could even be the ending (gotta know where you’re going to know where to start, right?). Many a musical has had its opening number rewritten a dozen times because they just didn’t know what show was going to end up being on draft #1. So why start there?

Write what excites you, what challenges you, what embodies the whole concept for you, because when you’re fired up you don’t have time to be scared of a stupid old blank page.