label discomfort: playwright

A script I wrote is now in the director’s hands, where it will join a collection of other short plays by local playwrights for a staged reading later this month. I’m excited–getting my stories out in the world is the best–but I’m also working through some feelings on suddenly adding the label ‘playwright.’

I decided I wanted to do theatre when I was eight. (Nothing specific, like acting, just ‘do theatre.’) Which is the same age I discovered I wanted to be a writer. So it’s not too surprising that I started writing plays back then, though I stopped sometime after joining the drama club in high school. Eventually, I all but forgot the fact I’d ever written them to begin with.

But I finished my first play when I was ten. Some terrible, quasi-Arthurian fantasy with no historical research and only the loosest connection to the legends. Somehow, in sixth grade I talked my teacher into letting me stage it as part of our Medieval Faire and, despite being the painfully shy, quiet kid, I got my whole class involved. The teacher probably gave them extra credit for humoring me.

I directed. The other kids came to my house to rehearse. We painted cardboard set pieces in my basement (as far as I know, the cement still bears the marks). At the end of our history unit on medieval Europe, we performed it for the whole school and the families that could come out in the middle of the day. I think Dad even had one of my sisters record it, though hopefully that tape is lost forever.

The second (and only other) play I’ve finished, I wrote over a decade ago as part of a new play festival. I wrote about then, but tl;dr: randomly-assigned groups have 24 hours to create plays from nothing before performing them for an audience.

Writing for it is intense, especially since the script has to be in the director’s hands within 12 hours of meeting everyone for the first time. I expected to pull an all-nighter, but miraculously drafted mine in about three hours. And I was so proud of how our group did. (Look! Video evidence!) The performances are, by necessity, rough: scripts in hands, skeletal set, and only whatever props teams can scrounge up.

With festivals and awards for ten-minute plays, I kept coming back to the idea of revising it, without success on the follow-through. Then last month, a friend reached out to me and asked if I had a piece to include in a staged reading series. March’s theme is “shorts by local playwrights.” So now my script is revised and approximately 1000 times better, and suddenly I’m labeled a playwright.

It’s weird because I’ve rarely struggled with calling myself a writer over the last 32 years. ‘Writer’ feels comfortable. It’s an integral part of my identity. My scripts, even when I approach them seriously (I approach the craft of storytelling seriously, no matter its form), have never amounted to more than practice and play. Intellectually, I know I don’t need to write more scripts or have other people treat them professionally in order to call myself a playwright, but I still feel as though I’ve missed a step. Despite this, in fact, being that next step.

Too, I’ve accumulated labels lately, in general. Calling myself a writing mentor, or teacher, or workshop leader…these are all new things. All these labels are accurate, all things I am actively doing, but they’re relatively new and I haven’t quite figured out how they fit yet.

Yes, impostor syndrome likely has a lot to do with it (when is IS *not* a pain in the ass?) but maybe this is also another “I’m not”–those anti-labels I keep destroying without meaning to. I had breakdowns when I finally asked my grandmother to teach me to sew because I’d spent a lifetime saying, “I don’t sew.” And wow, did I have trouble coming to terms with the fact I could no longer claim I wasn’t a short story writer.

As recently as last November, I was quick so say, “Oh, I’m not a poet,” to a group of poets, despite having written poems. This is especially on my mind now, as I’m working on a poem to submit to a local anthology.

So to call me a playwright still feels like I’m pretending to something I’m not. The label fits–I’m just on my way to embracing it.

Note: if you’re local to me and can make it, I’d love to see you at the reading! I may need the emotional support…