Playwriting as a Career

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to cover playwriting as a career. Now, as I'm sure you are well aware, with creative endeavors, it's not like working at a job where you have to take certain classes or you're promoted into a certain position. But playwriting is like having your own business and your product is your writing. And, of course, you're going to need a huge marketing department which is probably you. Now playwriting and the marketing of it and submitting take so much time that, of course, it's better if you're in a position, like say you're a teacher with a set scheduled, or you're retired or you own your own business where you can have some flexible time. That's all ideal. Now, you're probably going to want to pick up the "Writers' Market" and other books that give venues that you can submit to. Another thing you may want to do is, before submitting a play to a certain theater company, you may want to check out reviews on the internet that are unbiased, not from their own web page, in particular, but reviews of their play. The major theater venues are, of course, your Broadway productions and even off-Broadway shows. Now, for those, you'll probably need a literary agent who also specializes in stage plays to submit for you. Now when you see the phrase, "does not accept unsolicited manuscripts," that basically means you need an agent to send that in. Of course, you're never going to just send your manuscript out to any production company or agent. You'll send a query letter about your project first and then they'll invite you to go ahead and submit that. Now even a literary agent may say, doesn't suggest unsolicited manuscripts and, in that case, you're going to need an attorney to submit to the agent who will then submit to the theater company. Now in the motion picture industry, a lot of times, a screenplay is chosen to produce because a certain star is attached to that. And that can also play a big part in a major play production. And this is something you can talk about with your literary agent. Now another option is to have your play published. Now, of course, you're not going to make money on the individual sales of the script. But when the theater company produces your play, for each performance that they do, they will pay a royalty into the publisher and you'll get some of that. And that can be a great form of passive income. Something else to consider is working in community theater. An actress I had in the first play I ever directed, ended up moving up to a small, small Northern California town which was way up in the mountains, an isolated little place, and she taught school up there and she also opened up her own small theater. And it was wonderful because she's not competing against twenty other theater productions. Hers was the main one up there and it utilized lots and lots of people from the community and they supported it so much and were so excited about it. She always had a great audience and she had a lot of support on things like building the set and getting actors and things like that. So again, depending on where you live, that could be a good option. You may need to create your own venue. It might be a dinner theater or some sort of hook or gimmick. Maybe there's a night club in your town that has very off nights and there's a possibility of bringing in a very trendy, edgy show. There's a play in Hollywood that actually was a soap opera series in a way. And what would happen is that it ran at midnight, they served drinks and it would run maybe four nights a week. But for six weeks, it would be the same play and then, the next six weeks would be a continuation of that play. So, again, it was sort of a soap opera but it was six weeks at a time. And that was very risky of them to mount something like that, but it worked out really well and they got sort of a following. To make money at writing, it certainly may be more than you're just writing itself but it may involve producing and a lot of marketing and other side areas that you're getting in to promote that. Based on who you are, how many plays you have, what region of the country you're living in and which venue you're really interested in pursuing."