Page 9 - Plays. They Aren’t Child’s Play.

And This Title Was, Indeed, a Poor Attempt at a Pun

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Oh hi! I’m MJ Bailey, and I write things. Sometimes. It doesn’t mean I always know what to write, but hey, we’ll get there. I guess.

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At this point, you know a bit about my mediums of choice. There’s podcasting, obviously, and novels. And I’ve tried short stories in the past but struggled to keep them short. But there is actually, though, one more entry to that list. Plays.

Okay, but you have absolutely no way of knowing about that. My history with plays is simple and a closely guarded secret. It was something I thought to try when I was in high school because I had a book that explained how to format different types of creative works for submissions to places. It was a gift from my mother, though it was the kind of gift that I had picked out. But I had a reason for asking. In my mind, at sixteen, I was almost eighteen, and I had decided that once I crossed that milestone and could sign a contract without needing to involve my mother, I would start to submit to literary agents and magazines and literally anything that had an open call. Ambitious and ambiguous as far as plans go, but you’ve almost got to respect it. 

I was 16, though. So in some ways, I was jumping the gun by asking for that book, but at the same time, the same book made some things feel so much more approachable. After all, it had official or professional formulas for everything in the writing world. Like plays, which immediately my brain noticed.

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Why write a play specifically? I don’t know. I was in high school and seeing people perform plays once a semester, but I struggled mentally to sit through a movie unless I could pause it for breaks. And also, movies and television had so many more working parts what with the camera component. And I had only recently found out I needed glasses…. 

Okay, that was a poor attempt at a joke. But really, I’ve never been that strongly visual in terms of perception or design, so to me, the mere idea of cinematography was enough to put me off. Plays seemed more approachable. They seemed like the sort of medium I could handle. After all, our high school with its not super well but still reasonably funded arts program could do a couple of them a year. Maybe I could even write a play that our high school would perform, I thought to myself.

But swing and a miss on that one because yes I wrote a play, but it was a bad play. And I knew it even then. See, I was going through something at the time… Well, I always was. That’s what it means to be a teenager, but at the same time, this was more specific. I had just come back from visiting some of my family in the Philippines and considering my dad was dead and his brother wanted nothing to do with me, I wanted to be closer to what family I still had. But it wasn’t easy. There was a clear barrier, and I lacked the words to confront it. 

So I put it in a play. I put inserts of everyone involved and let the words I didn’t have when I was actually in the Philippines flow out. Cathartic, yes, which is what I needed it to be. But it could be that without any proper sense of structure or pacing. So it didn’t work as a play, and even at 16 I could see that.

What I couldn’t see was how inevitable and okay it was that my very, very first play was bad. I had been writing novels or novel-like things for years by then, so I already had a lot of the figurative bad out of my system by then. Sure, I didn’t have a great sense of technical ability. But there’s a certain amount that you have to learn just by doing. And when it came to plays, I didn’t have that yet. 

Nor did I fully understand that. Writing prose came easily to me, so I figured that everything else should come just as easily. And when it did, I never picked up the medium again. 

But lately, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t give it a try again. I’ve had a couple ideas that I think might be better as plays. And I’ve done audio fiction. In fact, I worry that my aversion to plays is seeping into my audio fiction

After all, I need to work on some full cast pieces. And I’m struggling. The single voice podcasts, the one that more closely resemble prose, have been fairly easy for me because I’ve never doubted my ability in writing that specific way. There’s no way lack of confidence. Confidence can make or break a lot of endeavors. I think this is one of them. 

And also, I don’t really like that I closed this door. I don’t like closing doors full stop. It has something to do with my anxiety, sure, but also, this doesn’t seem like the sort of door that should be closed to me. 

I love narratives, and I love their power to shift and twist to different mediums. I love how those different lights can bring out different bits and pieces, highlighting different aspects and attributes. Picking a medium can be an art form in itself, and it’s one that I don’t fully get to do. It could be if I work through this hesitation and fear but how can I do that besides writing plays. And it’s not like I don’t already have a thousand and ten other things to write. 

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I feel like this is just another path to the conclusion that I need to be a full time writer, that this is the domain my brain is always going to lean to, and if I can’t focus on that, I won’t have any chance of feeling less overwhelmed all the time by life full stop. And that seems greatly reductive. Like, life is not that simple. There is so much going on, and I can’t even mentally grasp most of that because of everything else I have going on in my head. So much of the problems I get into in life is somehow rooted in my need to write more, edit, and try to get things released out into the world. It’s a pressure that keeps building and swallowing everything, though. But even with unrelated problems I keep linking back to being able to write more in some way. And sometimes the leap is pretty dramatic. 

There’s just that urge, though. That need. And maybe I should be relieved that it isn’t insisting that I stick to one medium or style. Variety is nice and all. 

But okay, what is this hypothetical first play going to look like. And I’m phrasing it that way because I think I can get this one done relatively quickly. At least, I can map it out if I learn more about play construction and pacing. But it’s going to be about two former lovers sorting through an old mentor’s home after his death. So three characters. That feels doable.

Actually that’s what my first play had. But it was three stand ins. This would be three characters of my design that likely draw from experiences and beliefs, but they get to be their own fully fledged people, with parts of them that we don’t otherwise see. And it would be a lot easier to only track three of them on this figurative game board. 

So it does feel like a step forward from what I was doing before. Which is probably what I need to do at first. Just take it easy, find a stride, and see what happens. 

Above all, I need to be okay with stumbling and with the knowledge that it will take several rounds of either practice plays that never see the light of day or editing one over and over again before I feel as comfortable in this medium as I do in others. Likely, the skills will come before the bravado, which isn’t necessarily a bad order. But I’m also not going to be content with staying within certain boundaries. I am going to want to push norms because that just feels like the thing that I do. But what does that look like? And how does that fit within the larger whole that has had centuries to develop and test its own limitations? I don’t know. And it may be one of those situations where I just have to find out the hard way. And weirdly, I’m okay with that.

But with that, I’m MJ Bailey, and I’m a writer, I guess. Whatever that means.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The Writer’s Open Book is a podcast from Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, and produced by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Additional audio effects added by the podcats Minx and Midnight. The logo was made by Keldor777 on Twitch. And to the Queen of Cups in my life, you know who you are, thank you for helping me process so much of this writing journey and for all the support. I couldn’t have done it without you.