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 When you get close to crossing the finish line on a first draft, inevitably the thought arises, “So how did I do?”

It’s a natural question to ask. After all, you spent a tremendous amount of effort and energy to write something that may or may not be worth anything. Perhaps you have a written a story that will someday be performed. A handful of first drafts written during NaPlWriMo have continued on to become successful plays. 

Or maybe the thought of seeing your play onstage terrifies you. Some people write plays during NaPlWriMo as a personal growth exercise. You imagined the journey. Every day you wrote, you grew with your characters.

Either way, you now have a finished (or close to finished) draft.  And although people have told you to not judge what you’ve written, you really want to know. “So how did I do? Is it any good? Is it really bad?”

Although I haven’t read your play, I’ll be honest with you. It is both.

There are strengths in your first draft. Find them. Perhaps a character’s point of view is strong. Or maybe there’s one moment in the play where you conveyed exactly why you wrote it. 

One of my earliest plays centered on a dysfunctional family. Original, right? I had no idea why I chose these characters or what they were doing. I kept writing because I had a deadline for the first draft. I had to finish it. No choice. So I did. I knew it was terrible. I knew that version of the play was never going to be performed.

But in that first draft, the teenage son put a bomb on the dinner table. Someone asked me what the bomb symbolized. The answer didn’t require much thinking on my part. I knew. I stopped asking, “So how did I do?” Instead, I began asking other questions. 

“Why did the characters act that way?” 

“What were they hiding?” 

“What happened next?”

The answers replaced the bomb on the kitchen table. In the end, I kept almost nothing from that first draft. Even the characters changed. I never gave thought to whether the play would be performed. I kept working on the story because I wanted to answer the questions. It was fun. I had an intuitive sense that I was becoming a better writer through working on the play. I also knew it was challenging my beliefs about myself. 

The play eventually got performed, five years later. 

So how did I do?

I got far more out of writing that play then I ever would’ve thought. Because I chose to continue working on it, I met actors and directors who became my friends. I traveled to Europe with the play. It opened doors that would’ve otherwise remained closed. 

I never could’ve envisioned the future of that play, especially as I was completing the first draft. You don’t know the future of your work either. So don’t judge yourself or the play you’ve been writing. Just keep asking and answering questions about your story as honestly as possible. 

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Laura Axelrod is a writer, playwright and actress. Her plays have been performed in New York, California and Europe. Her articles have appeared in The Birmingham News and AL.com. Her play, “Everybody In This House,” is published by Original Works. She is a regular contributor to the NYC-based arts blog, “The Clyde Fitch Report.” Laura graduated from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA and BFA in Dramatic Writing. Read more at www.lauraaxelrod.com or gaspjournal.com. You can also follower her on Twitter at @laura_axelrod

There comes a time in every piece of writing when you have to decide how to end it. There are a couple of approaches to this. Some people just write, and trust that the ending will come to them. Others plan and plot extensively, and plan the ending before they begin. And some people write the ending first, to be sure they know where they’re going.

Whether your ending was set in stone before you wrote “Scene 1” or else is something you feel you’re about to discover, it’s worth thinking about what makes a good ending. It may sound incredibly obvious, but your ending is what people will remember, what they’ll walk out of the theatre with. What closing images or thoughts or emotions do you want to leave? I consider one of my most successful plays one where people laughed throughout, and then cried at the end. Not because I like making people cry, but because I adore making people feel.

Think about your own experiences, and what has worked for you – some people favour an ending which settles everything nicely, every sister married off à la Austen, or every character’s journey resolved in a big Peter Jacksonesque finale. Or perhaps you favour a twist in the tale, something no one saw coming, that will knock your audience sideways – maybe a handy deus ex machina who will sort out any problematic corners you might have written yourself into.

I think “resolution” is the right word to keep in mind when it comes to endings. You want to give your audience some sense of resolution – which doesn’t necessarily mean that everything needs to be tied up neatly with a pretty pink bow, but does mean that you don’t want to leave everything just thrown out on the floor for them to pick their own way through.

Above all, as I always believe in scriptwriting, the characters are in charge, and your ending must be true to them. So if you do have a spreadsheet detailing every scene, pause and consider whether your characters are still moving in the direction you intended, and still demand that ending you had planned. And if you are writing it as feels right, then don’t force an ending because of length, or time constraints, but let them find their natural ending.

Whatever you do, don’t write something and then have no idea how to finish it and be left...um... 

So here’s the thing. There is no “right way” to write a play. 

You don’t have to have an outline. You don’t have to write scene 1, then scene 2, then scene 3, and on and on. You don’t have to know how the narrative will end before you sit down to write. In fact, you don’t have to know the major plot points or even know exactly who your characters are.

What you do have to do is write.

And if you’re like me, outlines do not help. In fact, for me, outlines stifle my writing process. When I begin writing a play I usually know the ending and the beginning, everything else is a mystery and writing the play is a process of discovery. The narrative and characters reveal themselves, become more complex, as I write.

Oh, and I don’t write my scenes in chronological order. I put them in order later. You see, I’m very intuitive when it comes to writing. I listen to my Muse. And if the scene I begin to see and hear in my head is further along in the narrative, so be it. I’m going to strike while the inspiration iron is hot and write the scene that’s present in my mind—I’m not going to wait until later, until I’ve written all the scenes that come before. 

I write this way because this is what works for me. And you need to find out what works for you. So if outlines do work for you, if writing scenes in chronological order keeps your writing flow going—then do it, by all means.

But if you find your writing process stalling because you’re trying to adhere to an outline, if you find yourself facing writer’s block because you’re trying to write a specific plot point then pump the breaks.  You may want to try a different way of writing. 

You may just need to throw out that outline, along with any preconceived ideas about how to write a play.  Because while our preconceptions about theatre help us understand what is possible for us to create, while what we’ve seen and read inspire and inform our writing, they sometimes hem in our imagination for what could be. 

So remember, there is no right way or one way to write a play. For each playwright, there is just their way.

Go find your way.

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Poet turned playwright Marisela Treviño Orta has an M.F.A. in Writing from the University of San Francisco where she exclusively studied Poetry but somehow found her way to theatre. Her first play Braided Sorrow won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama and the 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama. She is an alumna of the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwrights Initiative and a former member of Playground’s Writers Pool. Currently she is participating in AlterTheater’s AlterLab residency program where she wrote her new play The River Bride, the first play in her cycle of Grimm Latino Fairy Tales. The River Bride will be produced in AlterTheater’s 2013-2014 season.

If you’re in NYC on November 27^th (6:30pm), you can see a reading of Marisela’s play American Triage, a finalist for the 2012 Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition at Repertorio Español.