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If you're needing a boost ...
If you’ve exhausted the initial first week excitement and are starting to be overwhelmed by the crappiness on the page …
Or in a broader sense you’re feeling the exhaustion of the life of a playwright …
I have found that writing a list of your accomplishments in the past year can be helpful. I will sell myself short, but then if I think it through and write it out, I realize I am doing better than I thought I was.
Obviously include in your list ….
Plays you have completed drafts of …
Readings …
Productions …
Contests or Grants you’ve won …
Classes you’ve taught …
But also feel free to include
Contests you were a finalist for …
Really positive rejection letters where they ask for more work …
Times you were really brave in initiating contact with a possible mentor/contact/etc. …
Classes/workshops you have taken …
I am NOT inviting you to write your list here. Comparison is so rampant in the theatre – I think it’s better if playwrights with less experience don’t get bogged down in comparing themselves to people with lots of productions or whatever.
Be generous with yourself. I haven’t slept in three years because I have a three year old with a medical condition that keeps us both up nights. So I might expand it to list all my accomplishments since she’s been born. I’ll start with “Walking upright …”
Anyway, I just thought this exercise might be a little self-confidence booster. I know I need one with some frequency.
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then I found out a writing project I did in July -- an artist entered a competition through the Smithsonian and I wrote the application essays -- is a semifinalist.
I feel this artist is wildly talented and felt confident his work would do very well, and his work had an amazing American story to boot.
That adrenaline rush of woo-hoo over Facebook has spurred me on to dig into the hard work I've reached in Brigid Kildare and with a Scooby Doo joke to set it off, the characters are splitting up to find irrefutable proof of their eternal souls.
Amy Peterson
Playwright, journalist, law goddess