Playwriting is hard. As a perfectionist, I found it near impossible. The third large unit of CW’s academic year is playwriting, when the department comes back together (we split into CW 1 and 2 for fiction and poetry) to write plays and put on our second and final show of the year (S’il Vous Play happening April 13 at 7:30, you should come). I had never written a play before. I had read very few, most in anticipation of this part of the year. On the first day of playwriting, we shard hopes, fears and the upperclassmen gave the freshman advice. Almost all of them reminded us sleep was important. This I perhaps should have taken as a sign.

For our big project of the unit, every member of Creative Writing composes a ten-minute play. I, however, wrote three. The first was contentless. The characters didn’t have names, there wasn’t a setting, there wasn’t a plot, or a title, or a purpose or anything being communicated. I turned it in for working shopping, and most of the feedback was something needs to happen. It was Waiting for Godot without an ounce of Samuel Beckett’s genius. I had my science teacher read it (she’s also a playwright) and she told me to delete all but half of a page out of the ten I had written. I decided I might have to start over.

Having ideas is hard. I always loved writing, however before SOTA, I wrote when I had an idea, when I wanted to. Having ideas was never something with a deadline attached to it, and though it is clearly imperative to have a functioning creative writing department, sometimes pressure, for me, can get in the way of allowing my brain to come up with something. I was stuck. I spent the better part of a week of classes scribbling in a notebook, trying to come up with a plot.

Finally, I had a halfway viable idea. But I was also getting on a plane to France in 48 hours. I frantically got my friends to promise me to read drafts for me, and pounded out one of the most atrocious pieces of writing ever to ooze from my brain to the page. On the plane, I attempted to edit, but soon, exhaustion and distraction and the anxiety of being alone heading to a foreign country where I do not speak the language took over, and I gave up.

I was on a climbing trip, and every day came home physically exhausted from scaling boulders, and mentally exhausted from dealing with toddlers. It was an interesting state to try to write in. I snapped at people who asked my how my play was going. I also wanted to talk about it all the time to figure out what on earth I was writing. When I finally created a draft I could show my closest of friends without being absolutely mortified, I immediately did so.

They told me to rid myself of one of the two characters. Basically, write a new play. I had two days until the due date. The first night I organized, as this unit clearly laid out for me, playwriting is more technically complicated than poetry or fiction. It doesn’t work (generally) to just start writing without an idea of plot, that’s how one ends up with a contentless scene (see my draft #1). The second night I spent in the home of an elderly Parisian family friend. I was able to disappear for a few hours, edit, freak all the way out, be calmed down by the same friend that I’m choosing to wrongly blame for causing the stress, and then reappear for a European-timed dinner. They wanted to know how the play was going. I said great. Then I went back into my room, sighed, and turned it in.

It might have been an awful play, but one of the things I love most about Creative Writing is it doesn’t matter if it’s your favorite kind of writing, you still do it. That’s how one learns. Playwriting is probably never going to be my favorite thing, or the thing that comes most naturally to me, but in six weeks struggling with it has taught me about dialogue, plot and character far more efficiently than fiction, which was a more comfortable experience. And I lived, I’m excited to write a play next year and fully intend to spend an entire year thinking of an actual idea.

Hannah W Duane, class of 2021