I recently submitted a play to the Austin Film Festival. The festival creators added a playwrighting category a few years back. The play I sent in was one I’d started back in 2015–based on the true story of my parents’ encounter with an armadillo. When I heard their story, I immediately thought it would make a great play. I decided that the setting would be Thanksgiving and that everyone visiting would have an idea of how to get rid of the critter. That idea carried me through the first act, but then I was stuck. I didn’t know at the time that I really only had one act. When I did finally accept it–after getting inspiration from countless writers on MasterClass https://www.masterclass.com/, I was worried. I had to re-think the playwriting process. When I did that, I was able to finish the play and meet the deadline–May 2024.
Outlining
When I first started listening to writers on MasterClass, I began with the Duffer Brothers. They talked about outlining a script. This technique helped me to brainstorm and get ideas down when I had none. I did this in March–two months before the deadline: https://jenniferluster.com/2024/03/10/outlining-inspiration-from-the-duffer-brothers/. As I look back on that outline now that the play is done, I can see that most of what I wrote there didn’t make it into the play, but it was an important step in my playwriting process.
Research
One thing I learned from listening to James Patterson–not a playwright–was that if you get stuck, you need to do more research. This directive surprised me. Writers just sit down to write. They have all the ideas and know everything about any place, person, or event that occurs in their tale. That misconception was what kept me from finishing my play. Once I took Patterson’s advice to heart and started researching the habits of the armadillo, the ideas started to develop. As I learned about my state’s animal, more comedic elements presented themselves, and Act II was born. Although, in full disclosure, I came back to this step three times because I got stuck a lot.
Dialogue: No Owner
The last scene of the play was unclear to me for months. I needed to tie up loose ends but not in the kindergartenish way I had done it before–very ala Scooby Doo, Where are You? With paper and pen in hand, I made a list of all the unresolved issues. Then, I opened up Act II Scene 3, referred to my hand-written list, and started writing bits of dialogue with no owner. Essentially, I was free-writing lines to develop each unsettled element. They didn’t go in the right order, but I had to get something down to rework later. What I’ve realized over many years of going through the writing process just in general, is that I do better if I have something to edit and revise. Ideas come to me as I re-read what I’ve written. It doesn’t matter how bad, simplistic, or ridiculous the ideas are.
Repetition
From David Mamet (Glen Gary Glen Ross) https://jenniferluster.com/2024/07/04/know-the-shot/and Neil Gaiman (Stardust), I learned that once you’ve said something, you don’t need to say it again. I had received feedback on my play submission from the previous year with the same advice. So, as I wrote the last scene, I made sure not to answer the obvious questions. Instead, pieces from previous acts came back to tie things up but in a more sophisticated way. I didn’t repeat, I resolved–creatively. Often I don’t know that what I’ve written in the beginning is going to come back in somewhere in later acts, but I go with it. Because I write comedy, the irony seemed to write itself as the act concluded. The play ended with a line that I never planned when I started because the whole goal was to get rid of the creature terrorizing a Corpus Christi, Texas couple:
Louisa: Can we just have our armadillo back?
Jennifer Luster, Mom and Dad’s Armadillo
Finishing Mom and Dad’s Armadillo took me almost ten years. Even though I had written other plays in between, I learned the most about my playwriting process by completing this one. Fingers crossed that I win this year.
