Open Wardrobes

Now that I've finished another draft of "The Princess and the Moon" I've set it aside for a short time so I can come back to it fresh. My writer's group, Critical Mass, is meeting next weekend to take a look at it, so that will be a good opportunity to hear the piece out loud (always important for a play) and get some additional feedback before I buckle down to the final polishing of the piece.

So in the meantime, as I consider the next steps for this piece, it's time to start writing a synopsis and cover letter in preparation for sending this play out into the wider world. I'm going to be honest, this is the part of the process I don't enjoy very much. If I could easily boil the essence of the play into a one-page synopsis, I would have written the play in one page! Frankly, I find writing a synopsis a pain and I usually find any excuse possible to avoid doing it (same goes with the cover letter). But for once I'm trying to start these now, before the play is entirely finished, so that I'm not doing a rush job later when frantically trying to get the play ready to submit somewhere.

It all comes down to the necessity of Marketing. It's not enough to simply write a good play, you have to get it out there into the hands of people who might actually want to put it on stage. The purpose of the letter and synopsis is really to entice the reader into wanting more, into wanting to actually take the time to read your play instead of tossing it straight into the recycling bin. It's not the most exciting task, and certainly no one becomes a writer in order to have to slog away at the marketing side of things, but it's part of the job. As writers we have to be the advocates for our own work. So now that I've avoided my synopsis and letter once more by writing on this blog, time to get back to it!