ESCAPING THE MODIFIERS by Emily Golden, Young Author,

Emily Golden is an award-winning young playwright.

A typical first-draft sentence for me looks something like this: The long, verbose blog post was playfully written with convivial humor and mirthful metaphor.

            Needless to say, brevity has never been my strength.

EMILY GOLDEN

It takes a tremendous amount of work for me to weed out all of the extra description and just leave the distilled meaning of what I’m trying to say. With some brutal rewriting I usually end up with something fairly concise. However, rewriting my reputation takes a bit more effort.

            As a young writer I’m constantly struggling against modifiers. I’m always “a great writer for my age” or “excellent for a college student.” I’ll win the student or young writer division in a competition. When I first started writing I relished being the exceptional new kid. I loved the feeling of being the only high school student who managed to get into a night of ten-minute-plays. Now that I’ve graduated from college, I find myself trying to break away from such phrases, but it isn’t easy.

            Even more important than outward perception are the modifiers I place on myself. Recently while having a conversation with my dad I referenced the two successful playwrights who graduated from my college. After asking whom the second one was, he was surprised to discover that I hadn’t included myself in that list. But, in reality, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I was now joining their ranks.

Being a “student writer” is my comfort zone. It gives me a constant fallback if I’m unsatisfied with my work. It’s okay if my last play felt mediocre because I’m still young and I have plenty of time to improve. Now, by trying to break away from this label, I have to also let go of it in the way I see myself. I have to become comfortable saying “I am a playwright” rather than treating it as something I’m trying to become in the future.

            I’m starting a new period in my writing and, in fact, my life, in which I’m going to have to embrace a brand new list of modifiers. The words “early career” and “emerging” are starting to find their way close to my name, and I’m going to have to get used to seeing them there.

            I think that’s one of the biggest struggles that young writers face—figuring out who they are once the “young” goes away and they simply become writers. I don’t yet know how I’m going to handle this change, but I’m excited to give it a shot. 

PEANUT BUTTER AND PLAY WRITING  In a June post, Emily Golden uses a metaphor to explain how she became a playwright.

Peanut Butter and Playwriting

By Emily Golden           

 

When I was a kid I didn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

            It didn’t make any sense. I was an enthusiastic peanut butter fan, and I frequently ate jelly on toast and scones, but there was something about the two flavors that hit me wrong when I tried to combine them. It was like having two delicious, diverse flavors in my mouth at once took something valuable away from each.

            Playwriting for me started out much the same way.

            As a kid I adored the theatre. I acted from a very young age and I was constantly going to see plays. There was just something so captivating about seeing these people living out their lives on the stage right in front of me. As I got older I began to pursue my own theatrical goals more seriously, and started to consider acting as a profession.         

           

            At the same time I was an avid writer. I used to sit in front of our old off-beige Macintosh (the kind that still had a floppy disc drive and no internet connection) for hours, creating elaborate fantasy worlds. I wanted to write the kind of books that I loved to read. The act of writing for me became something as natural and as necessary as anything I learned in school.

            And yet, with the same overwhelming sense of loss that I felt at the disappointment that was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, my first attempts at writing plays felt like little more than cheap imitations of my two favorite things. By combining them, it seemed that I was taking something away from each activity and I never quite felt satisfied. The whole experience seemed limiting. In a novel if I wanted to include a talking dog or a magic wand then I simply had to write it down. But in a play I felt a constant need to simplify. I confined myself to what I could imagine creating on a stage, rather than just telling the story that was in my head. It was frustrating and disappointing and I quickly wrote playwriting off as one of those things I really should be able to do, but just couldn’t.

Emily Golden

It really wasn’t until college that I let go of the expectations and limitations I’d placed on playwriting and embraced it for what it really was: a collaboration. In prose a writer is collaborating with a reader, but when I write plays I collaborate with the actors, the designers, the director, and only once all of those people have incorporated a piece of themselves into the work is the audience invited to take part.

            The words on the page are only a blueprint of the play and the delightful part is that every person who contributes to the production brings her own imagination and talent so that the end product is something greater than I could have ever written down.

            It took a while, but much like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once I acquired a taste for playwriting I never looked back.