Beyond Emerging:
The Stages of a Writer’s Life
Presented by DGF at the 2015 Dramatists Guild National Conference with Lydia Diamond, Mike Lew, and Christine Toy Johnson
Seth (DGF): Welcome to “DGF presents Beyond Emerging: Stages of a Writers Life.” The Dramatists Guild Fund is committed to supporting writers at all stages of their careers and we talk a lot about the life of a writer well beyond “emerging,” but because that term is used so frequently and because we haven’t fairly defined it we seem to straddle “emerging” and “not emerging.” How would you define “emerging”?
Mike: I think that it’s a grant term. I don’t know that it’s really a term that we adopted on our own. I think it’s a little artificial. I feel like a couple of generations ago, people would produce more, their volume of productions was greater but the design elements were cheaper, which would allow for that. As seasons have calcified into a six-a-year model, there are a lot of financial pressures for what you’re going to put into production. I think the concept of a “production-ready script” is an arbitrary thing. In the 70s EVERYTHING was production-ready. So, I feel like these terms like “emerging” have emerged to keep all of these out-of-work playwrights not angry.
Christine: I also think that one of the difficulties is that it seems to be attached to age. As someone who started as an actor — I’m still an actor but I didn’t start writing until much later, that’s when I found my writing voice — to not be considered emerging when I started writing because I wasn’t just out of college, put me in this strange area. And now having written for a number of years but not being produced on a level that certainly either of you have been, I still don’t consider myself to be emerging because I don’t feel like I’m just climbing out and just starting to write. I’m caught in this strange middle-role.
Lydia: I agree with what you’re saying and I think that the idea that there is a career trajectory for a playwright is fallacious. You can’t have words that describe points along a scale that doesn’t exist. Someone this weekend presented statistics of writers and productions in this country, the number of writers and the work they create far outnumber actual productions of new work. So, how can there be a continuum of success? And then how can someone land in a place called emerging or not emerging? The numbers don’t work.
M: In TV there’s these titles that actually mean something in terms of responsibilities and compensation. But I think the first time I found out that I wasn’t emerging is because of the Jerome Foundation.
C: Me too!
M: Oh yeah? So, they fund New York and Minneapolis-based theaters and Ma-Yi Theater is one of them so they asked us, “Here’s your list of playwrights. Who do you consider to be emerging?” Which, I think for them, were those who hadn’t had more than two productions or two works published. And so it’s like “Oh, I guess I’m not emerging anymore.”
S: That’s also another good question. When are you no longer an emerging writer? Do you ever stop emerging?
L: And then, if we’re talking about art, it’s sort of what you were saying with regards to age because I’d like to think that I continue to emerge artistically, but I also am sometimes insulted if somebody says, “this is an emerging playwright.” And it’s like, well, I’ve been emerging for twenty years. I’d rather not be emerging. I have emerged.
S: In an interview with the American Theater Wing you said it was interesting to come into New York with Stick Fly after writing twenty years in regional theaters, but in New York you were “unbranded.” The idea or the importance of how you label yourself as a writer and describe your work is really interesting. So, in those terms, how have you seen your writing evolve?
L: Artistically, I feel that my trajectory has been, early in my career, in my twenties, I just knew that I knew everything.
[Audience laughs]
L: I would think the world didn’t understand itself as well as I understood it. Then I grew up a little bit and I thought that, politically, I could save the world with my words. And then I was jaded, and now I feel as though I’ve been humbled by life and so I write from a place of not knowing. I write about the things that I feel I don’t know or understand. It’s interesting because they match the things I was writing about when I thought I knew everything and the things I was writing about when I was angry, they’re just, I think, deeper and more humble. And it’s a harder place to write from. It’s so much easier to be indignant than to not know something.
C: I think that I’m less afraid to write what I really want to write. In the beginning, I think I was more concerned about what people would say or if they would think my story wasn’t worthy of telling and I’m less afraid of that now.
In the beginning, I think I was more concerned about what people would say or if they would think my story wasn’t worthy of telling and I’m less afraid of that now. — Christine Toy Johnson
L: Does that free you up, creatively?
C: Definitely.
L: Interesting.
C: Yeah. To not write to someone else’s expectations.
L: So from the outside-in, it’s funny because you’re doing the same work. I’m actually a very slow writer, so the plays that I’ve written fifteen years ago are getting productions and I’m running on fumes at this point. I still am produced in store-fronts, as well as regionally and commercially. I was taught to always have plays in large venues and small venues and I advocate for that, but having said that, in my days of not getting paid for my work I was edgy and politically provocative and now the same plays, because they’ve been mass consumed and done for profit, are not talked about that way.
M: The very same plays that were produced previously?
L: Oh, yeah! The very same plays. My identity shifted once I had a Broadway show. I’m not edgy. I’m not edgy now, I’m just… yeah something else. I could be wrong, but my perception, maybe it’s just age, but when I’m being driven from an airport — well, there’s one thing, I get flown places and an intern will pick me up. I’ll say, “what do you do?” and they’ll say, “I’m a playwright.” “Okay, what type of plays do you write?” “Well, not those plays like they do on Broadway. I write real stuff.” And I go “oh!” I used to go “Ouch!” and they’d say “I’m sorry!” — but yes, there is a shift in perception.
C: Speaking of edgy, I am so not edgy! But I’m not going to apologize for it anymore and that’s one of those things that has come with being 150 years old. When I was growing up, all I ever wanted to do was a Broadway musical, and I have done 3 of them. I was in the session with Marsha [Norman], and she said something about how musicals always have to end happily. That’s what’s expected. And I thought “that’s why I was writing happy endings at the ends of my plays!” And that’s not considered edgy
S: Is that something that you’re striving for?
C: Well, I tend to have an upbeat outlook on life…
L: Only a playwright can say that apologetically.
[Audience laughs]
C: I tend to write these things that have some kind of inspiration. The character gets some kind of inspiration — and I think the roots of that come from my background in musical theater. I have DNA that is imprinted in me that is musical theater. And I think that the reason I have been apologizing for it is this expectation that it needs to be, you know, people cursing at each other and killing each other, and that would make an edgy play that would be desirable. But I’ve decided that I’m not going to worry about them anymore. I’m going to write what I want to write and if it has a happy ending, so what.
S: How then do you weigh making a living with your work and telling the stories that you want and need to tell?
L: I don’t think any of us are making money anyway.
M: Yeah.
[Audience laughs]
L: No, I mean, I don’t know who’s writing for this notion that if I write the right play, then I’ll be able to support my family. I think that’s just something that people impose on writers. You hear a lot about, “Now looks who’s writing a play with only four people.” I don’t feel like my peers are consciously doing that as much as we’re given credit for it.
I don’t know who’s writing for this notion that if I write the right play, then I’ll be able to support my family. I think that’s just something that people impose on writers. — Lydia Diamond
M: I just feel like my job is to say where I’m at as truthfully as I can and then in some ways also sort of “poke the bear” of theater as truthfully as I can. In a way I feel like a lot of my plays are just taking accepted wisdom from theaters and poking at it. A lot of artistic directors are like, “All of our young writers are writing tiny little plays and we want big plays of scope.” So I’ll say, “OK, here’s a trilogy.”
C: I dare you to produce that!
M: Yeah, I dare you produce that! And then in terms of the outside financial thing, early on I was like “Oh, if I get this fellowship or this writers group, then everything will snowball and everything will be okay.” But it’s not going to be okay. We’re in this long war of attrition and you kind of just make money however you can and then you just have to be as truthful as you can.
L: And I feel like those beautiful plays that move us are always written by a person from a place of “this is a story I have to tell.” And I think more of us do that than not. But that has nothing to do with emerging or not emerging.
C: I think it has to do with how we are evolving over time. Right?
S: Right. We’re talking about the things that affect you as a writer whether being labeled emerging, not emerging, or another term that we can come up with today.
C: You’re going to give us like five minutes of writing time….
[Audience laughs]
S: All of you are incredibly active in writing groups, teaching, and activism. How do you find a balance between the things that pull you away from writing and actually sitting down to write?
L: Very good question. I find that it’s hard. There isn’t balance. When I was teaching at Boston University, for eight years, in fact that’s always been my day job, and I loved it. I loved teaching and the energy I was getting from students and feeling like I was being an advocate. The responsibility as an artist is to mentor. It was wonderful and being around young people is nice. And then peers would say “Well, aren’t you resentful because now you don’t have time to write?” And I would say no, I just love teaching. I almost felt like a fuck up; Like I wasn’t writing enough. It didn’t occur to me, that I simply didn’t have time to imagine. I never felt while I was teaching that I should be writing more because it was filling me up creatively. Then I got a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute and they paid me to not teach and just to write. All of a sudden I was my old self. I was prolific, for me. So now I’m in a place where I think I may have to get a day job. So, I’m going back to “the academy” and I, for the first time, am feeling resentful, not to teach because I love to teach and I do it well, but that I should have to is making me a little… carmudgeony.
The responsibility as an artist is to mentor. — Lydia Diamond
M: I don’t get tired of the activism side of theater, just because I think that you go into this because of the community, in addition to wanting to tell people what you’re feeling. I think part of this business is that you’re in dialogue with other playwrights. So when there are obstacles to our collective well-being I feel like that’s part of creating, to be able to speak up on behalf of your community.
C: I don’t sleep a lot. [Laughs] I think I am very organized and am able to multitask a lot and so that’s key to how I try to balance things. And having a husband and having a life and being a friend. You know, all of the things that we want to do. I wake up every day and the first question after “Where’s my coffee?” is “what can I work on today?” For me, the way I can work it all out, is that I’m up in those early hours of the day writing and working on any projects that I need to do, then just trying to organize the rest of it so that it fits together. And I’m not always successful at it but I think I’m fairly successful at it. Sometimes I literally have to go to my bed and lie down and say “Okay, calm down. What do you really need to do right now?”
L: I think I’m very ADD, well I am, diagnostically, profoundly ADD and it’s amazing that I can even tie my own shoelaces. So, I think that contributes to my writing style, which is so not 5:30 in the morning. Ever. When you asked the question, I wasn’t thinking about the always saying yes. I like doing panels and I’ll always go and teach children how to write. Someone has to teach the children. So, that’s separate from my whole limitation about the college, the job-job.
S: There’s a lot of ways that a writer has to cobble together a living. How you distinguish this amount of time is going to actually writing, which is what I need to be doing, and this amount of time is going to making sure I can afford to do that.
M: I think that whatever is feeding your soul, you have to do. So whether that’s writing or whether that’s being in process. Right now Rehana [Lew Mirza] and I are in this crazy financial model of sometimes doing day jobs and sometimes doing freelance things and I feel like that’s some separate engine. But whatever is sparking us, whether it’s producing or writing, we just try to follow that because otherwise it becomes a grind and you think, “Why am I doing this?”
S: On that note, let’s open up this up to the audience.
Audience Member: I have two observations. One is; I think, historically, part of the definition of emerging vs non-emerging was that you went through a period where you wrote because you loved to, but you had to get a job. And you had John Logan’s ten years eating tuna fish and working in the library. Then, suddenly, he emerged in the sense that he was now being paid full time to be a writer, that’s what he did. That model has sort of disappeared. And I think we have an example here where Lydia who clearly is considered a successful person who has gone beyond emerging, has to work again. Maybe this will be a short period, maybe this will be a long period. So, the notion that you work for a while, you put in your time, you eat tuna fish, you work in a library and then you emerge because now you have a career that pays for itself, that model is broken. So that’s maybe one reason why we need to get rid of this distinction between emerging and a writer. Another is, I think a lot of us might be an example of this, I’ve been writing for eleven years now, and I get produced fairly frequently, but I’ve never broken through to a commercial level. That may not happen but I’m doing a lot of writing, having a lot of stuff done and its very satisfying. So, for me, the point of no longer being emerging is when I can say, “You know, what I’m doing is pretty good. I think I’ve learned how to do this and I’m enjoying doing this.” So, it’s not defined by some external criteria. It’s an internal criterion. When am I now really a writer and no longer an apprentice?
L: Absolutely.
Audience Member: So, I’m kind of curious. In your emerging process, how much self-production or of you doing the work to move yourself along is involved? You’ve mentioned fellowships and different opportunities. What are some of the pathways that get you where…
M: I went back and forth on this with Rehana [Lew Mirza] a lot because when we met, we were at the same career phase. She had a production company called Desipina that supported a South Asian audience and South Asian artists and so she was producing her own plays and I was doing mostly the lit manager thing. I think there’s a push-pull to both, because if she hadn’t self-produced some of those plays I don’t think she would be writing what she is today. I think you probably learn most when you’re in production or in rehearsal, more so than just writing draft after draft. But that being said, she got to a point where the scope of what she was writing went beyond what she could do herself. Her golden moment of “I’ve got to stop doing this” is that her sister was a producer and we had rented a car and filled it with all these props and then we couldn’t fit her nephew in the car.
[Audience laughs]
M: But that said, I think that if you don’t self-produce and if nobody else is really picking it up, then you’re not learning.
L: For me, self-producing was huge. I had my own theater company and then I had a theater company with friends and I think just in the ecology of theater of Chicago and growing up there in the theater, it would never have occurred to me not to self-produce. Twenty years ago, you could just write yourself a press release, find a church or store front, and the press would come. So when it was time for me to be applying to things that are for “professionals,” I already had a little stack of reviews. So there wasn’t a leap. I would just go “Oh, I’m a professional playwright.” I assume that it shouldn’t be different now because there are bloggers. There should still be a thriving store front theater movement of young people, it just takes you.
C: I am a big believer in creating my own opportunities. I think I’m up to, in the past 7 or 8 years, having won 17 or 18 competitive grants. They are all towards getting my work out there. So, I’m very proud of that and it’s not only been good for me to get my work out there but when you have to write what you want to accomplish over and over again, if you have social-action based work, it helps me as a writer. It’s like having to tell someone what your play is about. It’s been good for many different reasons.
L: Have you found that your vision, noticeably, has changed? When I write I always think, “Oh, I’ve written an artist statement” and then I look at it and it’s not really my artist statement anymore. Are you able to have something that lasts more than a year?
C: Not really.
S: You’re always emerging.
[Audience laughs]
C: There are certain things that you stand for that don’t change, but I’ve learned what I actually need in a deeper and deeper way. I have realizations of what I want to do or how I want to express it through writing all of these statements. So, yeah, I do have that file on my computer with the descriptions of particular projects and I use them and rewrite them over and over again.
Audience Member: In the process of trying to balance everything, do you ever get your greatest inspiration? My personal standpoint, besides being a playwright, I have a day job. It’s actually the strangest day job you’ve probably heard; I’m a licensed pharmacist of Texas. I get my greatest inspiration from interacting with patients. That’s how I get my stories, sometimes. Even just from seeing people. So, I want to know, in your profession, do you have any strong influences, or inspiration, or do you just kind of get moved by what you see?
L: I think that we do have a problem in theater in general of not interfacing with normal people. I think that our stories become small and self-referential because we don’t actually get out. So, I think you’re right.
M: Well, if you’re a playwright you can’t help but be inspired by whatever encounters you have. I guess that’s why I don’t stick around at a job too long… so I can be inspired as many times as possible. One of my plays was about the financial crisis and I was day-jobbing at a hedge fund at the time. So there were all these people losing their shirts and then there’s me in an elevator with a bunch of suits talking about how there were going to make more money that day, and I think that had to have fed that.
L: I caught myself writing a college play, I was like “Oh I’ve got to get out!”
[Audience laughs]
C: I think inspiration comes from all different places. I’m currently congratulating myself for writing my first play with all white people in in.
[Audience laughs and cheers.]
C: Thank you! I have emerged!
[Audience laughs]
C: But I didn’t set out to do that. Actually, I did set out to do that once and it ended up being four Asian American people and two African American people. Oh well. But this current play is about a story that is happening to a close family friend. They are a Jewish family.
L: [laughing] I haven’t gotten all the way there yet, so mine is a white male protagonist.
C: Ohhh. That’s good!
L: [chuckle, eye roll] Yeah.
Audience Member: I’m not ever hearing the word established playwright. I’m just wondering if you could talk about watching yourself over time writing on certain things that just keep coming up at themes. So, I’m an established writer who tends to write on this and that. I see, looking back.
L: Oh, that’s a good one!
S: Established is good.
L: If you could copyright that, cause that would be like sustainability. That’s going to be the word and we saw it happen!
Audience Member: You’re teasing.
L: No I’m not. I’m serious.
Audience Member: You’re actually serious?
L: I’m really serious because we started out by saying what is that word.
Audience Member: What I’m wondering is the difference between some of us and you is that people know where to find you. You’re established enough that people know where to find you, where to call you, and they come and they pick you up. That kind of thing and if you’re emerging, you’re kind of out there waving.
L: And I heard it more again as the creative trajectory. I think that if we’re going to call people emerging by people not being able to find us, 90% of us are going to be emerging for the rest of our lives. I also think that in terms of established or emerging or whatever, when I teach playwrights of all ages, we don’t give ourselves enough credit as writers because if you’ve lived, where you start as a young playwright, as a new playwright, is so much more evolved than some of the college students that I teach because you actually have stuff to write about. I think people should be given more credit for that. You’re not emerging because all of that life is pointed toward a creative imperative that is real and tangible.
C: I think what’s interesting about the word “established” is that everything is relative. I can be established in one circle and then nobody knows who I am in another one. What I love about this idea is claiming that on a creative level; saying “yes, I’m established because this is what I’m doing and what I love doing, for the art of it and the craft of it.”
L: Yeah, let us henceforth be established!
S: I think that’s absolutely right. That’s really what it comes down to. Being able to say for yourself “I am a dramatist.”
Audience Member: Going back to a comment before about, in terms of how we are culturally and as a nation, if you think about any job, the sense of being somewhere for a long time and having a pension or retiring, or mattering, or this idea of an apprenticeship and really cultivating something. I don’t know if there’s not the attention span or what but it’s, I don’t feel like that’s a part of us.
L: I think it’s us as artists buying into a capitalist structure that is not applicable to us. We don’t have middle management. I mean, if you’re somebody who’s going into business and you start out in the mail room and then you move up and you’re middle management and you strive for CEO, but we don’t have middle management. That’s unique to artists. That we’ve somehow bought into the way we are developing.
Audience Member: I think part of the whole pain in emerging is, when people ask me, I have a day job, and it’s finally evolved to at least I’m being paid to write. It’s not writing characters on the page in theatrical things, but it is writing. I don’t tell people I’m a playwright. I don’t tell people I’m a writer and occasionally I write things for the stage. I don’t feel like I’ve earned that mantle. And it’s a painful thing for me just because I think what you were talking about, the capitalist structure that doesn’t necessarily apply to us. I’m not paid to do it. Being at this convention, hearing so many people talk about the discipline and the rigor, I do feel like I have things to say and I do feel that I’m drawn for writing for the stage, but it’s not a 24/7 thing for me.
L: Well, you’ve got to get over that. Don’t do that! You’re a playwright! I’m sorry if I’m sounding condescending, but it breaks my heart to hear you say that because our work as artists isn’t to put it on walls and institutions and define ourselves based on external affirmation; Particularly not financial affirmation. So, I would urge you to try on the mantle of being a playwright.
Audience Member: Thank you. I appreciate that.
[Applause]
Audience Member: I have a larger, philosophical question. My friend who edits a lot of my work and I have been arguing about getting in your own way a lot and he says that I have a knack for this. I blew up at him about two weeks ago and I was like “I think all writers do this!” I guess I don’t go at something unless I built the wall first and the writing is the scaling of the wall. I was wondering, this whole discussion about emerging, at a certain point, if I ever do become established, I will resent not being an established writer in Spanish as opposed to English and so that will be a new challenge for me. I would say to myself I didn’t use my other language and become established in that language. So, I wanted to ask each of you if that’s something that you feel because the measures of success redefine and change every time you achieve something. So, is that really what being a writer is? You just have to constantly redefine your own success and, really, most of you will never reach it?
L: Are you saying inventing something to push against?
Audience Member: I guess I’m asking what does it feel like to continually be going through these stages? Does it feel like you’re ever arriving at a point? I assume the answer is no.
C: Not really.
M: Yeah, not for me either.
L: But I think that’s life. Because you said as you’ve matured you have more, I feel like I’m more afraid the older I get. I don’t know of what, not necessarily of an external, what people expect of me or whatever, just that I think life is a lot bigger than me. Who am I to presume to know anything about it? I get closer and closer to that as I get older I have less moxie every year. And I don’t mean that in a depressing way, just developmentally.
C: This is a pattern that I’ve noticed in myself, especially in the last 5–10 years: I will get really depressed about the state of the business, and really just hit the bottom and that’s when I get my best ideas. But now I know that! It’s good.
L: When I wake up at 5:30 in the morning, I think about negative things.
C: I do get depressed about the state of theater and my career and everything, but I do know that there is going to be a light at the end of the tunnel and I’m going to get an idea. So, I just hold onto that. I went to see The Visit, and I happened to be there the night that John Kander was being interviewed by Lin-Manuel Miranda and it was unbelievable. John was telling this story about whenever he would finish writing something on any given day, a scene or song, or whatever, he would say, “My conscience is clear.” And I think that that is something to hold onto day to day to day. That if we can wake up in the morning, “What can I work on?” “Okay, I’m going to write that scene between those two people that I’ve been dreaming about” and do it and then be able to say “My conscience is clear!” I have done what I have set out to do and tomorrow is another day and I’ll figure out what’s going to go on next. I feel like we have to live like that because being freelance is tough. I just think that sometimes we have to think long term, but short term on the way to long.
M: Don’t burn yourself out. You feel as though you have to give everything to your art, but that’s an unsustainable thing. I think that tethering your happiness to external measures of success is also unsustainable because you tend to stretch out what your goals were as you go. Building your happiness off of process-based things or off of community-based things and then continuing to challenge yourself in your writing keeps that hunger going but in a way that doesn’t crush you.
I think that tethering your happiness to external measures of success is also unsustainable because you tend to stretch out what your goals were as you go. — Mike Lew
L: I think that we forget the importance of living. Get knocked up, or fall in love, or get your heart broken, or travel, or sleep around. Having those experiences is maybe even more important than pondering who I am going to be next as a writer.
Audience Member: I’ll try not to get knocked up.
[Audience laughs]
S: Well, that’s all the time we have! Thank you to our panelists Lydia Diamond, Mike Lew, and Christine Toy Johnson!
[Laughter and Applause]
The Dramatists Guild Fund supports writers at all stages of their careers. To learn more about DGF’s granting and educational programs visit: www.dgfund.org.
