Playwright's Process Podcast

Tracking progress in the early phase of a project is pretty nebulous. What you’re tracking isn’t always clear, because how your ideas develop might not be observable. 

An image I find helpful to keep in mind in early ideation is approaching the idea like an iceberg. 90% of an iceberg is  beneath the surface. We can’t see it, but we know that it’s there. So most of the ‘progress’ we make in Draft 0 is becoming more and more conscious of the depths of your idea. And finding ways to inspire and develop your unconscious connection with the story.

What is usually my go-to 'meaningful unit of progress' (3 x 30min writing sprints per writing day) isn’t helpful right now. So with that in mind, I’ve been finding more appropriate ways to work on my idea.

In this episode I share what I’ve been finding useful to develop the idea in the ideation phase. I talk about:

- Removing as many of the obstacles as you can.
- Tracking how your resistance shifts at different phases of the project.
- Committing to the habit over the outcome. 
- Swapping out my usual writing sprints with other ways of working on the idea.
- Creating a list of non-prescriptive, enjoyable, artistic tasks to move between.
- Bouncing between research, reading source material, analysing play texts, deep story work on the dramatic world, the characters and the locations, process journaling, and writing the story in prose.

Favourite episodes you might like to go back to listen to:
- Episode 19. Writing the Next Thing
- Episode 13. Finishing Creative Projects
- Episode 12. Managing Research Draft to Draft

- Episode 11. Writing to a Deadline

- Episode 9. Dramaturgy, Feedback and Implementing Notes

- Episode 7. Motivation and Momentum 


Thank you for listening. You can learn more about my work on my website or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

I’ve started working on a new play. This month’s podcast is about what’s been helpful and supportive as I’ve taken the very first steps to develop my next idea. I speak about:

- Bringing more attention to areas of influence and inspiration that are already capturing your attention.
- Brainstorming and freewriting on the themes, genres, central relationships and formal references you’re most drawn to at the moment.
- Noticing the threads and patterns and finding ways to draw them together.
- Prompts I used in my process journal to develop these different threads further.
- Writing prose before trying to write scenes.
- Letting the themes guide the content I was consuming (audiobooks, podcasts, radio etc) and creating a thematic container in day-to-day life.
- 'Writing under the influence' of what you let in.
- You have to begin with what’s on your heart to write and trust that good writing is the stuff of multiple drafts, not perfect ideas.

Resources: I also speak about themes and creating thematic containers in Episode 12 Managing Research Draft to Draft.

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about my work on my website www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

Oops! I’m Drafting Again. In the background I’ve been reworking some aspects of the play I finished last year, so this podcast is on diving back into writing projects after an extended amount of time away.

I speak about:

- Reading your own work at the same time of day you prefer to write in, as your mood and your energy levels can affect how you perceive the text.

- Using a creative process journal or project workbook.

- Listing out the events of your play (i.e. things that significantly alter the dramatic action or the trajectory of a character)

- Using index cards to physicalise the structure.

- Dramaturgy, feedback and implementing notes.

- Prioritising rewrites by asking, ‘Which changes will impact the story the most?’ Start there, rather than going for quick wins.

- The magic of asking, ‘Do I have everything I need to take the next step?’ Then keeping it simple and taking one step at a time.

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

It’s Part 3 of my summer project, which is completing ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron. In this episode I debrief on Weeks 9-12 and speak about:

Week 9 | Compassion
- Procrastination and discovering your particular brand of procrastination.
- Overcoming procrastination requires self-compassion more than it does self-criticism.
- Enthusiasm and discipline in long term projects.

Week 10 | Self-protection 
- Getting honest about the things we use to distract and disrupt ourselves when we write.
- Glorifying busyness and productivity is detrimental at the start of a new project when in fact we need more white space.
- Boundaries and setting bare minimums.

Week 11 | Autonomy
- Taking responsibility for our art, our point of view as an artist and our creative process.
- Why it’s not helpful to look outside of ourselves for what we ‘should’ be writing, how we ‘should’ be structuring our writing sessions, what our artistic life ‘should’ look like… 
- Planning artist dates with ourselves.

Week 12 | Faith
- Being willing to be optimistic in a culture and industry that can be cynical.
- Accepting mystery and what’s unknowable in the early stages of a creative project.
- Getting comfortable sitting in the dark with an idea while it takes root.

Next month I’ll be back to speaking about craft as a new project unfolds…

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about me on my website www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

It’s Part 2 of my summer project, which is completing ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron. In this episode I debrief on Weeks 5-8 of ‘The Artist’s Way’ and speak about: 

- Showing up to create even when you’re not feeling yourself.
- ‘Feeling behind’ versus allowing time to be elastic.


Week 5 | Possibility 
- Exploring what might be possible for our projects, our craft, our collaborations, our platform.
- Uncovering the ways we might limit what’s possible for our art and our creative expression.

- Reframing what being ‘self-destructive’ can look like and making sure we’re not undermining our progress.

- Ugly duckling phases of growth - we can’t ‘look good’ all the time, especially if we’re exploring new territory.


Week 6 | Abundance
- Cultivating a rich and enriching arts practise that’s well-resourced, and finding new ways to make our creative process spacious, generous and luxurious.

- Bringing more sensorial beauty and sensorial stimulus into your writing routine.

- Noticing if we’re being unnecessarily stingy with ourselves. Something we think, ‘Well, if I were a ‘real’ writer I'd be able to write with this crappy pen and broken laptop and it shouldn’t affect the art.’ Well yes, but also are withholding tools that could make your process more enjoyable?
- The arts don’t have to be productive and efficient all the time. Neither does your creative practice. You’re allowed to be indulgent, inefficient, meandering and luxurious. 


Week 7 | Connection
- Practising deeply listening to ourselves, our muses, our ideas to connect more intimately with our writing.
- How perfectionism is pervasive, adds noise, and crowds out our ability to listen to ourselves.

- The gap between your taste and your abilities. Trusting that you got into this work because you have killer taste and all you need is time for your abilities to match your taste levels (Ira Glass quote copied below).

- Jealousy is just another way to listen to yourself and connect with the deeper desires in your heart.

Week 8 | Strength
- Setting goals.
- Committing to tiny steps, taken consistently, that are going to add up. This is the ‘bread and butter’ of your project.

- It takes a lot of strength and courage to consistently show up (often privately, often quietly) and repeat this again and again.

References:

Ira Glass quote: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

It’s my first episode of 2022 and I’m talking about my summer project; completing ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron. In this episode I debrief on Weeks 1-4 of ‘The Artist’s Way’ and speak about:

- Using ‘The Artist’s Way’ as a reset between major writing projects.
- How ‘The Artist Way’ works. It's 12 weeks worth of essays, journal prompts and assignments on a particular theme related to creativity.

Morning Pages

- Committing to daily journaling for the full 12 weeks.
- Using journaling as part of my writing practice.
- How journaling helps me to be in conversation with the themes and narrative threads of my play.
- Switching between my ‘Artistic Self’, ‘Personal Self’ or ‘The Voice of my Project’ as a way to focus my journaling.
- Discipline to not letting my anxious thoughts hijack my journal sessions as a way to ‘stress out’ on the page.

Artist Dates

- Committing to a weekly date with your artistic self.
- Consider yourself in a long-term, romantic relationship with your inner artist. If this is true, how would you romance your artist, treasure your artist and listen to what they’re inspired by?

Week 1 | Safety

- Exploring your creativity and the work you want to make less fearfully.
- Creating your own affirmations using these steps: 1. Complete the sentence ‘I (name) am a brilliant and prolific (artform)’. 2. Notice what thoughts you use to shut yourself down after completing this sentence. 3. For each negative thought, write an alternative statement in defence of yourself.

Week 2 | Identity

- Exploring your identity as an artist and how you define yourself and the work you make.
- Taking baby steps in your artistic identity. Our ego wants grand gestures and to overhaul our identity before we try something new artistically.
- The magic is in small steps, tiny progress and bare minimums.

Week 3 | Power

- Creative scar tissue. There can be anger and pain and disappointment once you get some skin in the game. Sometimes this makes us less open-minded about what’s possible for ourselves and our work.
- Creative detachment. Sometimes when we get closer to finishing projects we can pull away or detach emotionally from the work. - Be suspicious of indifference about your own work. Reinvest!

Week 4 | Integrity

- Having the integrity to take action on any new artistic self-awareness.
- Playing the long game. Each decade can hold meaningful and significant artistic work for you to create.
- Expanding your idea of what body of work you could create across a lifetime.

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about my work on my website www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

There are many points in an artistic timeline when you might need a creative reset. I’m currently in the threshold between one creative project and the next and in this episode I talk about:

- Resting and recharging without letting go of the habits and routines built by writing to a deadline.
- When moving from one project to the next feels like departing from a piece of yourself.
- Not letting life fill up the space I usually guard for writing.
- Taking an intentional pause between work. As writers we use space and silence in our text because an absence of dialogue allows the subtext to be felt. I hope this same absence of a project can allow my own deeper themes of where I'm at now rise to the surface and inform what I'm inspired and moved by at this point in time.
- SUMMER PROJECTS: ‘The Artist's Way' by Julia Cameron. I'll be making my way through the twelve-weeks of creative prompts in this book over summer. If you want to join me in using this as a creative reset, please do.

Thank you so much for listening. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, then some of my favourite episodes are:
- Episode 7. Motivation and Momentum 
- Episode 9. Dramaturgy, Feedback and Implementing Notes
- Episode 11. Writing to a Deadline
- Episode 12. Managing Research Draft to Draft
- Episode 13. Finishing Creative Projects

This episode was originally recorded in November 2021. You can watch the video diary here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWuhUDYFhG7/

You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

I finished my play! Today's episode is about finishing creative projects and all of the decisions and mental shifts that happen as you work towards getting to the end of a major work. 

I speak about:
- Mindset and making a commitment to finishing an artistic project.
- Making it the best version of the story it already is and not leaving things open for the other versions it could become.
- Realising I was writing in a way that was leaving the draft open to future changes I ultimately wouldn’t be making. So instead, I started to write in a way that closed down those options.
- Grieving the versions it's not going to become.
- Effort in versus distance travelled. Each new draft feels like travelling half way towards an end point, and eventually moving half way becomes impossible/invisible which is when you realise you've 'arrived' at your final draft.
- Hitting a point where edits are only making the creative work 'different' rather than 'better'.- Getting feedback towards the tail end of a project and the difference between: Feedback we agree with and we take, feedback we agree with and we don't take, feedback we don't agree with and we take, and feedback we don't agree with and we don't take.
- Deciding which parts of the project are worth getting right and which parts you're comfortable having some wonky bits, because perfection isn’t the purpose of art.
- There are always going to be things about your project that aren't perfect. Sometimes we think perfecting everything will protect us from criticism, but that's not true. It's up to us as artists to decide what about our project we're comfortable with leaving 'imperfect' and loving it anyway.

This episode was originally recorded in October 2021. You can watch the video diary here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CVWXA4Rh14g/

You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

Today’s episode is about how I've used research to inspire the content and themes of my play. What’s been useful to research - and the tools and exercises I've used - have been different from draft to draft. So in today’s episode I speak about how it’s played a different role in Draft 1, Draft 2 and Draft 3. I cover:

Draft 1
- Letting the themes guide the content I was consuming (audiobooks, podcasts, radio interviews etc) and letting them be on in the background during my day-to-day life. 
- Consciously curating a thematic container.
- Journaling on the themes as I was writing.
- 'Writing under the influence' of what you let in.

Draft 2
- Imposter syndrome.
- Letting content guide the research - knowing the difference between details that the narrative hinges on versus details that become the backdrop for a more human/universal moment or scene to take place.
- My process for using brackets in the text to flag the details you need to research later. 
- In the middle of a writing session is not the time to research a small detail.

Draft 3
- Asking people who live and breathe the world of the play to note any red flags.
- Making sure all the small details are cohesive and speak to the heart of the story.
- 'Furnishing' the play in a way that's well-researched. This can be so fun and satisfying if you do it at the end of the process. If I did this in Draft 1 it would be way too overwhelming and feel like a test.

This episode was originally recorded in September 2021. You can watch the video diary here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CT6HtOblSxl/

You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.

I’m working towards a deadline for my final draft (Draft 3) of my play and using every spare pocket of time to make it happen. Working in this intensive, focused way has been unique to other parts of the writing process so in this episode I speak about what has been helpful and unhelpful in managing my time, my brain and my emotions in this final stretch of the project.

I speak about:
- Not rushing through your process even though you're on a deadline.
- Trusting the habits you’ve built already and depending on the routines and writing rituals that work for you. Don’t throw them out the window now that you need to ‘go faster’.
- Creating a goal that is more meaningful and motivating than ‘get to the end’ or ‘finish my play’.
- Leaning on my new goal of ‘continuing to deepen and master my craft’ to guide each writing session. This helped reframe the minutiae of the notes I had to implement as I was willing to put in the work to become a better writer beyond the outcome of this project.
- The magic of asking myself, ‘Do I have everything I need to take the next step?’ and recommitting step by step.
- Leaps of faith when you hit a block and feel overwhelmed. Be willing to believe you will pull this off.
- Writing when you’re not in the mood to write. My capacity to handle discomfort and to keep writing when my mood wasn’t ideal was key. 
- Writing treats. For me that means stationary and snacks.
- Being conscious of the media and entertainment I was consuming and staying in the genre of my work just for the period of getting to the end of my play. 

References:
Episode 9. Dramaturgy, Feedback and Implementing Notes - for my workflow and process for working with feedback.

This episode was originally recorded in August 2021. You can watch the video diary here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CStcGi7JWht

You can learn more about my work on my website http://www.emilysheehan.info or say hi and ask me a question via @emilysheehan__ on Instagram.