Put to Bed

"Theatre of Women 8" has been put to bed. My play, "Just Testing," seemed to go over well.

I've written for this 24-hour festival 5 times now. Two of my 24-hour plays were later picked up for performance in other festivals, so I'd like to think my work in this format has been decent.

I've puzzled over something: it seems easier to write a decent 10 minute script when you have to get it done in 8 hours, than when you're submitting it to a contest but have a lot of time until the due date. So - is it the deadline that helps? That was my first thought. But a friend suggested that it's the certainty of having your play produced that is the real help. Of course, it could be both.

I don't think this is really about writing, as such. I've seen similar things in the world of computer programming, where amazing things have been coded in very short order because they needed to be. I'm sure people from other lines of work could tell similar stories.

I'm put in mind of the "theory of flow" that's popular in the positive psychology movement. "It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning."

When the work required is immense,
your focus had best be intense.