on writing
The One Room Play
Sep 24, 2025
You’ve heard a lyric in a song, and suddenly the gears in your mind begin to turn. Inspiration strikes. Maybe you usually work in narrative, but this idea feels more like a play. Now you’re staring at an itty-bitty page, trying to capture the colors of the universe for a complete stranger who knows nothing about you until their eyes meet the words.
You write the first line. Then reality sets in: How do I show where these characters are? How do I reveal that one is in love with another without just saying it? Are stage directions usually this long? Do people really talk the way I’ve written them?
When I’m working in an unfamiliar form, I try to color inside the lines. Getting an idea onto the page is already hard enough; I don’t need to make it harder by breaking the rules before I’ve learned them.
Respecting form shows appreciation for the medium and helps readers know what to expect. Only after mastering a form can you break its parameters in thoughtful ways that elevate the experience. A screenplay, for example, has dialogue, scene settings, and action descriptions. Without these, is it even a screenplay? Even if you wrote the next Shawshank Redemption, if you handed it in as a block of prose, it would never make it past a reader’s desk.
That’s why new writers should make things simple enough to finish. Your first play doesn’t need six countries, forty characters, and a dose of magic. Easy there, tiger—focus on the essentials. Strip it down. Two characters. One room. Now make that compelling.
Take Beckett’s Endgame: two men in a single room, reflecting on the aftermath of nuclear fallout. The set is sparse, the cast minimal, but the premise grips us. We want to hear what they have to say. All Beckett has to do is provide dialogue that carries the weight of his idea.
This principle applies across writing. Before attempting a novel, try a short story. Before writing your epic, try a sonnet. Every line of a poem must bear the weight of the last. Making it longer doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder, because now you must maintain tension and integrity over more space.
I’ve fallen into the trap of chasing grand ideas before I was ready to handle them. It’s never fun to watch inspiration die under its own weight. Train yourself step by step, master the constraints, and soon you’ll be ready to open the door of your one room play—and step confidently into another.
You’ve heard a lyric in a song, and suddenly the gears in your mind begin to turn. Inspiration strikes. Maybe you usually work in narrative, but this idea feels more like a play. Now you’re staring at an itty-bitty page, trying to capture the colors of the universe for a complete stranger who knows nothing about you until their eyes meet the words.
You write the first line. Then reality sets in: How do I show where these characters are? How do I reveal that one is in love with another without just saying it? Are stage directions usually this long? Do people really talk the way I’ve written them?
When I’m working in an unfamiliar form, I try to color inside the lines. Getting an idea onto the page is already hard enough; I don’t need to make it harder by breaking the rules before I’ve learned them.
Respecting form shows appreciation for the medium and helps readers know what to expect. Only after mastering a form can you break its parameters in thoughtful ways that elevate the experience. A screenplay, for example, has dialogue, scene settings, and action descriptions. Without these, is it even a screenplay? Even if you wrote the next Shawshank Redemption, if you handed it in as a block of prose, it would never make it past a reader’s desk.
That’s why new writers should make things simple enough to finish. Your first play doesn’t need six countries, forty characters, and a dose of magic. Easy there, tiger—focus on the essentials. Strip it down. Two characters. One room. Now make that compelling.
Take Beckett’s Endgame: two men in a single room, reflecting on the aftermath of nuclear fallout. The set is sparse, the cast minimal, but the premise grips us. We want to hear what they have to say. All Beckett has to do is provide dialogue that carries the weight of his idea.
This principle applies across writing. Before attempting a novel, try a short story. Before writing your epic, try a sonnet. Every line of a poem must bear the weight of the last. Making it longer doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder, because now you must maintain tension and integrity over more space.
I’ve fallen into the trap of chasing grand ideas before I was ready to handle them. It’s never fun to watch inspiration die under its own weight. Train yourself step by step, master the constraints, and soon you’ll be ready to open the door of your one room play—and step confidently into another.
