One week until the Frenzy...

So my new potential career choice (for now, anyway) is writer.

I've been writing as a hobby since high school. First it was the 32-page "short" story for 9th grade English class, and then, deciding that novels and short stories had too much description and not enough action, it was plays. Encouraged by my high school theatre director/mentor and motivated by my need to vent and get all my emotions out on paper, I began to write plays - mostly short, 10-minute one acts but I tried my hand at a longer, full-length thing. They were mostly semi-autobiographical, with me as the starring role and my emotions spread across the page. However, I did win a county-wide prize for best play my senior year of high school...

The year after my freshman year of college, I did a six-week internship at New Dramatists, in NYC's theatre district. It was an amazing opportunity, and it gave me the chance to ask some professionals the question that I'm still fascinated with to this day: How do you go from getting the idea to writing the first draft? I've always been interested in the process of developing a new idea and overcoming the obstacles to putting it down on paper in a coherent form. Something I still struggle with to this day...

Then in college I continued writing down ideas and mapping out plays. I took a playwriting course with the brilliant and talented Michael Hollinger - a Philadelphian playwright who provided me with a lot of insights and knowledge that I never even thought I could learn. And it also spurned me to keep a writing journal, in which I've developed several ideas for full-length plays. And I also started to keep a list of ideas.

Today that list has several ideas - for plays, for movies, for novels, for nonfiction books. Ideas that I have always intended to develop and do something with, but never have. But now, perhaps, I finally will.

Script Frenzy is a challenge: write 100 pages in 30 days (the month of April). There's no prize or award, other than the satisfaction of writing something. I discovered Script Frenzy through some random search, another mindless venture through the Internet led by a daydream about one day actually becoming a writer. But daydream no more. Starting next Thursday, I'm going to attempt to finish my first full-length something, and hopefully jump start my next career.

100 pages. 30 days. It all starts in 1 week.