I’m concerned that my reflections here have been shallow at best, and that I would be better served spending the time developing my various ongoing projects. I dunno. I’ve done so little true writing, it feels like. This is the ratio of meaningful writing I’ve been doing:

I enjoy your readership, and it’s nice to have a log of where my brain is at. I just need to produce more results, do more writing that is going to challenge me. We’ll see. Maybe just a matter of finding a better balance, or better taking advantage of creative writing time I have.

I was touched when some of you reached out due to concern last month over how brief that edition was. Haha, I suppose if I’ve made a reputation for long, rambling posts, it might behoove me to balance my writing time better. Ideally, I’m able to share what I’ve written with you here, rather than simply write about what I want to have written.

The team’s the thing

Translations, the play I produced in Boston, closed this month on the sixteenth. I’d been working on the show since at least December 2025—I remember getting on the phone with the person who would be our production manager, conducting an interview with her from my hotel room in Rochester at the beginning of the Miracle on 34th tour. That would have been November, actually. Wow.

Translations really hammered home to me the way in which creating good art hinges on having a good team. The aforementioned production manager was pivotal in hiring great staff and overseeing our team effectively; our director was a lover of the source material committed to making the show to best thing it could be for both the team and its audiences. The whole team was dedicated to each other and the show.

The fun part of being a producer is having the opportunity to put all these great people in a room, the elation you get from lining up resources and opportunities for the team. The hard part is the distance from the art itself. Now, I produced this play from New York City, so much of the distance was literal, though I think the same would be true regardless of my physical distance.

I was hit by a wave of melancholy after the show, and I realized that I haven’t experienced a post-show slump in a while. They’re brutal—a wave of purposelessness and uprooted community. It’s a feeling I hope to wipe away with many more projects. The solution to a lot of my psychic turmoil, I suspect, is to simply keep myself busy with meaningful work.

When I was first drafting this, I was still in the post-show slump. Now, though, my brain has moved onto other things—I guess I proved myself right about that “keep myself busy” point.

“Plot - Character - Thought - Diction - Music - Spectacle”? More like Plot (but really Character) - Character - Character - Character - Character - Character

I’m attending a writer’s workshop the first week of June, and the head of the program has been very generous in offering his time for each participant to review their writing efforts thus far.

I applied to the workshop on the grounds that I am looking to hone my ability to make compelling full-length stories. I have a handful of short scripts I’m proud of, but I can’t think of one full-length thing I would actually want to present for criticism in its current form, be it screen or stage. Workshoppable things? Sure. A couple.

Point is, I was telling the leader of the workshop about my struggles to create a full-length work these past few weeks. I mentioned how my work tends to unravel in the middle, doesn’t land on a sharp point. He told me, after reading three different samples of my work—again, many thanks to his generosity in offering his time—that he suspects character work, in particular, will help me build strong conflicts and propulsive plots.

This was fascinating for me to hear, in part because I’ve heard it before. You were right, Ryan! Not that you needed a Yale professor to tell me for you to know.

I had applied to the workshop saying I needed to make better outlines and do better plotting: “If I build and rebuild again and again, I’ll be able to treat a plot like a puzzle, and it will eventually come to be that all the pieces click into place.” I wonder if I’ve had a desire to frame it as, “If I intellectualize and brute-force Plot enough, it’ll come together.” Plot emerges from what characters want, though. I’m looking for more fun in the process of exploring my characters, telling myself to be more patient. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes.

There was an interview on the Scriptnotes podcast where the hosts talked to a writer who primarily drafts and redrafts his outlines at length, rather than his scripts themselves. ‘I don’t put pen to page for dialogue until I’ve got everything pretty thoroughly hammered out,’ is what he essentially said, and I quite like the sound of that. I want to explore strong characters and outline strong stories ahead of time so that I don’t need to keep banging my head against a wall redrafting a full piece from scratch.

Maybe developing this my ability to flesh out characters will help me achieve that. Derek, the workshop leader, tells me that he’s prescribed a particular approach that has worked wonders for his past students. I’ve been taught to be wary of miracle solutions, but my hope is that this will unlock something for me. I want to produce more full-length pieces.

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Michael