Training Your Readers to Read:Part I

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > RUNNING COMPETITIONS > TRAINING I >

'If I'm feeling solitary I prefer fiction, but if I'm feeling public I prefer plays. But I tend to write both at the same time. I've written fiction longer and I can't conceive of not writing fiction. I can conceive of not writing plays. I don't think I would write plays unless I knew that there was a place where I could take them and have them produced. A book is a book, even when it's just on the page. But a play isn't finished until it's on its feet.'

-- Jim Grimsley

Six days a week, that pile continues to grow until your deadline date -- after which playwrights can no longer send you scripts -- seems like your one glimmer of salvation.

It's often only when you see how tall a pile 300 or 500 or 1,000 scripts makes that the enormity of the next phase of your selection process sinks in. When you realize that if it topples over you've actually attracted enough mass to do serious damage to a small dog, this ceases to be a theoretical process.

No matter how much you'd like to, you can't read all these scripts yourself. Well . . . you can, but physically you can't manage it and still give a fair reading to all those playwrights. So to avoid disappointment -- and sleepless nights -- later [see last month's column], it's worth spending the time to train your volunteer readers. Even if they're doing this for free, you owe it to those playwrights to insure that these folks know something about what you're asking of them. Even if your readers are performers, designers, or stage managers, that doesn't mean they'll fully understand the difficult task of searching for value in previously unproduced scripts.

There's a huge difference between a new script and the acting edition you get from Samuel French that's gone through the shaping of a professional production.

Here's what you can do up front [and in an ideal world] to get the best from your readers . . .

• Limit their reading to 15 scripts apiece.
  The last thing you want is to burn-out your readers. When this happens, good scripts end up in the slush pile. And it's not the reader's fault -- it's the process that did them in.

• Set your reader deadlines based on 5 scripts a week.
  Professional readers with lots of experience can do far more than that, but we're assuming you don't have that luxury.

• Ask them not to read more than 2 scripts a day.
  And suggest that they leave several hours between scripts. They need to allow time for their ears and eyes to clean out so they can approach the next script with as little influence as possible from the writing in the one they've just finished.