I was sorry that The Literal Challenge didn’t run their Scriptly Challenge last October. I got some really good ideas from their 2021 Scriptly, and I would love to have put together the music video I wrote for Hugh Laurie’s ‘Didn’t It Rain’. When TLC announced that they would return with 28 Plays Later this year, I was chuffed. I told my writing group that I would sign up. A couple of them reacted as if I’d pledged my allegiance to a particularly vicious cult. I’ve been reminded that I couldn’t write anything for the whole of March 2022, having wrung out my brain on daft play scripts all through February.
Well, I’m almost through it. The third week is the second hardest part of the challenge. By the time Brief 15 drops into your email inbox, you’ve had two weeks of asking your other half to take up the slack on household chores, two weeks of that initial panic followed by hours of blank brain or hours of brilliant idea being hammered into play shape. It’s taking a toll. And all through that second week, you know the Rules brief is looming.
This last week has given me prompts for an emotional or geographical journey, a creative take on a true news item, send your actors round a circus ring and dive into the abstract world. They have also let us off the hook a little with a dead easy prompt that had my mind go blank for almost a day – the simpler they are, the less my mind works to bring up a good idea, and the more time I spend not writing. The dead easy prompt was a small reward for having given us the Rules Brief.
If you’ve ever slogged your way through 28 Plays, you know The Rules Brief. Ten rules that you must adhere to, each one utterly crackers, and the only play in the series with a minimum line count (at least 198 lines of dialogue). Last year’s Rules asked – among other things – that the last letter of the last word in each line be the first letter of the first word in the next line. That was surprisingly easy to adapt to, though my teenage lad switched from being Max to being Roy, just to let me start the next line with ‘You….’ This time around, I said no. Not writing a rules play. Sticking to all those rules is great practice for writing to a competition’s very specific brief (‘only three actors, represent the Massacre of Peterloo…’ ‘set aboard a French cargo ship in July 1826…’ ‘One character speaks no English and the other is completely deaf…’). However, I was feeling the strain and other projects are looming. So I refused the Rules brief and wrote something else instead. Something that was enough of a challenge in its own way, and left me with a good idea that might warrant being expanded in the future.
Since then, I have slogged my way through Briefs 20 (AI Chat thrown in like a hand grenade) and 21 (a revolutionary type of theatre that I have never heard of before) and now I have the final week to go. Most of the way through the challenge and the hardest part is yet to come. Because if you have written 27 plays in 27 days and you’re tired and feel like you’ve been moulded to your seat and your friends and family are hinting that they’ve been carrying your share of the household work for EVER; that 28th prompt is your chance to fail at the last hurdle. The 28th brief is always so easy that the only thing that comes to mind is ‘I can’t think of anything to write for this and I don’t want to try.’ And if you don’t write that 28th play, the other 27 are not part of a success story. You missed it. You were Devon Loch, yards ahead of the rest of the field and then falling flat with the finish line of the Grand National within spitting distance.
I know I can finish. I’ve nothing to prove. I’ve refused The Rules Brief this year, so I’ve failed already, in a way. There’s no money at stake. If that 28th brief doesn’t give me something I can write into a play… You will find me feet up in the garden with a mug of tea, sitting in the sunshine and cheerfully admitting to failure.
Julia Chalkley 