Yes, I’ve been busy. Yes, It’s been a stressful work year. But thankfully I did find a moment to write down an idea for a new play to work on this winter…hopefully.

Usually when I get play ideas, I have a concept and I start developing characters. But often if my idea doesn’t go any further than that, it’s because I don’t know what I want to say with my play. What message or theme(s) do I want it to have? If I can’t answer that, I can’t move forward.

After toggling around a couple different concepts, I finally landed on one which would serve as a vehicle to share my thoughts on journalistic integrity, which seems scare today, and the practice and perspectives on protests in America, which everyone seems to have an opinion on if you have and read any kind of social networking feed.

So I came up with a premis and set it in a television news studio setting. But as I started to determine characters I would need to mold the story and adversity, I started to realize I haven’t a lot of experience with how a television news studio operates outside of what I’ve seen on dramatic series and motion pictures. As a journalist, I hate it when news outlets cite other news outlets as a source for a story. It makes me always wonder, “What if news outlet A got it wrong? That means now news outlet A and B are now reporting false information.”

It’s the same for creative writing for me. What if the the creative television and movies got it wrong, what it’s like to broadcast a news report on television? They probably didn’t but if I haven’t experienced this first hand with my own research or professional experience, how can I be sure I depicted it properly on my own story?

So with this in mind, I switched the news outlet for my story to a news magazine instead, of which print news I have plenty of experience in and was a vehicle for my play Mourning News. So this will be my third play which involves a journalist and second set in a news outlet. Too much? Maybe it will change again once I start scribbling changes, but I feel relying on what you know well is never a bad thing. Is Tom Clancy going to write a book about lumberjacks? No. He’s going to continue to fall back on his experience in government intelligence. Same with John Grisham. He will almost always fall back on law and legal stories. So I don’t think this would be too much for me.

I’ll try to develop outside the box in other ways. Wish me luck.