On Time in Your Work
& getting better feedback in 2025
The world’s obsession with Time lately has seeped into my consciousness. I’ll turn 60 this year, and I’m thrilled I’ve made it this far. It seems to me, just arriving in 2025 is a win for us all. We’re here! There’s a lot happening! Let’s enjoy what we can!
Many writers have offered some wise words about reflecting on the previous year and setting goals for the new one. If you want to read more about that, check out Maya Popa on How to Enjoy Your Writing Life in 2025 or her poetic take on Atomic Habits. Absolutely check out and subscribe to Audrey Cephaly’s How to Playwright.
The Prompt:
How do you manage the passing of time in your writing? Time can designate a threshold, like from year to year. On Tuesday, we moved from last year to this year as a ball dropped in Times Square. That’s a concrete visual for time passing. Old movies used the visual of calendar pages being torn away. Films often create montages to show the passing of time. Consider using that montage technique in words for a story or a play.
Do you call attention to time or shy away from it? Are you clear on the timeline of the piece you are working on? How clear? Would going through the story looking for where you ground your piece in time for your audience/reader be helpful?
Do you use time (or deadlines) to create urgency? Is there a ticking clock or a bomb about to go off? Are there consequences?
Do you condense time to function linearly á là Aristotle? He wanted plays resolved within the span of 3 days or less. See all the Ancient Greek tragedies or Marsha Norman’s Night Mother which takes 90 minutes of “real time” to perform.
Or do you draw time out in episodic dramas/comedies borrowing from Shakespeare for a structure where time and place change as needed?
Do you make time Epic, leaping back/forth using signage or signaling? Does style define time, as it can in Magic Realism? Does time become the foreground or the subject, as it does in Beckett? Do you play with time like Caryl Churchill who uses actor-doubling and skips decades or centuries between acts?
Have you read or seen Plano by Will Arbery? His characters talk about what they are going to do, and then, in the same breath, they say they did it. Time passes as we hear this and realize it’s now past that, even though nothing else has changed - no light cue, no costume changes - it’s instant.
What has inspired how you think about time?
After considering (or ignoring) any of the above, what are your actual needs when it comes to the passage of time in your work? Would it help to condense time and make all (or most) of the events of your story happen in a shorter amount of time? Does that create more urgency? Forward motion?
What does your reader or audience need to know about time? Do you worry they won’t get something because of time confusion? How can you make it clear? Or can you get some feedback on it to find out if it’s already clear?
If you’re asking for feedback, don’t preface it with, “I’m worried people won’t get X, so please tell me if you get it.” Humans as a species hate to be wrong or seem dumb about stuff, and we will lie about getting it. Ask someone to read a passage (or a whole piece), and then ask them to summarize what made sense to them, or what they know now about what they read or heard (if it’s a play reading).
What they know is what you want to know. And how do they know it? Can they stick to the actual text when answering? Feedback is a skill. Remember comprehension tests in school? So be kind. Take this person for coffee, or feed them something nice. Or hire a dramaturg. Dramaturgs are trained to be able to tell you what they know, and why, and what page they know it on.
For example, can they tell you how A is related to B? And if they know that A and B are sisters, (great), then what did they notice about their relationship? What else do they know?
No matter who you ask, you will immediately know whether this is a person you want to ask for feedback again soon, rarely or never.
Steven Dietz spoke brilliantly on getting feedback at The Playwrights Center last year. He said, you want to “invite scrutiny. What is it you think you're getting away with? Make it a question for your talkback. Ask ‘while you were watching, who were you rooting for?’ A play chases a question, so what question were you chasing? Turn the notes into a question the character can confront. You want your notes from feedback to be actionable.”
Dietz suggested we ask, “what are the things that you suspect you know - getting to the layer under the play, and what did you just not buy. What are your biggest narrative / story questions and what question was pulling you through? You are not looking for consensus but reportage."
ON REPORTAGE: If you’re doing a talkback after a reading of a play or a screenplay with an audience, let the audience know before they speak that you aren't looking for the right answers, that the narrative as far as each person experienced it, may be different. Put everyone at ease so that they can report what they think happened even as it differs from what their neighbor thought. The writer needs to know if half the audience is confused! But no one will say anything if there is someone who says, “this is what happened,” and the playwright nods in agreement. We must let the talkback audience know that what they think happened is important, especially as it disagrees with what someone else thinks.
For whatever you need feedback on, find the right person or the right group. With Zoom, these are easier to do now. Brave Space has Sharing Salons 6 times a month!
One last thing about Time: what I love about playwriting specifically is that we are always writing in the present tense. Yes, messenger speeches and other monologues might be in the past tense, but everything that is happening on stage is happening in the present. A scene in the past (a flashback) is still happening in the present on stage; we are still moving forward even if we’ve shifted to another time (future or past). As the brilliant playwright and teacher Sherry Kramer always says, “at the end of the play, your audience is always closer to death.”
artwork by Scott Sherman from ScottShermanStudio on Instagram
With prompts, grounding practices, & discussions, Brave Space invites playwrights, poets, painters, potters, novelists, memoirists, musicians & artists working in any medium to make meaning in a safe community. Begin and/or bring your projects to completion. $5-25 suggested per session. On or off camera. No commitment, drop-ins welcome. Brave Space is open to female-identified and nonbinary folks, and on Sundays All Humans. Try it!
Brave Space Schedule:
1/3 Friday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/5 Sunday 6pm ET All Human Brave Space
1/6 Monday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/8 Wednesday 12pm ET Brave Space w/workshop
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1/12 Sunday 6pm ET All Human Brave Space
Sunday 730pm ET Brave Sharing Salon
1/13 Monday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/15 Wednesday 12pm ET Brave Space w/workshop
1/17 Friday 12pm ET there is NO Brave Space today
1/19 Sunday 6pm ET All Human Brave Space
1/20 Monday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/22 Wednesday 12pm ET Brave Space w/workshop
1/24 Friday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/26 Sunday 6pm ET All Human Brave Space
1/27 Monday 12pm ET Brave Space
1/29 Wednesday 12pm ET Brave Space w/workshop
1/31 Friday 12pm ET Brave Space
Friday 3pm ET Brave Sharing Salon
Each week Wednesdays includes fast feedback for up to 1 page (@300 words) of writing or you can bring in a craft issue/ask for help with your project.
Each month there are 2 Sharing Salons: Second Sundays (730pm ET) and Final Fridays (3pm ET) for sharing up to 10 minutes of work (up to 1500 words).Amazing People Doing Amazing Things:
1/4 & 1/5 Leap with Passion this coming January! (Either day) Get ready to leap into your New Year! Rhonda Musak’s workshop for focus and clarity around your life goals is transformative! I highly recommend it! Register Here!
My poem, “We Used to Save the Whales,” was published a few days ago at Nature of Our Times.
Take a Poetry Workshop with Only Poems.
The Femme Collective presents January, The She-Wolves and Broken Thread at the 14th Street Y this coming January! Get Your Tickets! The Femme Collective is a groundbreaking partnership between MultiStages, The Neo-Political Cowgirls, and Eden Theater Company. Together they represent a united front in reimagining the theater industry’s future. Born out of the financial and cultural challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, this innovative collaboration between three women-led companies seeks to redefine theater through shared resources, amplified diversity, and community resilience.
Opportunities:
The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis offers the following programs to apply to:
-Core Writer Program - open to any committed professional playwright, deadline in January 2025
-McKnight Fellowship in Playwriting - open to mid-career Minnesota-based playwrights, deadline in January 2025
-Core Apprentice - open to playwrights in or recently graduated from undergrad and graduate programs, deadline in February 2025.
1/1/25 Pen America U.S. Writers Aid Initiative The U.S. Writers Aid Initiative (USWAI) is intended to assist fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, playwrights, translators, and journalists in addressing short-term financial emergencies. To be eligible, applicants must be professional writers based in the United States, and be able to demonstrate that this one-time grant will be meaningful in helping address a short-term emergency situation. Grant decisions are made on a quarterly basis by a volunteer committee of literary peers in consultation with PEN America staff.
1/3/25 McColl Center Artists-in-Residence Programs to spark artistic growth for emerging and mid-career artists. Residents enjoy private housing, a large-scale studio, guidance, marketing support, and a stipend. They have the freedom to focus on artistic exploration and engage with the local creative community. Access to shared labs: 3D, ceramics, media, and woodshop. The program runs from September 9 to December 15, 2025.
1/5/25 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Residency free, stipend-supported, accessible residencies to artists and writers who are residents of New York State and Indian Nations therein. They support artists and writers working in the following disciplines: Poetry, Playwriting & Screenwriting, Photography (film or digital) & Filmmaking, and Visual Arts (Painting, Sculpture).
By 1/31/25 Autistic Oral History Project is offering grants of $3K to Autistic folks and Autistic-adjacent folks who want to participate in collecting oral histories.
2/1/25 Wave Farm Transmission Art Residencies in Hudson, New York This residency will emphasize “A Radio Art Hour.” During a 10-day residency at Wave Farm, artists will develop new transmission artworks informed by access to a research library, equipment, unique workspace resources, and on-site staff support. An artist fee of $1,000 will be provided to each resident artist.