Karl’s Imposter has been writing plays since 2004, staging them at the Rampart in Whitechapel, the Wimbledon Festival, the SPRINT fest in Camden, the Camden Fringe and the Brighton Fringe Festival. They also went to Edinburgh, but only to chat to writers and watch them waste offensive amounts of money.

Karl has had several pieces of short fiction, articles, interviews and even some prose published in printed and online magazines, including Don’t Panic, Pro-file and Creaturemag.

Let’s go through the process for writing a play:

1. The idea
2. Planning + Structure
3. Writing
4. Editing + Rewriting

Once you have your work completed to the best of your ability or 90% satisfaction, you have 4 options:

• Agent
• Competitions
• Manual submissions
• DIY

You shouldn’t be running off to the big publishers such as Penguin without having secured an agent first (Read why). However the smaller publishers might be more open but then you face less exposure. With film and theatre scripts there are plenty of avenues for submitting to the big companies but your text will sit there at the reading farms. Then there’s the last option, Doing It Yourself.

Edit 2009: This is what I used to think, around 2006(?).  What’s changed, three years later?  As I posted in a scathing attack on fringe theatre, as a new writer I had no regard for the audience.  This is the only thing you, as a professional writer, needs to consider, right from the beginning.  The re-writing comes when you realise your ideas of a sunset over war torn Hackney haven’t transferred very well into the cold light of a small termite ridden stage (and your actors suck).  After writing the piece, as you might be able to tell, I went for the fourth option.  I cannot describe how empowering the whole process is.  And how gut wrenching, how much it destroys your soul and faith in humanity.  Did I become bitter and cynical?  Of course not, and you will too!

To recap:

1. What will the audience pay to see?
2. Get the story to fit a structure per the genre.
3. Get an idea of your venue and actors ($$$) and adapt the writing as necessary.
4. Put in on and give out lots of free tickets to the press and industry.

The last step encompasses the four options that we had before.  Still, there is so much more to explain, for example, the structures to follow…  I will try to keep updating this.