It was the pandemic. I was home. Everyone was home.

But I’m a writer. I’m supposed to cherish time at home. Time to write! All the time I could ever want. There was only one problem…

I wasn’t writing.

I have a friend, a fellow writing teacher, who tried to reassure me. “It’s a pandemic, not a writing retreat,” she said.

True. But was I really going to be home for an entire year and not write anything? That thought was more than I could bear.

So I got myself a half-hour hourglass on Amazon. Not digital—the real thing. Sand cascading down. And I said, “I will sit at this desk until that runs out. Maybe I will write, maybe I won’t. But I can commit to sitting here for half an hour.”

So I sat there. For half an hour, (almost) every day. Eventually I started writing, as much out of boredom as anything else. A monologue, about a man who has lost his son and has decided to live in a graveyard. The character started talking about his wife, so eventually I put her in there too.

Then I had a one-act play. I hadn’t written a one act play in 20 years. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I figured that was the end of it. But then I got another idea. The same characters a couple of years later. So I wrote that.

Now I had two one act plays. What the hell is one supposed to do with two one act plays? But then I got the idea for another one. So I wrote that. Then I had three one act plays. But I still didn’t know what I had. Was it an evening? A play? I had no idea.

So I had it read in my house by brilliant actor friends (and wife). Eventually I called a studio in New York where I teach, the Barrow Group, to ask if I could do a reading there. I chose a couple of actors who also teach at the studio with whom I’d worked with before. We met for about an hour before the reading, which was “performed” in front of 7 people on a rainy Friday afternoon.

It went wonderfully. I was so gratified to see my play come to life out in the world, to watch people who didn’t know anything about the play or my process in writing it have such a deep response to it. I figured that was it, and I was happy with that.

Then the next morning the artistic directors of the Barrow Group, who had been 2 of the 7 audience members, texted me and said they wanted to produce the play.

It is now 10 months later. The production of my play, Triptych, starts in 2 weeks. It is the least likely, but arguably the most important, production of my career.

And it started with me and a half-hour hourglass sitting in a cold garage willing something to happen.

When I teach Save the Cat! workshops, writers can often get discouraged. They’ll work so hard and struggle so much, and at some point they get to wondering—why bother? The odds are so long that this gets out into the world in the way I want it to, why should I put myself through all this?

I don’t kid my students. The odds are long. They’re always long. The vast majority of the time nothing happens.

But then, sometimes, it does.

Shakespeare said, “the readiness is all.” He’s right. (He usually is.) Being ready is all you can control. Work as hard as you can, make it as good as you can make it. Because you never know what’s going to happen on some rainy Friday afternoon.

Use the barcode above for more information, including purchasing tickets, for Triptych.