Ten-Minute Plays Brought Me Back

For a long time, writing meant the long haul: fiction drafts that asked for stamina, immersion, and a kind of deep solitude. Then depression hit, and that whole approach stopped working. The page didn’t feel like possibility anymore—it felt like a room I couldn’t enter.

What surprised me was how ten-minute plays opened a door back in.

Not because they’re easy—they’re not. But they’re contained. Ten minutes gives you a small, clear container: two people in a space, a problem, a want, a pressure point. Instead of asking, How big can you make this? the form asks, What can you make happen right now? When I didn’t have the energy for a long project, I could still write a scene with teeth. I could still finish something. And finishing—even something short—helped me feel like a writer again.

Playwriting also changed how I think about craft. Fiction can let you linger inside a character’s head. The stage won’t. Onstage, feeling has to become action—words, choices, silences, moves between people. Ten-minute plays taught me to listen harder, to trust conflict, and to build scenes around what characters do to each other instead of what I can explain about them.

The biggest shift, though, is that theatre brings other humans into the process earlier. I had a table read recently that went really well—actors in a room, real laughter where I hoped it would land, and that attentive quiet when the room leans in. It made the work feel alive outside my head. And there’s a chance one of these plays will end up in a ten-minute festival at UIS this coming fall. Even the possibility of that—an audience, a night where the piece lives in real time—feels like momentum.

I still love fiction. I’m not abandoning it. But ten-minute plays have given me a sharper sense of what writing is: not waiting for the perfect mood, not proving anything, just returning to the work and making something happen on the page—small, focused, honest.

Sometimes ten minutes is enough to start again.