Hi folks
We have reached the midpoint of the month - day and challenge 15 of 30!
No matter how much writing you've done or haven't done over the past two weeks, well done, everyone!
Every day you write something (no matter how good or bad you think it might be in the moment) is a better day than a day where you don't write. These are just first drafts, you can go back and fix whatever you want later. For now, just let the pages flow.
Happy writing to all!
And also remember, you can ignore this prompt and write whatever you like.
Just write some pages and turn them in before Sunday, 12 noon Central Time. That's enough to satisfy the challenge.
(Or that escape hatch play at the end of this message/post is always an option)
RAW NUMBERS
Challenge 11 had 84 playwrights submitting a total of 309 pages
(Or the equivalent of two full-length plays, plus another one-act of 69 pages, for another over an hour of stage time)
Challenge 12 had 82 playwrights submitting a total of 218 pages
(Or the equivalent of one full-length play, plus another 98 page long one-act, which might as well be another full evening of entertainment.)
That lesser number of pages for Challenge 12 isn’t on any of you, by the way. That was the challenge where Kate set a 300 word limit, and even though I told you that you could ignore it if you wanted to and just had too many words that could not be contained, many of you were sticklers for the rules so, of course, fewer pages that day :)
And, since it’s come up - no, there isn’t a 300 word limit going forward, that was just for challenge 12, and as I said in the challenge message itself, you could feel free to ignore that limit if it was holding back your creativity. Don’t put any limits on yourselves. Keep writing, as much or as little as you wish. Just write something and turn it in by the deadline. What you write is up to you.
Remember, if you ever find that you haven’t received the day’s email, or perhaps Gmail is hiding it from you, you can always find the challenges posted on the blog - https://thresholdwritingchallenge.blogspot.com/
Let’s get you that writing prompt…
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Challenge #15 - 300 Monologues
Write Sunday, November 15th - or earlier if you like
Due: Monday, November 16th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)
Outside of November, the most jam-packed theater months of the year for me are July and August, when I’m prepping to see and review a lot of shows at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and then actually seeing them and writing about them afterward. Because there are more shows in the festival each year than there are times when you could see them in an 11 day schedule with 53 time slots, you have to choose wisely, and very, very rarely do you see a show more than once because, well, you could be seeing another show you still haven’t seen yet, rather than doing repeat viewing of a show you’ve already seen.
So if I go to a show more than once, it’s the work of an artist or group of artists who intrigue my theater brain because they’re playing with words and performance in a way that my brain doesn’t operate when I create, but which I recognize as something significant. For instance, I can’t write the way poets write, but I appreciate what they do with language - I love reading poetry, but I can’t write a decent poem myself. I can’t play the guitar with any kind of dexterity, but because I know the component parts that make up playing a chord or finger picking on the strings, I can appreciate it when someone really good does it, because I know how hard it is, this thing they make look so easy.
I saw Sam Sweere’s Fringe play “A Horse Walks Out Onto The Stage and Dies” three times in the summer of 2024.
And then I saw his Fringe play “A Good Cancer To Have” three times in the summer of 2025.
This year, he didn’t have a Fringe show but he created a challenge for himself. He set himself the task of writing two monologues a day, at first for two weeks, because they say that it takes doing something regularly for two weeks for it to become a habit (sort of like writing something every day for the first half of November, you might say). He posted them every day in his Instagram stories, as a way to hold himself accountable. Once he cleared the first fortnight, he announced he was going to try to keep it going for 150 days, or 300 monologues total.
Now, he ended up doing more than that because sometimes he lost track of which day it was and did say, Day 22 twice, or threw in a bonus monologue on a couple of days because he was feeling fired up and had another idea. For those following along, he put out a call for suggestions. He also enlisted the aid of a random word suggestion program online. He used another program to create a wheel of suggestions, often from other people’s suggestions, and then spun it and wherever the program chose for it land, that would be the topic for a monologue.
Now, I could give you all three hundred plus monologue titles but giving you that many options is like giving you no options at all, it’s just a blur of words. So I’ll just choose one from each letter of the alphabet (it wasn’t a plan but he ended up only missing Q and Z):
Awkward (day 120)
The Bar in the Airport at Chili’s (day 65)
El Chupacabra (day 116)
Driving a Forklift (day 94)
Elementary School Crush (day 68)
Fan Fiction (day 76)
Gay Croutons (day 149)
Hydrants (day 98)
Inconsistency (day 82)
Juggling (day 37)
Ketchup (day 132)
The Littlest Pet Shop (day 67)
Monologue about Something that Actually Happened to the Playwright (day 33)
Nightmare (day 27)
Old Timey Sayings (day 34)
Professional Darts (day 58)
A Ridiculous Song Connected To An Important Life Event (day 17) (I suggested this one :)
Superposition (day 7)
Trick Candles (day 123)
Unrequited Love (day 54)
Vending Machines (day 78)
Wrestling (day 8)
The X-Men (day 113)
Monologue Where You’re the Person who Invented Sticky Notes and You’re Trying to get Someone to Like You Romantically (day 27)
If you really want to sample from the whole list, there’s a separate post for that
Also, for fun, if you see interesting runs of words in the list, you can play with those. For example, I saw these amusing words next to one another and ran them together:
Peasants’ Pepperoni Perfection at Perkins
A Pterodactyl’s Public Apology for Punching Puppies
Sacrifice Sand Castles
Saunas Serenading Shepherds
A Spy Stabbing Stars
Wizard Work Going Unnoticed
You’re a Girl In a Sitcom and You’re Giving a Victim Statement to the Court and You’re a Mime
(I could keep going. That list is unintentionally quite funny sometimes. But I do need to stop writing this challenge at some point and post it and get it out to you all :)
So take one or more of those words or phrases that strike your fancy and write something of your own.
Doesn’t have to be a monologue (monologues are hard - which Sam will be the first to admit. I’ve personally only ever written a good monologue by accident, as part of a larger scene where the character just had something to say at length.)
So, you know, a scene or part of a scene, whatever you feel like writing with these random bits to choose from as your launching off point.
If that sounds like a fun thing to play around with, go for it.
Or ignore me and write whatever you want - either way, we’re halfway there!
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If you’re not interested in this prompt, you can
try 2021’s challenge #15: Endings
Or try 2022’s challenge #15: Fake Adaptations
Or try 2023’s Challenge #15: Pictures That Haunt You
Or try 2024’s challenge #15: Reunions
Or try 2025’s challenge #15: Things That Remind Me of “Sex and the City” (from Threshold Theater co-founder and Managing Director David Schlosser)
Or,
you know, just ignore the prompts altogether and write whatever you
want - as long as you’re writing and turning it in by the deadline,
that’s all that matters for the challenge :)
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And because we call can get in our own way so easily, here’s some words of reassurance on the basics of this month:
Friendly Reminders - Answers To Common Questions:
(Follow the links to read me expounding on these items :)
Don’t Stress About Writing A Full Play
Don’t Stress About Format
Don’t Stress About Sticking To The Writing Prompt
No. Really. I Mean It. Don’t Stress About Sticking To The Writing Prompt
Don’t Stress About Finishing An Idea (You Can Add Later)
Don’t Stress About “Succeeding” or “Failing”
Don’t Stress About What You’re Turning In Each Day
Don’t Stress about November 26th (however you recognize the holiday weekend) - 2026 edition
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How to submit your work for Challenge #15
We’re streamlining the process this year with a Google form,
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdy-wyjz-IITaNsOkXM1zVQu_yrt_o7E4Vp2eQnr-8VNnu49w/viewform?usp=header
but you still have multiple options for how you submit your playwriting output for the day.
After you enter the required fields of
email,
name,
challenge number (for today, that’d be 15 :)
and page count,
you can submit your writing in one of four ways:
Save your script as a PDF or Word Doc and upload that document to the Google form.
OR
Post
your script online (on your personal website, as a blog post, or as a
Google doc) and put a link to that online script in the Google form.
OR
Copy/paste your work from another source directly into the Google form
OR
Type directly into the Google form.
(Whichever option you choose, you can leave the other ones blank.)
Write Sunday, November 15th - or earlier if you like
Again, this is: Due: Monday, November 16th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)
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And,
just to reassure you, no, we are not going to be sticklers about you
following these directions down to the minutest detail - the important
thing is that you write, and then that you share it with us, so we can
keep track of who’s writing every day.
Also, no, there is no
penalty for finishing and submitting early - but it also isn’t a race,
so give yourself all the time up til 12 noon Central Time on Monday to
write if you need it. When you’re done, you’re done.
Again,
remember, it doesn’t need to be great, it doesn’t even need to be
responding to this prompt (the prompt is just there so you’re not
staring at a blank screen to start with no idea what to write about :)
Doesn't
even need to be complete - you could have the beginning or the middle
or the end of an idea, maybe two out of three but not all, that's still
fine. This is all about getting things started, you can write more
later.
You have 15 more days to build on whatever you come up with today, if you want.
Just get anything on the page, even if won't make sense to anyone else, as long as it makes sense to you.
It just needs to be something.
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And that something can be:
Lights up.
CEDRIC walks out on stage.
He has a monologue somewhere in his head.
He knows he does.
He can’t think of a thing to say.
Sigh.
Lights down.
The End
That’s always your escape hatch, every day.
That’s your base line.
Build on it.
Have fun.
Don’t stress.
Make an impulsive decision and run with it.
Breathe.
You’ve got the day.
Just write.
And take good care of yourselves, and each other.
Matthew A. Everett
Literary Director
Threshold Theater
(he/him/his)
