Hi again folks!
(2 of 2)
27 down, 3 to go!
We’ve nearly reached the end of November. Well done, everybody!
This prompt is the one you would be writing Friday 11/28 to be turned in on Saturday 11/29 by noon Central Time, but just fill in the Google form and tag it for prompt 28 and you can turn it early and I’ll credit it ahead.
And of course, you can always use the mini-play at the bottom of the email and blog post as an escape hatch for the day’s writing.
Now, let’s get you the second writing prompt of the pair for the day…
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Challenge #28 - Quilts
Write Friday, November 28th - or earlier if you like
Due: Saturday, November 29th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)
Most of the time when I wake up in the middle of the night I can go back to sleep. But every now and again my brain gets going and it’s hard to shut it off.
Recently, as the cold sets in, one night I woke up because the bedroom had suddenly gotten quite colder since the time I’d first turned in and gone to sleep (the kind of night that makes you realize, reluctantly, you’re going to have to turn on the heat again, summer’s over, now fall is over, too)
As an intermediate measure, just so I could comfortably get back to sleep, I broke out a couple of old quilts sown by my late Aunt Ida. They were originally my dad’s possessions but when he went into the nursing home, where they crank the heat up mighty high, he no longer had need of them. And my stepmother had plenty of bedding of her own, and she realized I lived in Minnesota (something she had done for a few years during her marriage previous to my father) and she figured I could make good use of them, which I have. She shipped them, along with some other furniture pieces - my dad’s old chest of drawers from when he was a kid, my great grandmother’s rocking chair (on dad’s side), which they’d refurbished but had no need of (and I had a new home that could use furniture). The quilts themselves where packed into and old steamer trunk, which great grandmother brought over with her to America from Wales. That steamer trunk is now my coffee table and work station in the living room when working from home (with laptop computers and a printer that would no doubt have blown great grandma’s mind, just as the voyage she made from Wales would have blown my mind).
So breaking out these quilts got me thinking of all of that for starters.
And Ida and her husband Harry and their long marriage out in Colorado.
How both my mother and stepmother had to be run by Ida for approval when Dad wanted to marry them.
How Ida was likely a woman ahead of her time, with all kinds of intellect and skills that the family didn’t allow her to fully utilize, putting all their hopes for the family on my Dad, her brother, instead.
Ida helped raise my Dad, because their parents suffered a devastating loss when the children were younger. Ida and my Dad had an older brother and sister, both of whom died in a tragic train accident. Though they still had two children left, the parents never really recovered from the loss of having the family cut in half like that.
One of the weirder things about the family that my Mom remembered the first time she was taken out to visit the family was that they had a picture of the train crash, from the newspaper coverage at the time, framed and hung on the wall, along with other pictures of the family, both living and dead.
Again, my brain is cycling through all of this just because I got out the quilts.
And then I thought of an old movie from back in 1995, How To Make An American Quilt, a romantic comedy/drama with an absolutely insane ensemble cast doing what was essentially a piece of fluff but just acting their asses off. It starred a young Winona Ryder, only 24 at the time, now the matriarch of the Stranger Things series on Netflix.
Also in the cast, the poet Maya Angelou, who has my favorite line from the film that I still remember, mostly because of the way she said it:
“I never liked full moons. They give people an excuse to do *foolish* things.”
(At around the 1:10 mark in the trailer)
She meant in a romantic way, not a supernatural werewolf kind of way, of course. These days we have to clarify such things.
This then reminded me that Maya Angelou once visited the Indiana State University campus where I went to undergrad and she came and spoke to our little theater department. I didn’t even fully understand who she was at the time, I just remember being dazzled by her presence, which then made me research her afterward and, wow. What the heck was she doing in Terre Haute, Indiana talking to a bunch of us theater kids? I think she had a friend in the English department, and those folks knew our professors so that got her to do a little side trip to see us as well. Still blows my damn mind.
Also in the movie, a 26 year old Jonathan Schaech, who also did the insanely different Gregg Araki movie “The Doom Generation” that same year, and the completely different That Thing You Do in 1996. Plus another oversexed but less homicidal Araki movie, Splendor, in 1999. (That man’s filmography is nuts.)
So my brain was pinging all over the place for about an hour because of those quilts.
If you did an emotional tour of your apartment or house, what items would be overflowing with either personal memories and/or family history?
How do the ghosts of memory, good and bad, manifest themselves onstage?
Play around with that
Or don’t.
Whatever you like, do that.
Just write.
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If you’re not interested in this prompt, you can
try 2021’s challenge #28: Companion Plays
Or try 2022’s challenge #28: Atmosphere
Or try 2023’s Challenge #28: Contronyms
Or try 2024’s challenge #28: Moving People Along
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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How to submit your work for Challenge #28
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 28 :)
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 Friday, November 28th - or earlier if you like
Again, this is: Due: Saturday, November 29th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)
*************************
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 November 27th (however you recognize the holiday weekend) - 2025 edition
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
***************************
How to submit your work for Challenge #28
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 28 :)
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 Friday, November 28th - or earlier if you like
Again, this is: Due: Saturday, November 29th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)
*************************
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 on Saturday 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 2 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.
Claire gets out a quilt to put on her bed.
She unfurls the quilt and several people come tumbling out, startling her.
Then she recognizes them, and breathes a little easier.
She takes a moment to sit with her ancestors.
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)
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