In January of this year, I had the incredible opportunity to see my twenty-minute play Stop, Look, Listen performed at A Play, A Pie & A Pint, having developed the script over three months through the Trajectories New Writers programme.
I learnt so much in those three months that would have taken years of fumbling around at my desk to discover on my own. It would be an impossible task to summarise it all in one short article, so here are my top three things which have had a profound and immediate effect on the way that I approach my writing.
Lesson 1: Don’t obsess over the rules, enjoy playing
During the Trajectories New Writers programme, alongside mentoring from Douglas Maxwell, we received workshops from guest artists including Stef Smith, James Ley, Jack MacGregor, Maryam Hamidi and Elfie Picket Theatre. We learnt about structure, building characters and generating ideas. I tried to absorb everything, took careful notes and read them over when I got back home. It would have been easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of brilliant technical advice, but it was Douglas who pointed out – after a particularly insightful session on structure – that our goal wasn’t to use these workshops like instructions. “Take this in as theory,” he said, ‘”then forget it”.
Where often writing is taught like a mechanical science, Douglas’s advice gave me the freedom to relax, to experiment and, most importantly of all, to trust my own instincts. To trust that all the plays I had read, all the theory I had learnt over the years, was in me somewhere and that what really mattered now was writing the thing that felt right.
Suddenly the whole process didn’t feel like a task but like a game. And like in any game, the fun part wasn’t in the rules but in the playing.
Lesson 2: Sometimes limitations are helpful
Stop, Look, Listen is a monologue play, consciously written for the stage at Òran Mór. For a long time previously however, I had been working without any consideration for how my plays might actually be staged: writing for twenty people, with forty locations, demanding fire, a string quartet, vast quantities of water, geese. With hindsight, those plays were an important step. They gave me a freedom but, crucially, they helped me to get to the end of the draft, rather than stopping myself before I’d even started to ask “is this even possible?”. At some point, however, it’s important to recognise the reality that most opportunities for early-career playwrights do not come with a million pound production budget and a cast of ninety-one.
While I don’t think that means that you should stop writing those plays, to me there is also great value in practicing making work which actively takes into consideration the limitations of a real space, a realistic cast size etc. This is, for the first time, what I had in mind as I began the drafting process for Stop, Look, Listen. I found it gave me a focus, a clarity of thought, which had previously evaded me.
Lesson 3: There is always something you can do
The first and the most immediate thing you can do is write. Just sitting down at your desk and writing is a massively undervalued act of progress-making. With Stop, Look, Listen I discovered that I could write something I felt proud of in only two months, where previously I would have believed I needed years. Sit down and write (with commitment) as regularly as possible and soon you will have something that you didn’t have before.
The next thing you can do is go outside. Go to everything you can, talk to people in theatre bars, introduce yourself, make friends. Write to artists you admire, ask to meet with them for coffee. It’s okay to ask people to talk to you – it really is! People like to talk. In my experience people who are interested in making theatre especially like to talk about making theatre. If you need to hear your work, get your friends together, friends of friends, local amateur groups – you don’t have to wait for permission for that to happen.
Read more plays. Read books. Watch telly. Listen to music. Write about all of it. Apply for funding. Apply to scratch nights.
Then, of course, the most important thing of all: find out what it is you love about writing. The thing that excites you most of all. Find that out and keep doing it. People can tell.
I’ve heard lots of different playwrights describe the experience of writing a new script as being one of starting again, of learning from scratch how to write that particular play. If there’s one thing that has become clear to me over the past few months, it’s that while it may well feel as though there is always so much more to learn, that’s also kind of the whole point. There aren’t any answers – just loads and loads of question. Sometimes that’s terrifying but sometimes it is an indescribable joy.
– Elliot Scott, Trajectories New Writers 2026