Scholarship Essay, 600 word limit

So the Dramatists Guild is having their annual Conference in La Jolla in July and I have every intention of going. So much so that I've already paid for it. However, they just announced through the Dramatists Guild Fund scholarship opportunities for said Conference. All one has to do is write a brief essay on one of the prompts offered, and this is my submission. Any feedback would be great.


Fifteen years ago, I would have looked at you askance if you told me I was going to be a Modern Verse Dramatist. Sure, I had been active in theatre in High School (I achieved the prerequistes for the International Thespian Society in two years) and I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with the theatre ever since. Except in my writing. I grew up reading sci-fi/fantasy novels, and my first forays into writing were definitely derived from that vein, but I had never really thought about scripts. I knew I didn't want anything to do with the Screen, writing or otherwise, but writing for Theatre...

It was in a particularly tumultuous time in my life that I discovered playwriting. Pretty cliché, I know, but it is also true. I never set out to write a script. I was writing a conversation, but that was part of Fiction, too, and I never thought much about it during the process. What was different was that I was only writing the conversation. I had some rather undeclared scene changes that occurred as the moments within my life during that time moved from one issue to the next, but the conversation would return like old friends catching up. Everything I wanted to say, setting and so forth, was spoken of in the conversation. I didn't use any stage direction at all. Why would I, at that point? I was trying to purge the moments. Trying to understand the moments. Trying to forgive the moments. Toward the end of that period, my affections shifted from pain to hope, and I decided to end the conversation. And I mean end it. Not stop it and never think about it again, but actually end it. And I did. I remember realizing as I ended it; flipping through the pages and pages of dialogue, that that was all it was. Dialogue. I realized all of my terrible attempts at fiction mostly moved through dialogue. And this? This was so much better. Gone was my prosaic and uninspired prose. In its place were thirty pages of verse dialogue, and I knew in the core of my being I would have to try and do that on purpose. Fifteen years later, I have a collection of 10 plays (8 full length, 1 one act, 1 ten-minute) that I know are ready for the stage, with another in progress. I have another 5 that are my first attempts, horrible as they are, and I still cherish them as the stepping stones that allowed me to develop the form and style I devote myself to, but the time for looking back has ended, and now the stage calls. The time has come to move my works from the page to the stage, and I'm hoping that the Dramatists Guild Conference will help me draw that curtain.