how to submit your play without losing your mind

There’s a quiet absurdity to submitting a play: you’ve made something intimate, alive and unruly — and now you’re asked to flatten it into PDFs, bios and word counts. The trick isn’t to eliminate the friction. It’s to contain it.

Start by accepting that submission is a different craft than writing. You’re no longer discovering the play — you’re packaging it. That shift alone saves a great deal of anguish.

A few steadying principles help:

Choose your lanes, not every lane.

You do not need to submit everywhere. In fact, that way lies exhaustion. Pick a handful of theaters, festivals or fellowships that genuinely fit your work — tonally, aesthetically or geographically. A well-chosen five will serve you better than a frantic twenty-five.

Build a small system you trust.

A simple spreadsheet is enough. Track where you’ve submitted, deadlines, requirements and responses. This does two things: it clears your mind of loose ends, and it quietly returns a sense of control. You’re no longer “trying everywhere” — you’re working a plan.

Standardize your materials once.

Have a clean packet ready:

• 10-page excerpt (if requested)

• full script (properly formatted, clearly titled)

• 1–2 paragraph synopsis (short means short)

• brief playwright bio (trim it to what matters)

For help in properly formatting your play, this link will provide you a template.

Respect the gatekeepers — but don’t mythologize them.

Literary managers and readers are not oracles. They are often overworked, underpaid and reading quickly. Clarity and professionalism matter more than cleverness in your submission email. A calm, direct note will carry further than a dazzling one.

Decide in advance how much waiting you can tolerate.

Submissions stretch time in strange ways. Set a quiet boundary for yourself: “After I send this, I won’t check on it for X weeks.” Without that boundary, you’ll end up living inside your inbox.

Keep writing something else.

This is the real anchor. If the submitted play is your only creative investment, every silence will feel like judgment. If you’re already halfway into the next piece, the silence becomes background noise.

Redefine what “success” means at this stage.

A submission is not a referendum on your worth or even your play. It’s a logistical step. Success, for now, is simply: you sent it where it needed to go, in good shape, on time.

And one last thing, which matters more than it sounds: try to keep a little humor about the process. There is something inherently comic about attaching your soul to an email and labeling it “PDF, 12 pt, double-spaced.” If you can see that clearly, it takes some of the sting out.