We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Bykowski a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rachel, appreciate you joining us today. One of the toughest things about progressing in your creative career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
When I was in my late teens, I tried to shove all my creative energies into one box – playwriting. A “playwright” is how I packaged and presented myself. Much like trying to squeeze into a favorite dress from decades ago, I firmly believed that if I could not make myself fit into this category, then I was a failure. Theatre is my first love and writing plays comes naturally to me. But I also enjoy writing essays, blogs, editing videos, podcasts, and more. However, I believed I could not possibly be all those things at once. It’s too much, too big, too wild and unfocused. No one will take me seriously. I need to be the master of one craft, in one industry. I need to be specific, precise, tight, and sculpted. So, I pushed aside all those extra helpings of creativity and forced all my ideas and inspirations into a single channel.
It was suffocating.
I studied playwriting in undergrad, but I also minored in journalism. I loved playwriting, but while attending my journalism classes I felt like I was having an affair. Journalism, especially digital journalism and media, excited me. The ability to explore and experiment with different methods of storytelling electrified my imagination.
BUT…did I want to be in a newsroom or a theatre? Did I want to be a journalist or a playwright?
From undergrad through graduate school, I refocused my attention, cut out some delicious concepts for future projects, and slowly minimized my imagination as I slid into the playwriting world.
Of course, I knew of playwrights whom started in theatre then moved to television. Television – if you can break into the industry – is a very smart business decision and fairly similar to playwriting. Playwriting skills are easily transferable.
BUT….did I want to write for the screen or write for the stage?
I was always so jealous of colleagues who seemed to have their cake and eat it too. I met playwrights whom didn’t feel content in playwriting programs because they said they felt the pedagogy was too limiting. They wanted to experiment with their stories and push the boundaries of theatre by mixing media and mediums. They didn’t even like calling themselves “playwrights.” They preferred, “writer,” “creative,” “artist,” etc…
I admired them. Their bravery to be bigger than a single label both attracted and frightened me.
It wasn’t until recently, I realized the importance of letting my creativity take up space. Currently, I’m on a creative journey to feed my imagination instead of starving it. The pandemic motivated me to listen to my writer’s voice and what it was trying to tell me…
It was hungry and existing in one category was not going to satiate it.
Right now, I’m writing a podcast series and working as a content writer for a B2B marketing agency and you want to know what? I love it. I’m helping a brand connect to audiences by telling genuine stories about agency life and chronicling its insights for broader consumption – humanizing the brand.
My podcast series, Murder, We Spoke, is challenging my writing, pushing me into a purely audio medium. My writing is becoming stronger as I experiment with how sound can tell a story.
I needed to become comfortable with growing my craft and letting it expand in different directions. Maybe, that means I don’t write a play for a year or two or three, but I write a dozen articles and a series of essays. That doesn’t mean I’m not a playwright, I’m something bigger.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
I am a playwright, storyteller, teaching artist, content writer & producer, and overall creative artist. I write to explore the many facets of my identity and raise awareness to social issues. I find myself exploring middle class America, matriarchies, privilege, gender roles, and how women contribute to the legacies of their families. The question, “What does it mean to be a woman?” propels my characters on their journeys. My womanhood, experiences, happiness, anger, desires, and vulnerabilities, are tangled together in these knots of words I call my plays.
I strive to challenge myself with each new play I write. In order to excite myself, my collaborators, designers, and audience members, I challenge myself to include at least one “unproducible” element in each of my plays. I believe “the unproducible” is where theatricality is born.
I write blogs, interviews, long-form articles, digital content, case studies, event coverage, social media campaigns and more for the arts, culture, technology, software, B2B, and C2C industries. I leverage my extensive experience as a creative storyteller to develop strategies that invite audiences along on an authentic journey that connects humans to brands and enables buyers to advocate for those brands.
After writing for 15+ years, I’ve learned a lot by making a ton of mistakes. I package all those mistakes and share it with students and those beginning their creative journeys. I teach the craft and foundation of playwriting, tips and tricks for breaking into the professional writing world, and how to build your personal brand as a writer.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
In a word – trust. Society needs to start trusting creatives and new works. Speaking specifically from a theatre industry perspective, the new play development world has come a long way, but still has miles of road ahead. Not even factoring in achieving true gender parity and addressing the gross amount of racial disparity that happens on and off stage, theatres are still using elitist forms of gatekeeping to weed out new writers and new plays including: requesting letters of recommendations, requiring a BFA or MFA, accepting agent-only submissions, and on and on. And yet, within many of these theatres’ seasons, I still see they made room for a main stage production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or insert random Shakespeare play here. And when I see those season announcements, I can’t help but wonder, what new stories, new perspectives, new voices were turned away for the sake of kneeling at the altar of “honoring” theatre history, (easy) marketing, assumed subscriber preference, and ROI.
Look, I like Ibsen just as much as the next theatre nerd, but remember, he was once considered “new” too until someone, some theatre, trusted him and his vision. Also, on the subject of trust – trust that your subscribers can handle a challenge. Trust that they want to learn. Trust that they are not afraid and are aching for something that is not just another parlor drama.
I am looking forward to the day when theatres that proclaim to LOVE new plays and believe new writers are the future of theatre, actually put their money where their mission statements are. My advice for a first step – do away with the requests for letters of recommendation and degrees and all that other stuff and just read the f*ck*ng play. If you like it and it fits your season, you have your production.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
One of the biggest rifts between creatives and non-creatives is agreeing on the defination of “productive.” As a creative, living in a corporate world, I sometimes struggle to showcase the value of how creatives create. To many 9-5 folks’ confusion, creativity does not flourish in back-to-back status meetings or between the hours of 9-5. Sometimes, the best ideas come while taking a walk or pacing around a room while making chicken-scratch notes on a whiteboard. For some creatives, they need silence and thrive in moments of solitary. For others, it’s a busy coffee shop. Productivity for a creative is a very personal and individual preference. If you have creatives in your workplace, listen and trust in their process to get the job done.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rachelbykowskiplays.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelbykowskiplays/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelBykowskiPlaywright
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-bykowski-bb4092143/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/rachb713
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5sqIlBcvZ1o4gbIResfGkg
- Other: https://www.clippings.me/rachelbykowski
Image Credits
Photos (1 and 2) by Leslie Hilliard; Majestic Repertory Theatre, Las Vegas – Mckenna Castro, Cristina Florea, and Miles Nelson; Body-Shaming article published by HowlRound; Photo of Rachel addressing audience by Yaphet Jackman