It’s easy to look back on this year and feel like nothing happened. It’s been feeling like that for a while. Stagnant. So many of us are feeling it, right? Productions seem harder to come by. Rejections are nearly expected. Maybe it’s getting on in the career and falling out of the zeitgeist. Realizing people might be focused on the next new names and not on you as someone worth reading. Or just wanting things to get a little easier after a long time in the game. But they don’t, do they?

I interviewed Donald Margulies in 2017 and he told me he’d gone to see a production of his play, The Model Apartment, and he was in awe at his fearlessness in writing it. At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, so he explained that as he got older and worried more about making a living, he wrote safer.

I recent years, I may have hit a tipping point to understanding how he felt, but I also think it’s more than that. When you’re starting out, you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re never being told what you should or shouldn’t write. So you just write. Freely and optimistically. And see what sticks, hoping that one of them is really the holy grail that can launch you. You still believe that playwriting is mostly a meritocracy, because you haven’t yet learned how the business side of it all works. Or that the fight against commercialism—that disconnect between what wins prizes and what actually gets produced—is omnipresent. Or that getting over the money wall—the need for investors to finance you into the big places that will get you noticed—is something that builds careers.

Even without COVID to crush momentum, there does come a time when we look back at things we wrote at the start of our careers, know we wrote them, can recite lines from them, can recognize our voice and style, yet in some ways feel like they were written by somebody else. That must be what Donald was feeling. It can feel weird.  Unsettling. But it really just means you’re adapting.

Because Donald, and I, and likely any of you reading this, are still writing. And submitting (well, Donald probably doesn’t submit). In 2024, I talked about how low my submission number had gotten—just 136 for the year—as post-COVID as submission opportunities continued to decline in both quality and quantity. This year is a bit better—155—but even if that nominal rate of improvement were to continue (and for myriad reasons, I don’t think it will), it would be years before we see the submission opportunity numbers we did in the mid-2010s. Last year, I talked about it being time to create our own opportunities, whatever those may be, and I have certainly continued in that vein.

I ended last year in rehearsal for BRILLIANT WORKS OF ART, my Kilroys-list-making, agent-getting play, multiple award-winning play that finally saw production, and it was every bit as satisfying and brilliant as I wanted it to be. A great way to start the year and, when I realized this month, that the production had actually been in 2025, I realized that I achieved so much more this year that it felt like.



Even financially, I made almost double what I did last year in playwriting/screenwriting related income. I helped nearly twenty playwrights with scripts and marketing, which is always satisfying and I love when I hear about their good results! (If you’re interested, reach out!)

BRILLIANT WORKS wasn’t my only production, mostly due to the efforts I made in 2023 to get many of my scripts published. As a result, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW, and THE CROSSWORD PLAY all saw productions, the first two multiple throughout the year. And for 2026, THE CROSSWORD PLAY and LITTLE WOMEN… NOW both have productions lined up, the latter several. I point this out because it’s important to remember that even if you’re feeling stagnant, your work is still out there, doing the work for you when you’re not up to it. It’s a reminder, too, that taking the time to make those connections does pay off. (I am sad that TEACH hasn’t gotten any love, as I think it’s one of my best plays.) Two more full-length titles are expecting publishing contracts in the new year and my ten-minute play, “Jack Pork,” was published in Smith & Kraus’s Best 10-Minute Plays this year, as well.

In unpublished news, I had eight productions of ten-minute plays, because, even though I don’t really write them anymore, I still send them out when I have something appropriate. My short play, “Life Lines” continues to be part of the ever-evolving Grief Dialogues, and most recently was part of an immersive production called IN THE WAKE OF LIFE. I also had readings of EMILY OF NEW MOON, THE LAZARUS CLUB, ELEVATOR GIRL, MABEL TALKS, HEARTS OF STONE, and MADNESS MOST DISCREET: Larry and Viv’s Last Visit. And FOUR DOORS DOWN and BEST LAID PLAN(t)S earned several finalist and semifinalist accolades. That’s a lot of plays getting attention. (One of these was through the New Play Exchange, so if you still don’t believe your play can be found amid 65,000 plays, it can.) 



In September, I got a huge gift when the historic Lancaster Opera House chose to revive ONCE IN MY LIFETIME: A Buffalo Football Fantasy in the heart of Bills country. It was a huge success—their best-selling play in ages, I was told—and it was such a delight to revise and revisit it with a stellar cast. Twice in my lifetime—who’d have thought? And the Bills are in the playoffs so…



So things did happen—six full-length productions, a one-act production, and eight ten-minute productions. That’s not nothing. And for next year, I so far know of five full-length productions—including a world premiere—and possibly (fingers crossed) another TV film. Is momentum coming back or have I simply switched gears? Moved in a different direction and failed to acknowledge that things don’t have to be the same to be good? Or just had a hard time seeing the good amid all the stuff around us that can pull down a mood?

My biggest accomplishment of 2025 is that I wrote three scripts—one play and two screenplays! That’s a huge accomplishment, because I haven’t been that prolific in a long time. It also kind of tells me that maybe I’m enjoying writing screenplays, something I’ll continue to explore in 2026. To paraphrase my daughter, go where you feel excited to go. The important thing is that writing is happening.

Because careers ebb and flow, and it’s hard when the ebb is happening to believe the flow will ever come back. And sometimes the ebb just means we’re experimenting with other forms, following a path and seeing where it leads, rediscovering the joy of creating. As my son recently said on his podcast, “I enjoy creating content more than consuming it.” I agree and am at my happiest when I’m creating and, more and more, it matters less what—a screenplay, a play, a meal, the huge Halloween blanket I made for my son’s birthday, the party I threw for the arrival of my daughter’s husband, or the favors I made for my other daughter’s wedding.



Therapists like to ask—when a client expresses something as truth like, “it’s been a shitty year for me as a playwright”—what evidence there is to support the assertion. This has been a good exercise in refuting what felt like the truth of 2025. Don’t trust the doubt. As the external environment that keeps beating us down, find your wins this year. You need to.

Then keep being a creator in 2026—in whatever way feels best. I know in mine, I’d like to see more scripts, more productions (TEACH anyone??), more crafts, more cooking… 

P.S. If you made it this far, let me know if you think this blog is worth converting to a Substack or if blogs are really coming back lol.


———————————–

(Click on the home page to read about my plays!)

–Please follow me on Instagram @dhokeplays or like me on Facebook at Donna Hoke, Playwright.

–Read my plays and recommendations on the New Play Exchange!

–Playwrights, remember to explore the Real Inspiration For Playwrights Project, a 52-post series of wonderful advice from Literary Managers and Artistic Directors on getting your plays produced. Click RIPP at the upper right.

–To read #PLONY (Playwrights Living Outside New York) interviews, click here or #PLONY in the category listing at upper right.

–To read the #365gratefulplaywright series, click here or the category listing at upper right.

–For more #AHAinTheater posts, click here or the category listing at upper right.