Can't Fly Up

And be expected to take hits? Wear unfashionable armor? Never.

My experience with freelance work has been all over the place, so I’m not sure if my advice has any merit. It’s also specific to playwriting, which is its own brand of weird (and functionally different from writing and selling a novel, doing freelance creative writing, or taking screenplay commissions). I’m also in Canada, so this is specific to the Canadian theatre scene. 

1) If a company had contracted a commissioned work from you, read your contract thoroughly and carefully. Make notes and ask questions. There’s a lot of legal jargon that you may have not encountered before. If you need clarification, do it before you sign it. It’s really important to know the limitations of your contract so the company can’t come back to you six months later and say, “Hey, we want this changed, can you change it” without paying you for that work. 

2) If you are commissioned, double-check your contract so you understand whether you are a) a writer providing a service to create a product for a company to sell or b) a writer creating a work for a company to produce. There’s a difference between the two. My last commission was very clear that I was hired to create a product for a company. Even though it’s my play and it’s my words, they own the copyright and are allowed to produce it for as long as they want without paying me royalties. If it was the other way, they would have to pay me royalties every time they wanted to produced it.   

3) If you need help understanding your contract, research and contact whatever guild is in your country that oversees the kind of creative work you do. For me, it’s the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada. PGC helps those of us without representation (many of us are our own agents because Playwriting Be Like That) go over contracts whenever a theatre company wants to produce our work and make sure we are getting proper royalties and the right percentage of the box office cut. Usually guilds require a yearly membership and a membership fee for access to their services, but it’s worth it once you’re established enough to make use of those services. (PGC in particular has different membership levels, so students and emerging artists pay a cheaper fee than fully professional playwrights, who can afford the $100-odd annual membership fee). 

4) Pricing is all over the place, since it depends on the individual context and the theatre company who wants to commission you. Generally speaking, I don’t accept less than my provincial minimum wage. It’s a good idea to know roughly how long it takes you to create a product, so you can estimate the amount that work is worth.  

So let’s say I get hired by a theatre company to write them a new one act play. 

A one act play is roughly 40-45 pages and around 60 minutes of stage time. 

Let’s say it takes around 300 hours of work to research, draft and write a play (I’m going with 300 because I started keeping track of my writing hours and I know that’s around my bare minimum to churn out a couple decent drafts of a one act). 

300 hours at $13.65/hr is $4095.

Depending on the company, that may be appropriate. If they have funding for a new writers program, they may want to pay me more. Or they might not be able to afford that rate. Again, it depends on the context of the situation (my last commission was for a university and they paid me $8000 for a 30 minute play that I spent a year working on. Mind you, they own the copyright, so they overpaid me to compensate for not paying me royalties every year they produce it).   

Essentially, the situation I am now trying to avoid is what happened to me during my first commission. I was “commissioned” by the theatre company I was an artistic associate for to write their spring play. It was TYA and there were a lot of specifications (large cast-size, appropriate roles for children to perform, fast-paced dialogue, not a lot of demands on the set or costumes, etc). 

I wrote an adaptation of Robin Hood that was about the most perfect play for their needs. It took me about 350 hours to research, write, draft and edit it, and even then I was still making slight changes as they went into rehearsal. 

I didn’t get paid for the actual play text. I got paid the amateur royalty rate as outlined by PGC at the time (which was $100 per show). Originally they had intended to do 10 shows, but then the artistic director cut it down to 7 shows due to budget constraints. So after all this work I put into this beautiful, perfect script I tailor-made for them, I only got paid $700. 

That comes out to $2/hr. 

The reasoning was that I could then take that play around to other TYA companies and try to get it produced, but the problem is that it is so specific to that theatre company’s needs that it doesn’t really fit anyone else’s. So it’s been gathering dust in my folders ever since.  

I’m not sure if this is helpful, but basically:

Don’t undersell yourself

Find the appropriate resources to help you with legal jargon before you sign a contract

Ask questions before you sign a contract and make sure you follow up on any possible loopholes that could be used to exploit you and your work in the future

The final Interlude oof

Oh tell me about it! It’s so hard to do your artistic projects when you also have fulltime work. I’m not as far along with Insurrection as I want to be because work saps my energy so I only ever work on it on weekends.

I did get past a major milestone yesterday (Character Creator, yay!). I’m finally moving on with the Prologue but I have some other drafting to do first… It’s a long road.

As far as my own work goes, I’ve actually got more then just the one commission going on. I’ve got another portrait, plus some branding work that a return client wants done. Apollo is the big guy I’m working on right now. He’s a little more done then this, but I’m hoping to finish off the medals tonight!