If you’re an author, you should write a play. Even if your genre is high fantasy novels, even if your genre is romance novellas, even if your genre is poetry, even if you don’t watch theatre often, you should write a play.
Why?
1. It’s a completely different medium for storytelling that still puts your writing skills to use.
2. It’s an incredibly helpful exercise in show-don’t-tell. Like seriously. Wow.
3. A new way to write characters. You can’t shoehorn in extensive physical descriptions most of the time, so you have to resort to defining them by their actions and words. Again, see point 2.
4. You’re creating a piece of performance art without even getting up off the couch? Woah??
5. It’s so gratifying to watch it performed, or even just read, if you can. Like oh wow.
6. Lots of stuff that you never think you’ll need or use again outside of playwriting follows you back into your prose work.
7. The world needs more plays that aren’t just adaptations of Disney movies or 80′s jukebox cash grabs trying to ride the coattails of Heathers. Seriously.
8. It’s fun.
9. Like, really fun.
10. For real, I have never finished a writing project more quickly or with less burnout.