Writer’s Spotlight: Dray Dickey

My name is Dray Dickey, I am from Bronaugh, MO, a town with a population of around 200 people. Ever since I learned how to write, I’ve been writing stories. When I was a little kid, I would put stickers on my notebook and then write a story based on the stickers I used. The downside was that nobody could read my handwriting, and the stories probably didn’t make a lot of sense anyways.

Thankfully, when I got into middle school, I took a typing class. In that class I would write stories and show them to my friends, sometimes I would even write stories with other people. One of my earliest stories was a nonsensical tale about a anthropomorphic water bottle that was in love with a binder. It wasn’t perfect but at least was more original than most stories that Hollywood is pumping out these days.

The next year I took a creative writing class, I enjoyed writing more stories and continued sharing my favorites with my friends. I did have this nasty habit of starting stories and then abandoning them after only a paragraph or two. I probably have scores of unfinished stories from middle school and high school.

Once I got into high school, I was still writing the occasional story for my English class. I wrote a prologue for a story that got high praise from my teacher. It was called The End, and it was a post-apocalyptic story based on the lore of the Fallout games. What made this story different was that it featured my classmates and teacher as the main characters. I continued the story and eventually showed it to my classmates who immediately asked for more. My story was the talk of the classroom, and everyone would ask me when the next chapter was going to come out and speculate about what would happen next.

Yes, the main reason they liked it was probably because they were in it but even others who read it said that they liked it. I’d never gotten such high praise for anything before. I wasn’t good at sports, and I wasn’t good at math, but I was good at writing and that was enough. I decided that was what I wanted to do with my life. I planned to move to Los Angeles after graduation and become a screenwriter.

That was the plan until my senior year. I remembered that I had no money and no connections and would probably become homeless in a month. Plans changed and that’s a good thing. I didn’t have to move across the country to write for a living, I figured that I could do it just about anywhere. I went to the community college that was in the same town as my high school. Thanks to an academic scholarship and a theatre scholarship, I was basically able to go to college for free.

I’d only acted in one play before, but somehow was able to get a theatre scholarship anyway. I will admit, the acting was fun, but that wasn’t why I was there. I was there to write plays, and I got my chance in the spring of 2022. I wrote a one- act play called Greece, a comedy where Hades is forced to go to a family dinner with his relatives on Olympus. I also directed and acted in the play and it was praised by our theatre director as the best student play to ever be performed at the school.

Directing the play that I’d written and watching it be performed, even being a part of it, was on of the greatest times of my life. That summer, I wrote another play to be performed the next spring. It was a full-length musical, which was bigger than anything I’d done before. It was a jukebox musical with mostly songs that already existed, and a few original songs from me and a friend. It was supposed to be a senior project that everybody could contribute to. I had one friend who planned to do choreography and the choir director in line to help us practice the music.

It started rocky as the theatre group that was once friends had already started to break apart before we even had the first practice. I tried to hold everything together for a month or two before everything fell apart. I lost my choreographer after she was put on suicide watch for family reasons. One of my starring actors quit because he couldn’t handle another actor being the on-stage love interest of his girlfriend.

Even though my theatre director liked the script, the new theater manager did not. I’m terrible with conflict but I fought to keep my play the way it was supposed to be. They wanted to use external mics for the musical when we had perfectly good wireless mics, which led to another conflict. Finally, the theatre director told me that it would have to be a read-through instead of an actual play. Maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t want to do my play unless it was done right.

I went to talk to my choir director who was helping with the play’s music and everything that I’d been holding inside came out when I told him that I was giving up. I broke down crying in front of him, a moment in my life that I don’t share very often but it was crucial to my journey as a writer. He consoled me and encouraged me. Sometimes you fail and it’s not your fault, but that’s okay. I learned more about writing and directing from that failure than I did from the success of the year before.

I planned to go straight into the workforce after community college but as I looked for online writing jobs, most all of them required a creative writing degree or a bachelor’s degree of some kind. My parents agreed to help pay for my college if I chose a Christian school. I looked at the five Christian schools that offered a degree in creative writing and chose Bob Jones University. As soon as I heard about their bake-off, I knew that was where I wanted to go.

Before I went left for South Carolina, my pastor let me put on a play that I’d written my senior year of high school. The play wasn’t able to be performed because of the pandemic but I was grateful for the opportunity to do it years later. I’d made multiple short films for my church in the past put this was the first play. The play was a dramedy called A Second Chance. It was a rocky start, as it was hard to get the right cast. However, once it got started, God blessed us with a great cast and a great performance.

Soon after, I went to the university. The bake-off was early in the semester. For those who don’t know, it’s a playwriting competition where you get 24 hours to write a play and then the winners get a cash prize and they get their play performed, which was what I was most excited about. There were about 20 other students at the writer’s meeting and I thought that there was no way that I would win.

 I wrote a comedy called The Hostage and it won. I was beyond excited, and all my friends came to watch the play. It was the first time that I got to sit back and watch a play that I wrote, without directing or acting in it.

The next year I wrote a play called The Return of Mr. Sinistache. A goofy comedy about a low-level supervillain who just wants to be taken seriously. I thought that there was no way that I’d win again but to my surprise I was picked for a second time. The actors were amazing, and the crowd really seemed to enjoy it. One of the theatre students told me that it was the best play that had ever been performed at bake-off.

The next year, I wrote a spy-comedy called Maverick. I can’t win every time, that would just be unfair to everyone else. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t picked. It’s okay because I still have one more bake-off left before I graduate, and I enjoy writing the plays whether I win or not.

            This semester, I looked up whether or not it was possible to make a living as a playwright. I found out that it’s almost impossible, thanks to the low royalties that writers are given for their plays. I didn’t feel like that was right and I wanted to make a website that sold scripts and put writers first, giving them up to 25% royalties instead of the usual 10 to 15 percent.

            At this point, the website isn’t up yet but the plan is there, and I hope that within the next few months the website will be up and running, because writers deserve better.