Writer’s Spotlight: Jeff Miller

     

    Jeff Miller is from Railroad, Pennsylvania. It’s a town of about 300 people, it’s where he met a group of Christians and was born again. He eventually moved to a Christian school and had a very creative friend who helped with skit writing and creative ideas. After graduation, he went off to college, saw his first real play and thought, “I can do that.”

            He started getting into plays there and switched to a double major with dramatic productions as one of them. He wrote his first skit for a class, Three Men in a Tub, which was an elevator skit. He wrote another one for a society meeting, which was the beginning of a four-set script about Trindle and Dundle, these imaginary Christmas elves. He said, “It's absurd, it's very sarcastic, it's very funny, and it works at the college level.”

            He also wrote a more dramatic play, early one. He said, “I met a couple, Joseph and Maria, I think their name were, and they were immigrants. It was when I was on choir tour and they had escaped from their home country. I said, can you just tell me your story? Based on that, I wrote a short script called Freedom Flight.”

            One of his biggest milestones as a writer was staging an adaptation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which is one of his favorite novels. He then produced it his first year at Maranatha when he taught there.

            One of Miller’s biggest challenges has been the tyranny of the urgent, because he often had to write for things he needed.

“I needed a chapel script, I needed a Christmas, or four Christmas scripts for the classes I was teaching. We put together a comedy night and we needed eight original pieces, and I was writing out of necessity, although I loved doing it. The challenges was often the time and the energy. There was also the lack of appreciation. It wasn't regarded like sports or music, and you could only use it once.” He said.

When asked about his favorite scripts he mentioned that there were a lot of Christmas scripts he wrote that his sense of humor. He said, “You don't typically see them in your average ministry setting. They're just a little offbeat in their humor.”

Miller is currently working on a young adult novel that he started about 20 years ago and just recently started back up again. The book will be about a teenager in the middle of very dangerous, very realistic espionage type settings. According to Miller, the book is a long-term project and is what he will be working on for the foreseeable future.

One of Miller’s most impactful projects was a one-woman show about the life of Amy Carmichael called Self Undone. His wife performed that in about 40 different places. He said that is over time, in the different places it was presented, It just had a really profound impact on people and their understanding of missions.

Another special moment for Miller was when he staged The Body of Death and a student in college came up to him. “They were tearful, and they said, ‘next time you put my life on stage, give me a heads up.’ So that was kind of cool.”  He also wrote a script called What Do You Think of the Cross. The impact of the play caused one of the actors to accept Jesus as their savior.

Writing has had a big impact on Miller, “It's let me express myself. It's let me have a creative outlet. It let me influence performers and influence students who would probably never have performed in their life. It lets me put my humor in their mouths and let them enjoy it. It's allowed me to see ideas come to life, because my writing has almost always been for performance, so very rarely has it been just to be read.”

Finally, Miller was asked to give one piece of advice to aspiring playwrights. He said, “I think you have to do a self-evaluation and see if you actually are gifted in the area of playwriting. I'm not saying they shouldn't, but they probably should be realistic about why they're doing it and what's going to happen at the other end.”

He finished with by saying, “If you just want to do it for yourself, do it. If you're doing it with some aspirations that you're going to become a world-famous author and make millions, you probably need a reality check. So be realistic, write because you love it, and offer it to people that would enjoy it.”