What’s the Challenge?

Who: a bunch of playwrights

What: write a 90 minute play in 90 days.

When: August 25, 2025 to November 23, 2025. The full schedule can be seen on the Calendar page.

Where: the 90x90 Plays Discord community (invite link)

The 90x90 Playwriting Challenge is a free, fun, community-based writing challenge over the course of 90 days, from August 25, 2025 to November 23, 2025. There will be an overall theme shared in the first week and weekly prompts to inspire ideas or edits. Neither of them need to be followed to participate — they’re purely to help get the creative juices flowing!

There are two ways to participate:

  • Community via Discord

  • Solo via Email

Regardless of which option you choose, you will receive a weekly email with the week’s prompt and a reminder to submit in-progress work (if you want to).

Optionally, you can join the Discord and get the benefits of having a community of fellow playwrights all working towards the same goal. This can help with accountability and even be an opportunity to receive feedback on your in-progress play!

If at any time you’d like to change from one style to another, you’re more than welcome to join or leave the Discord server at your leisure.

There are weekly scheduled co-writing sessions and a feedback forum where you can solicit and give out constructive feedback from/to other participants. You can always join a voice channel and chat with others, or use it for body-doubling.

Starting November 23, 2025, you’ll have a week to submit a first draft of the (roughly) 90-minute play you wrote over the last 90 days. I will read as many as I can and provide light feedback if desired.

What’s expected of me?

Not much!

Participation: This is meant to be a helpful tool/community to inspire each other and give each other a stronger sense of accountability. That said, nothing is required other than being nice to everyone. You can choose to participate as much or as little as you like!

Feedback: We do ask that if you solicit feedback for in-progress work that you also provide feedback on at least one other participant’s work. Guidance on how to give feedback will be provided.

Formatting: No strict formatting requirements, but you are encouraged to use the Dramatist’s Guild standard formatting (pdf).

Play length: Using the Dramatist’s Guild standard format makes 1 page roughly 1 minute of runtime, depending on how much action, silence, etc. occurs within the individual play. To that end, between 85-105 pages is acceptable. Before considering your play complete, please do a timed read through as if you were acting it out to see how close to 90 minutes it is.

 FAQs

  • Feedback from the interest survey showed people wanted the challenge to start in September, but some folks explicitly said to avoid holidays. In order to avoid Thanksgiving (in the USA, sorry Canada!) I had to pull the start date up a bit.

  • No, in order to keep this challenge organized and to help prevent people from signing up just to submit existing plays, you must join on or before August 25, 2025.

  • Yes! Please use the contact form and include “DISCORD MOD” somewhere if you’re interested in moderating the Discord! I can’t promise anything in return at this time, but it’ll be a nice favor to me, and I’m sure we’ll find some kind of benefit down the road like including one of your short plays in the staged reading program.

  • There will be two ways to submit in progress work:

    • A form which will upload the document to Google Drive. All drafts submitted this way will be deleted at the end of the challenge.

    • Sharing in Discord. These get kept until you delete them. We will not be purging this history, but we will lock access to only those who signed up for the challenge.

  • No. Since this is a writing challenge, you should be doing the writing.

    What if someone uses AI and doesn’t tell anyone?

    I understand that there’s no real way to know. The only thing we can do is give clear rules and hope the honor system holds up.

  • I strongly believe in full transparency around the use of AI.

    Squarespace (what I used to build and host this website) does have some AI tools/use by default. It suggested certain layouts, and I can only assume most of the default images are AI. I’ve tried to replace things where I can, and I’m still working on that as I flesh out this website. (Getting stock images is on my list of to-dos!)

    None of the text I wrote on the website is generated by AI. By that I mean I did not ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other agent to generate text, images, or even code for this website. I wrote it all myself (insert proud smile image here)! Whether or not that constitutes “intelligent” or “artificial” I’ll let you decide.

    I did use Gemini to ask about what a good Discord server structure would look like. It provided some suggested channels and how they could be organized. I found this helpful and used it as a starting point for organizing the Discord server.

    If you are unhappy about any of this and that prevents you from wanting to join the challenge, I completely understand and respect your decision. If you’d like, you can use this feedback form to let me know your opinions on this.

  • Personal information collected will only be used for sending information regarding in-progress or upcoming challenges. If your play is given feedback or selected to have a staged reading, we will contact you via email or Discord direct message.

    Anything submitted directly to Discord will be publicly available to anyone else in the Discord community. Do not share any sensitive information.

  • My name is Sean Gref. I’m a San Diego based playwright and theatre enthusiast.

    You can read some of my plays on my NPX page, or find my LinkedIn to learn about my non-theatre career.

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