After creating a podcast both scripted and non scripted, I have decided to join vocal and continue expressing my opinions of theater, film, TV and other sorts. I find this is WAY easier than recording an audio podcast. I will continue to do the podcast but this will also be fun as well and I hope that you continue with me!!!
About the Creator
Matthew Garlin
Matthew Garlin is a playwright, producer, lighting designer, director, actor for Theatre, Film, and TV. He is also an author with many of his books available on Amazon Kindle and paperback.
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The Beginnings of Writing
The other thingthat inspired me was when I was a kid, my father used to show me old movies and he showed me the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movie Boys Town where I saw simple people putting on a show for themselves and I realized that it was something that I really wanted to do. I could imagine seeing my name in the credits as a writer of musicals and plays. But more than that, I could imagine getting a bunch of friends together and put on a show. That’s what I enjoyed the best. I enjoyed getting my friends together and even if there wasn’t an audience, we were the audience and we would make each other laugh. We could hang out for hours and just make jokes and almost entertain each other, theater is very much the same except higher stakes and more people can see it. So I began to ask myself: How do you write a show? My mom took me to see Broadway shows constantly! From when I was 10 until maybe when I was 16, my mother would take me on 3 vacation trips to New York City to see Broadway shows: in February, July, and December and the primary reason was to see Broadway shows. We would take a bus from Peabody and travel in one day to New York, usually stay in New Jersey and, yes do the sightseeing stuff but also see musicals and shows. I saw a ton of shows with some very good performers like Nathan Lane, Bebe Newuirth, and Michael Crawford. I was enjoying seeing these shows like Oklahoma, Urinetown, and Annie Get Your Gun, but I also had an alternative reason: I wanted to learn more about shows. I really wanted to learn how to write a show. I also used to visit the play bookstores and buy tons of books about playwriting and shows but also plays and musical librettos and I would read through them constantly to try to learn how to write my own show. I never bought a How to book, I always bought the librettos of the musicals and just read them from cover to cover multiple times and just try to learn how to write from that. Starting at 12-year-old, I began to try to write my own show to disastrous results. I began to learn how to write songs and my first writing partner was a kid called Marc Krupsky. Marc was a composer and a lyricist of his own, but we wrote together as Marc the composer and Matt the lyricist. I learned how to play keyboards, but I never took a music theory class, so I never really knew how to write music down, but Marc knew how to so that’s why I trusted him to take care of that. We found we loved early rock bands like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin. So, we decided to try to write a show together and we called it The 60’s Story. It was going to be about the Vietnam War and it was like Miss Saigon mixed with Hair. We wrote a few of the songs and I wrote the book, but it got bogged down by my stupid lyrics. I read it now and it makes me embarrassed but that’s what happens with most people’s early work. I wasn’t ready yet. Marc and I tried to write a few more musicals but life took us in different paths so I began writing by myself but since I couldn’t really write music, I decided to learn how to write plays. The first play I wrote was called Wouldn’t Have Missed it for the World and it was terrible. Then I wrote a play called Stupidity Run Amuck which again was me trying to be Neil Simon and I came off like a bigger schmuck, but I was still learning. I also fell in love with Kaufman and Hart, and I tried to write plays that took place in only one place, but I hadn’t discovered dialogue and how dialogue should sound. I would just write scenes that wouldn’t go anywhere, and may I remind you, reader, that I was 12 and 13 so I wrote like a 12 or 13 year old with your mom jokes and random stupid juvenile jokes. Then I discovered Stephen Sondheim...
By Matthew Garlin2 years ago in Writers
Unofficial Challenge: Black History Celebration
Forward: February 28th, 10:53 PM, EST... The final hour of Black History Month, 2026. Hello fellow writers. I've had this challenge waiting in my drafts for most of the month. But I held off on publishing it, until now.
By Sam Spinelli7 days ago in Writers
Writing plans coming up
This is a quick drabble of my upcoming writing articles. First coming attractions in my opinion are a lot of book blurbs of old and new books that I have read, but not complete reviews just to create possible interest. Another idea I had was to offer in this day and age of keyboarding some typing lessons from an old typing textbook I had in high school. Also, I am planning on writing more of my Alphabet stories, as well as more of my art colorings for I just bought a new Bible coloring book. I hope you share thoughts.
By Mark Grahamabout 5 hours ago in Writers
A More Human Vocal
When we launched Vocal nearly a decade ago, the world was a very different place. LLMs did not exist, and stories were created one at a time by people sitting down to write, revise, and share something personal. Many of our assumptions about publishing, trust, and participation were built for a world where effort and output were inseparable.
By Justin @ Vocal2 days ago in Resources
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