The Writers Chair - Sair Kaufman

What happens when you combine the high-stakes adventure of Dungeons & Dragons with the emotional power of Broadway? You get The Reality Shaper, a groundbreaking musical podcast. In this episode of In the Writer’s Chair, host Lana McAra sits down with New York City-based musical theater writer and performer Sair Kaufman to discuss the "different beast" of writing for the ear rather than the stage. 

Sair reveals the six-year journey of transforming a novel into an 11-episode audio drama, featuring over 40 original songs. Whether you're a TTRPG fan, a theater nerd, or a writer looking to pivot between mediums, Sair’s insights on collaboration, "perfect rhymes," and creative marketing are pure gold. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The Musical Pivot: How Sair transitioned from theater performance to writing music, lyrics, and "books" for musicals. 
• Podcast vs. Stage: The unique challenges of creating an episodic arc where the protagonist must change every 30–50 minutes. 
• The "Musical Truth" Rule: Why characters in musicals are trusted implicitly and why it’s harder to write a "lying" character in song than in a play. 
• Comprehension & Rhyme: Why theater writers stick to "perfect rhymes" to ensure the audience understands the story on the first listen. 
• Roll for Promo: Sair’s viral TikTok marketing strategy using D&D dice to decide daily tasks—including a high-stakes roll for a tattoo! 

About Our Guest:

Sair Kaufman is an award-winning musical theater writer and the creator of The Reality Shaper. Based in New York City, Sair is an alum of the prestigious BMI Musical Theater Writers Workshop and the founder of Theater Writers Digest. 

Connect with Sair Kaufman:

• Website: therealityshaper.com — Get tickets for live NYC/Manhattan concert events on June 8th and August 24th! 
• Theater Writers Digest: theaterwritersdigest.com — A monthly resource for grants, residencies, and mentorship opportunities. 
• Social Media: Follow @SairKaufman on Instagram and TikTok. 

About the Show: In the Writer's Chair features candid conversations about the writing life, hosted by novelist Lana McAra and brought to you by Vandella Publishing. 

✨ Don't forget to LIKE, COMMENT, and SUBSCRIBE for more deep dives into the writing craft! ✨

#InTheWritersChair #MusicalTheater #DND #Podcast #AudioDrama #WritingCommunity #IndieAuthor #Playwriting

Transcript

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In the Writer's Chair. Candid conversations about the writing life with Lana McCara and Vandela Publishing. Welcome to In the Writer's Chair, where we pull up a chair to talk about writing craft, the writing life, and what's possible for writers right now. I'm your host, Lana McCara, and today I am so delighted to welcome Sarah Kaufman. Sarah is an award-winning musical theater writer and performer based in New York City and the creator behind The Reality Shaper, a musical podcast. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm delighted to talk to you. I was so intrigued when I found out that you are a musical theater writer. Have you not had a theater writer on here before? I think we might have had a playwright, but not musical theater. That's a little different. Yeah, it's a different beast. Yeah, yeah. So how did you get started doing this? Like musical theater writing? Yeah. I went to theater school for performance. And one of my professors, Barbara and Selmy, essentially took me under her wing and said, I'm gonna mentor you on how to write a musical because it was something I'd expressed interest in. And then I got into the BMI Musical Theater Writers Workshop over at World Trade 7. And that community has really just really just helped me to grow these skills and blossom and also make the best friends I've ever met in my whole life. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, my son does musical theater. He's an actor. Yeah. Yeah. So do you write the music as well as the words? Yeah, I am a music and lyrics and book person. So I do it all. Wow, I'm so impressed. Those are extensive pages and pages. Wow. Yeah. My collaborators on this project, though, have a bit of a music team helping build out the musical arrangements and create. I just had a meeting earlier today with Noah Weisbart and Amon Taylor, and they are working on some of the arrangements for our first few episodes, just solidifying those. And they are just incredible when it comes to the arrangements and orchestration and such. Yes. And what about the choreography? For this particular project, it's a podcast. So we don't have to worry so much about that. Oh, so it's on a podcast. So there's music and like a skit on a podcast. Hmm? Explain that to me. Okay, absolutely. How does it work? Absolutely. So the Reality Shaper is a Dungeons and Dragons inspired fantasy musical podcast. So it is a musical in audio drama form. There's 11 half-hour episodes, each of which include between three and seven original musical theater songs. And uh altogether it's about six and a half hours of Broadway style musical theater writing. That is delivered via podcasts. Oh. I love the creativity of all that. Thank you. Wow. So how do you do the music? Is it a uh you create a track that you play? Usually it goes a little something like I will come up with a set of lyrics, usually along with a melody, and then sit down at my keyboard and plunk out some chords. And then I'll send here are the chords, here's the music, off to a musical collaborator who's much more pro prolific when it comes to the arrangements, and they will turn it into something that can actually be called a song. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So it is DD related. My my other son is a DD master. Ooh, a dungeon master? Dungeon Master. Yeah. That's fabulous. Yeah. DM'd before, but I prefer to play. He loves to sit at the he loves. We we've done it two ways. We did it in real life where we actually had dice and maps on the table. And then he also does it online, but he loves to sit at the head of the table and watch everybody squirm. That is the best part of being a DM. No, he would love this project for sure. It's got all of the classic, it's got dungeons, it got, it's got dragons, it has the chaos, the lawful characters butting against the so I think any DD fan would really be into this project for sure. Yes, absolutely. I know he would be enthralled by it all. Is this the same son who's an actor? Because if so, I fear you gotta put us in touch. Oh no, two separate, two separate sons. Uh yeah, yeah. You just have a family full of creatives. Oh, yes. I'm a novelist. They grew up with the creativity in the house, and I would pull the kids around the table and we'd brainstorm my next novel. Wow. Oh, it was so much fun. We would sit there and I would have a list of questions like the main character needs a job. So let's brainstorm what kind of job he would have. We have this conflict. What kind of a job would he have? And I would pass out all these three by five cards. And so all the kids would write three or four ideas on their three by five cards, and then we go around the table and everybody read their one and throw it in the middle. And based on the reaction of the group, I would know which ones were good ideas and which ones. Which one's first, I was using my kids as a focus group. Yeah. That spirit of collaboration is so necessary when it comes to musical theater writing because it's like this, you were talking about choreography earlier. It's like this unchoreographed dance that as a lyricist or as a book writer or as a composer, you have to negotiate together and figure out how the pieces all fit together and how to make it uh the thing. And what's great, and what I think our team has in spades is when everyone is trying to make it the best that it can possibly be. Because then when you're butting heads, it's for a good cause, right? And no matter what direction you go in, it's all like to help just like you guys with the with the cue cards, it's all in the interest of making the best possible story. Yes, yes, exactly. And some of them got the writing bug, and others got other things. But my actor son's long-term girlfriend is a choreographer. Oh. So whenever I go to see them, we're having this conversation. I'm directing this time instead of acting, and she's doing the choreography on some show coming up, and it's just fun. It's just so fun to be in theater's theater's a great time. Yeah, yeah. So, what's your writing process like? Do you sit down and outline or do you just flow? Yeah, the process for this project was extremely unique. I think I mentioned it started off as a novel. And so from there, it was about taking something that was built for prose and transforming it into something that would work episodically. The biggest challenge that the team and I ran into with that translation was really making sure that every episode had its own contained arc and that the protagonist was changing from the beginning of the episode to the end of the episode. Because when you're writing a book, it's one hero's journey, and you just gotta make sure by the end of it he's gotten somewhere. But for an episodic thing, if you want each one to be satisfying, you have to do that for every episode in addition to the larger one. Yes, I can see how challenging that would be. So how long is the how long is the podcast each episode? How long is it? Each episode is between 30 and 45, 50 minutes. So totaling, we're estimating it's around six and a half hours total. Okay, okay. So are you going with the same setup as for the movies, one page per minute, or you know that I have found that is when it comes to music and lyrics, that is highly dependent. Because you could have a song that the lyrics take up half a page, but because the music is so slow or drawn out, that's gonna take two minutes easily. So what we do is a combination, we will estimate about how long each song is going to be, and then do the one minute per dialogue rule. Okay, okay, I see. Yeah, that's a really cool method because it boggles my mind writing music as well as dialogue. I mean, that because I'm such a I'm a writer, I'm not a musician, and I just can't even bring my head to think about Yeah. What we say in theater is that you start to sing when the emotions are too big to talk about, and then you start to dance when the emotions are too big to sing about. Obviously, with the podcast, we're focused more on the first part of that. Yeah, I think finding those escalations and understanding the character well enough to understand when the song is coming in. And there are some of these songs. We've been working on this project for six years. So there are some of these songs that have moved around a bit. They started in one episode and now they've landed three episodes later, and the lyric has been completely rewritten and the bridge is different. And but yeah, getting to know the story. Yeah, yeah. I when I my son was directing Lend Me a Tenor back a few years ago. What a great story. Play. And I was so impressed the way a play has all these layers, and you have this through line is passing over this way, and you're coming out with this other one, and the subtext and all of that. Do you go into all that as one playwriting is uh I don't know that I could ever do it. Playwriting is such such a skill, but there are definitely differences, not just in the fact that musical theater has songs, but also in a structural sense. I think when you see a character or hear a character singing, especially if they're singing from the heart, because you sing when it's too big to talk about, you trust that character implicitly. And that makes certain things a lot harder to pull off in a musical the same way they would be in a play. Like I love, love John Proctor is the villain. Have you seen that one? A wonderful play, but there is a secret in that play, and that not just that play, All My Sons has a secret. A lot of plays have secrets that become revealed. And when they become revealed, you're like, oh, of course, this makes so much of this play make sense. But with a musical, it's harder to do secrets, it's harder to do lies because people feel betrayed. This is something that I learned at BMI. When you hear a character sing, you trust what they say. So if you find out later that they were lying to you, it's like, why was this a musical? Yeah. Wow. I hadn't really thought about that. That people who sing like that, they can't be lying because then you'd turn around and be tr you would hate them for it. Right. Yeah. There are certain ways around it. I've seen some musicals pull off secrets, okay, but it's harder. It's a completely different art form. It's similar to, are you familiar with the term near rhyme versus perfect rhyme? Yes. Or slant rhyme. Yeah. So in pop music, rock music, slant rhymes are perfectly fine. No one's gonna bat an eye if you rhyme eye with side even. But with musical theater, the there is this concept, this expectation that you're writing with perfect rhymes every time. And I've thought a lot about this. Because when I started out writing, I was writing slant rhymes. Everyone was writing slant rhymes. And my mentor was like, no, you gotta, if you're gonna write theater, you have to write perfect rhymes. And I was like, I don't like, but music is evolving. Lynn Manuel Miranda doesn't write perfect rhymes. Why should I be writing perfect rhymes? And what I landed on was it's because of comprehension. When you're listening to a pop song or a rock song, especially a good one, the expectation is that you're putting that on a playlist. You're gonna listen to it over and over again. When you're writing for the theater, a lot of times people are only going to hear that once when they are sitting in the theater watching your song on stage. So you have to make sure that the audience gets most, if not all, of your lyrics on the first listen. And that is much easier to do when you are writing perfect rhymes versus when you are writing slant rhymes. Yes. Yes. The meaning has to be crystal clear in the music and in the words. Yeah, I love uh Hamilton. I mean that just blew me away. I wish I could turn my camera around. I would show you my signed Hamilton poster. My gosh! Wow, that is so amazing. Being in New York City has got to have so many perks to it. Oh, yes. Yeah. Hey, if anyone listen, are you located in New York? No, I'm in Florida. Oh, hey, if you find yourself up here, slash if anyone listening is in the New York area, my team has got two concert events coming up. Yeah, so on June 8th in Williamsburg, and on August 24th in Manhattan, we are having two live concert reality shaper events. So if anyone wants to come, go to the reality shaper.com. You can get tickets now. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And our listeners are all over the place. Yeah. Excellent. So when you're doing the podcast, do you have a whole team of people? Oh, yes. Wow. Yeah, I definitely didn't fully understand what I was signing up for when I signed on to essentially be the executive producer of this project. It has been a wild trip learning how to manage a whole team. Yes, and they're creatives, which is it's the equivalent of managing bouncing balls all over. I know. I definitely know. Yeah. Yeah. So you have live shows that you're doing as well as the podcast. Yep. Yeah. The podcast starts launching. First two episodes drop on June 9th, and then we're going to be releasing weekly episodes until mid-August, which is when the final episode will drop. And then we have the two live events in June and August, one of them to celebrate the launch, and the other to celebrate like a closing night concert situation. Okay, so are you performing like excerpts in both of those? Oh, we're gonna be doing songs from the project. Okay. Website. I know it's the reality shaper. Yeah. What's the website? It is thereality shaper.com. Okay. Yeah, definitely go over there if you're listening. The realityyshaper.com. I'm definitely gonna reach out to my two sons too. As far as that goes. We'll do my best to get this put up on our podcast before that June 9th date so we can get more people to come in. It's actually like just between you and me in public. Um you I'm gonna jump you to the you know uh ahead because we're booked out to like August 3. Oh no, I want to support you in any way on classic. Thank you so much. Sure. My pleasure. I'm just so happy that I stumbled onto you. This this space. I think some things are just guided. They're guided moments. Yeah, yeah. So once this is over, once August hits. What's coming next for you? That is a very good question. We're going to be I have everything all planned out in my little spreadsheet. I love a spreadsheet. We're gonna be launching a Kickstarter to support season two. That happens right around mid-July. So I think a lot of it is dependent on how successful that Kickstarter campaign ends up being. I think if we have the excitement, if we have the drive to keep going and we have the public interest, we will probably start production on the next season. But regardless, I will definitely continue writing. I have a few other projects in the pipeline. Oh, yes. And you have some novels, is that right? Oh, yes, yeah. Yeah, wow. You are so busy and so creative. So tell us about your novels. The reality shaper. That is the novel that's going to be coming out at some point. I actually, between you and me, I have you and me in the public. Yeah. I have this TikTok series going on called Roll for Promo, where I let the dice decide how I'm promoting the musical podcast. Okay. And I happen to know that under one of these numbers is released the novelization. So when I roll, when the dice decides it's time to publish, this book will be published. I see. Oh my gosh. How fun is that? Are you using DD Dice for that? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. I myself and my friends, we got together, we came up with this list of 20 activities that one could potentially do to market this podcast. And I ordered them from high effort, low return at the low numbers to low effort, highly effective at the bottom. Okay. Oh no. Even though I really don't like needles. You gotta take one for the team. I know. That is really insane. Oh, wow. So great. So everything is called the Reality Shaper. Yes. Do you have a mailing list? The Reality Shaper does have a mailing list with you which you can join at the on the website. If anyone listening happens to be a theater writer, uh playwright or a musical theater writer, I actually do run a newsletter for theater writers called Theater Writers Digest. And you can go to theaterwritersdigest.com. And that is basically I distribute, I do a bunch of research on upcoming opportunities. So funding opportunities, grants, residencies, mentorship, production, open call, and such. And so I will distribute monthly highlights of things that should be on your radar to apply for. So that's the closest thing I personally have to a mailing list. That is so helpful. You're such a resource for people to find out. I try to be. I try to be. Yeah, yeah. So go over there to that mailing list and sign up for that. If you're in that world, that's too good to pass up. I think at some point in the future, you could actually charge for that. So the highlights I distribute are free for anyone because I really want to make sure everyone has equal footing in terms of what they know about. But I also have a real spreadsheet of between 60 and 80 upcoming opportunities, which I update monthly. And if you want my crazy spreadsheet of opportunities, then you can sign up for I think it's I think it's like $5 a month. And 100% of that money goes towards my production company and goes towards producing new work. So hopefully, my feeling is that people will think it's a win-win because you get my crazy spreadsheet of opportunities. Like I said, I love a spreadsheet. And in exchange, you're helping to support an indie theater company. Absolutely. What a great idea. Yeah. Yeah, this is absolutely amazing. I'm so glad our paths have crossed today. Same year. Yeah. How can I guess we've already gone through this because I always ask people, do you want to give out your email address or your Instagram? Sure, I am at Sarah Kaufman, S-A-I-R-K-A-U-F-M-A-N on Instagram and on TikTok. There's a contact page on my website, which is just SarahKaufman.com. You can join the Reality Shaper mailing list at thereality shaper.com. On that site, you can also get tickets to our upcoming live shows. You can pre-save our Kickstarter. And yeah, just stay up to date on all of the developments there. Wonderful. Wonderful. Sarah, I wish you all the best in your enjoyment. Thank you so much for having me. This was a joy. Oh, such a joy to me too. And thank you for being with us today. Thanks for pulling up a cheer. Of course.