Review of "What the Hell with the Hat" by Ed Ballou

Score: 91/100 (9.1 out of 10)

What the Hell with the Hat? by Ed Ballou is not a conventional book, yet it exudes an unmistakable passion for literature and storytelling.

Ballou is a playwright with nearly five decades of playwrighting experience—some ups and a lot of downs. But you know what they say? Mistakes, failures, and setbacks are the best teachers.

He wrote his first script in the 70s on a typewriter. Over the years and decades he progressed to word processors, computers, laptops, and eventually a Macbook Pro. Oh, and by the way, he lost a copy one of his longtime works because one of his laptops broke. Can you relate? We can.

Through this book, Ballou serves as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. This book is fascinating in so many ways, mostly because it offers a very rare glimpse into the thought process and everyday struggles of a passionate creator, one who often times seems down on his luck. Yet he never gives up! Decades upon decades of writing dozens of different scripts and plays has calloused him like a barbell and chalk would callous a weightlifter.

Ballou offers something that many creators don't: transparency and blunt honesty.
Nothing he describes comes across as smooth, natural, or easy.

We can't emphasize enough: this book is not a book. It's more like a collection of diary or journal entries. In fact, it sometimes feels more like that recording thing that psychiatrists do after therapy sessions. The author essentially shares notes to himself while he works through the realities of being a playwright: the rewrites, the stalled productions, the moments of hope, the practical headaches, the disappointments, the tiny victories, and the stubborn refusal to quit. That structure will not work for everyone. Some readers will absolutely wish for a cleaner narrative arc or a more conventionally shaped memoir. But for us, that rawness is part of the point. It lets the reader sit inside the grind instead of just hearing about it after the fact.

It's in the moment (or shortly thereafter). It's practically unfiltered, talking about unsavory things like being jealous about the success of others.

A lot of this book is stream of conscience, and it's super rough and sometimes hard to read.

That in-the-moment, unfiltered aspect is simultaneously one of the best and worst things about this book. It's incredibly unpolished, rough, and unrefined. It almost seems thrown together and unfinished. It's like someone just copy & pasted all their tweets, e-mails, notes into a Word document with no editing, formatting, or... anything... then interspersed them with excerpts from their scripts.

Some of the ellipses aren't even full ellipses. Some of the em dashes aren't even full em dashes. There are a lot of run-on sentences and fragments.

A part of us wants to ask: Why would you submit this to a contest?
Another part of us want to say: Thank you for submitting this to our contest.

See, the fact that this is so unpolished, rough, and unrefined gives it a really raw, real, genuine, and authentic feel. Ballou doesn't sugarcoat or hide anything.

And, really, what he's saying and describing is extremely relatable to authors and creators of every kind. We can personally relate to a lot of his struggles.

He talks about how he entered a contest hoping to at least finish in the top ten and be featured, yet neither thing happened. He found himself trying to read the winner's work and not being impressed, admitting that this might've been due to some petty jealousy. We can relate to that! Can't you?

One thing that stands out to us about Ballou is that he is constantly reading, researching, and trying to sharpen himself. He talks about Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and more. One of his plays features a bunch of literary legends like the Shelleys. He tries to "learn from the classics."

Sometimes, we feel like he distracts himself with all this research and probably overthinks things. Nonetheless, he seems to draw inspiration from these creators.

The self-awareness and self-deprecation are also major aspects of this book. He creates a joke review of someone who crawled out of the back window to escape seeing one of his plays. We got a kick out of that.


It's hard not to feel for him when he talks about his Indiegogo campaign failing or not being able to have the play he had planned at the venue he already rented due to circumstances with the actor(s).


He talks about his creative process, which honestly seems kinda scatterbrained and unfocused to us. Ballou is one of those people who has an overactive mind and imagination. He has no shortage of ideas, yet seems to struggle to put it all together. He also seems to struggle with taking constructive criticism. There's a moment in which he's told to create a one-line hook for each of his scripts, but instead of doing so, he spends about a paragraph talking about reasons to discredit this advice, including the term "logline" being underlined in red on spellcheck. He also seems to have a lot of trouble focusing on any one thing. He talks about how it's normal for him to work on two or three scripts at one time. We're not sure if that's... ideal.

He seems like a chronic pantser. He says something like how he just has a bunch of characters and that writing is like trying to open/crack an egg. In other words, it often seems like he has concepts of a plan but no actual plot. It sounds like he writes himself into corners, then writes himself out. It works for some. We get a hunch, though, that a combination of this and his overthinking may have adversely impacted the quality of his writing.

He does have some good ideas that come from all his ruminations. For example, while working on Lake Brimstone, Ballou decides that the stairs and thrones in the play should be made of metal because, in his own mythological logic, they were built by Hephaestus, the god of fire, blacksmithing, and metalworking. That is the kind of detail we appreciate in this diary. He is not just throwing weird ideas at the wall. He is trying to make the world of the play feel internally coherent, even down to the material of the set pieces. He also created this really cool concept for a play involving his now-deceased three-legged cat, Toby the Boby, and a bunch of other talking animals. Why not finish that? It sounds adorable and fun.

Check it out on Amazon!