Part Three
“The most important ingredients for a play: life, death, food, sex, and money — but not necessarily in that order.”
Noel Coward
Begin by Just Writing
“to know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing” Pablo Picasso
“You never know what you’re really doing. Like a spider, you are in the middle of your own web.” —James Salter http://bit.ly/1Dj1NED
L’écrivain est en situation dans son époque: chaque parole a des retentissements. Chaque silence aussi. Je tiens Flaubert et Goncourt pour responsables de la répression qui suivit la Commune parce qu’ils n’ont pas écrit une ligne pour l’empêcher. Ce n’était, pas leur affaire, dira-t-on. Mais le procès de Calas, était-ce l’affaire de Voltaire? La condamnation de Dreyfus, était-ce l’affaire de Zola?
The writer is situated in his time. Every word has consequences. Every silence, too. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression which followed the Commune because they did not write one line to prevent it. One might say that it was not their business. But was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Dreyfus’ condemnation Zola’s?
Jean Paul Sartre, translation into English appeared in the 1982 book “The French Left: A History & Overview” by Arthur Hirsh
Theatre isn’t real. It’s a refraction of reality
The play does not exist in the theater as a written text; it has been absorbed in the process of production. Drama is ‘translated’ or transformed into the person of the actor — “the body of the art of the theater”, as Stark Young put it.
Harold Clurman, On Directing
“Acting is not truth.… One of the key things GBS took from Ibsen is the way in which people on stage are not just actors imitating people. They are actors playing people who act.”
Fintan O’Toole, Judging Shaw
“Asked recently by a student what he expected from an actor, he had replied (as he always did), ‘clarity of utterance,’ and been met with a nervous laugh of reproach. But, he said, it ‘really is the first thing I ask for.’”
Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard biography
“Theatre is not about the writing, it’s not about the directing. It is about that, but in the end it’s really about the actors and the audience and most audiences – aside from the cognoscenti who sit there being experts – come to watch a bit of acting. I’ve had some unsophisticated audiences in my time and I hear them asking the actors whether they made it up? They go, ‘no, it’s all written down.’ It’s a mystery and why should you solve it . Stephen Joseph always taught me that you serve that wonderful moment between actor and audience. And that is the precious moment that live theatre has that no other media has quite to that extent and that is why I stick to theatre.”
Alan Ayckbourn
“My sort of play would be impossible unless I endowed my characters with powers of self-consciousness and self-expression which they would not possess in real life. You would not have Esop’s fables unless the animals talked.”
GBS
To me the play is only the means, the end being the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician. Anything that makes this expression more vivid, whether it be versification, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial delivery of the lines, is so much to the good for me, even though it may destroy all the verisimilitude of the scene.
GBS
“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tightrope. When the Verities become acrobats we could judge them.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
[And with the above comment it is useful to recall the OED definition of a paradox: “An apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one, which investigation, analysis, or explanation may nevertheless prove to be well-founded or true.” Emphasis added by T.J. Elliott Your play is that investigation.]
“’… The play’s atmosphere by which I mean the feeling of being encapsulated in the situation… The play works because no one is telling the audience precisely what to make of it… I feel it would be fatal to break down the ambiguities and give them to the audience on a platter to make it easy for them… The next thing which might need saying is that the play [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern] is above all funny. I mean it was written to be funny… [And] the concrete limits of the stage are very much a part of the play structure and discipline; the stage is as it were a cinema screen beyond whose borders a character is not allowed to trespass.”
Tom Stoppard quoted by Hermione Lee in her biography of him from 1972
One is tempted to imagine a play — to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle — from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.
Harley Granville-Barker:
Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating. … What is escalation, anyway? How does a story produce the illusion of escalation? … One answer: refuse to repeat beats. Once a story has moved forward, through some fundamental change in the character’s condition, we don’t get to enact that change again. And we don’t get to stay there elaborating on that state.
George Saunders
In a good story, the writer makes energy in a beat, then transfers this energy cleanly to the next one (the energy is “conserved”). She does this by being aware of the nature of the energy she’s made. In a bad story (or an early draft), the writer doesn’t fully understand the nature of the energy she’s made, and ignores or misuses it, and it dissipates.
The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.
George Saunders
Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality. For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.
This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.
[…]
Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.
George Saunders
“There’s no great art in confusing the reader.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Clarity matters
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
—E.F. Schumacher
“It was [my teacher John Gardner’s] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author’s insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn’t care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. A writer’s values and craft. This is what the man taught and what he stood for, and this is what I’ve kept by me in the years since that brief but all-important time.”
Raymond Carver,
https://d.docs.live.net/bdc1f311ae670521/Documents/current%20writing/playwriting-notes-to-read-over-and-over.docx
“He (Shaw) learned the order of the two important questions: first, what do I want to say?; Then — and only then — how should I say it? The form of his writing always followed its function. To the aspirant critic Reginald Golding Bright, he wrote, ‘Always find out rigidly and exactly what you mean, and never strike his attitude, whether national or moral or critical or anything else… Get your facts right first: that is the foundation of all style, because style is the expression of yourself; you cannot express yourself genuinely except on the basis of precise reality.’”
Fintan O’Toole on George Bernard Shaw in Judging Shaw
Only Einstein could explain why it’s clarity which shaves time, not speed.
Author unknown
“Another piece of advice: when you read proof, cross out as many modifiers of nouns and verbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time figuring out what deserves his attention, and it tires him out. If I write, ‘A man sat down on the grass,’ it is understandable because it is clear and doesn’t require a second reading. But it would be hard to follow and brain-taxing if I wrote, ‘A tall, narrow-chested, red-bearded man of medium height sat down noiselessly, looking around timidly and in fright, on a patch of green grass that had been trampled by pedestrians.’ The brain can’t grasp all of this at once, and the art of fiction ought to be immediately, instantaneously graspable.”
Chekhov in a letter to Gorky
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