Read This When Writing Plays

Quotes and Thoughts selected by T.J. Elliott since 2018

Need a stage

“ If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.” David Mamet

“Art is Craft, Not Inspiration”

Stephen Sondheim to James Lipton

But inspiration doesn’t hurt, does it? Especially from diverse sources

On Writing in General

Only the latter is required of the artist. Not a single problem is resolved in Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin, and yet the novels satisfy you completely because all the problems they raise are formulated correctly. It is the duty of the law courts to correctly formulate problems, but it is up to the members of the jury to solve them, each to his own taste.
Anton Chekhov

On writing poetry, Jane Kenyon said, “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
Joan Didion (I wish I could find the piece that Didion wrote many decades ago about all the ways we keep ourselves from writing such as sharpening pencils over and over again. It nailed me.)

“In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.”
WH Auden, Writing

“If poetry is your goal, you’ve got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it’s you — nobody else — who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There’s the artist’s responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth.”
From a lecture at Harvard by e.e. cummings

“Somebody […] asked me: ‘What do you do? How do you write, create?’ You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
Charles Bukowski

“Anyone who says that the artist’s sphere leaves no room for questions, but deals exclusively with answers, has never done any writing or done anything with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses, and arranges; every one of these operations presupposes a question at its outset. If he has not asked himself a question at the start, he has nothing to guess and nothing to select…”
Anton Chekhov

The young writer, Faulkner said, “must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart—the authorities and truths without which any story is ephemeral and doomed.”
William Faulkner

“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.”
Jean Cocteau

“We must teach ourselves to walk on air against our better judgment.”
Seamus Heaney

“The simplest thing is the most incredible thing, and most incredible thing is the most remarkable thing, which requires examination. One must see the heart in a suspended moment, as it beats, as though it’s transparent; one must see a living heart, a suffering heart, and then tell about it.”
Viktor Shklovsky

Validation is for parking tickets

“So, you see, I had a certain independence of judgment, which is important for all artistic pursuits. I didn’t depend on Seventeen magazine to give me validation. You can’t depend on anything external for that. In fact, I’m not sure what validation even means. If you are looking for validation (a stamp of approval?), you may not last long. Validation is for parking tickets: yes, I parked there.”
Lorrie Moore

Why write plays

“If you can provide a keyhole into some world that nobody has ever seen, that’s the play that will get you the notice you finally deserve.”
Marsha Norman

Is there a purpose to what we are doing here beyond doing it?

One of best theater books I have ever encountered. I learned so much.

“Stephen told me that he despaired after five years of running the Royal Court because he came to realize that few new writers feel the obligation to work out who they are in the equation. Somebody writes a play saying life is awful in Camberwell. You read it and you say ‘yes? And? So?’ — and there is no answer. If you produce only this kind of play, you are reduced to the worst kind of tokenism, doing plays by gays and Blacks and women and the poor, on the grounds that ‘they ought to be heard’. But what does this mean if the plays themselves have no analysis?”
David Hare, Acting Up
[Don’t be afraid to be judgmental; that’s part of working out who you are.]

“I made a proper entrance to begin the show. By doing it, I had at once pulled the house together. I obeyed Patsy’s instruction, which was to take a huge breath, in and out before I began. ‘If they sense that you are not too nervous to breathe, then you will calm their own nerves, “she told me. “You will feel your control spread through the house on the out breath.’”
David Hare, Acting Up

“There is no doubt that my entrance will be crucial. How I come on. What effect I have by coming on. And how I keep the audience wanting to know what comes next. I learned two useful things today. First, not to rush straight from the end of one line onto the next, but to allow the end of the first line to do its work before I proceed. Second, not to look away from a particular member of the audience before the end of the line, since this creates the impression that I don’t trust it, or I am ashamed of it.”
David Hare, Acting Up

“Nothing is more boring on stage than to see and hear characters who know the same things.… Audiences side instinctively with anyone who shares their own ignorance.”
David Hare, Acting Up

From Acting Up by David Hare

“The slower people speak the harder they are to understand. Dialogue is rhythm and there is some scientific rhythm which I believe corresponds to the natural pace of activity in our brains.”

[Quoting Patsy Rodenburg] “All my teaching is to free the actor from their own voice in order to express the writer’s. And so it’s essential that you feel them as two different things.”

“Stephen then insisted on working on the Grossman passage, which had gone dead on us. I pointed out then in its shortened version it was no longer a scene. The dialectic had gone, so that instead of it being an argument between me and another character, it had been reduced simply to a passage conveying information. It was so quick now that there was no tension. As a result, it seemed tedious, although it was much shorter.”

“All my life I have told actors that my work is like a musical score. You must learn it, every single note of it, before you can earn the right to jazz it. If you try to jazz it before you’ve mastered it, you will make a fool of yourself. I have always used a phrase which has a nasty German ring to it. Beyond Discipline, Freedom.”
David Hare

“Frankly, I also don’t want to have to listen to everybody’s views since, based on an ignorance of the overall text, they are only going to be prejudices anyway. Of which, with this subject, there are too many already.”
David Hare, Acting Up

Not to preach outright, but…

“Preaching is a hazard when writing plays. One isn’t supposed to preach and gets told off if one does. Poets are allowed to, but not playwrights, who if they have naked opinions, do better to clothe them in the decent ambiguities of their characters or conceal them in the sometimes all too thin thicket of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience.”
Alan Bennett

Write plays because you like it

“I write plays because I like it, because I cannot remember any period in my life when I could help inventing people and scenes. I am not a storyteller; things occurred to me and scenes, with action and dialogue — as moments, developing themselves out of their own vitality.”
GBS

Frank O’Connor called writing “One Man’s Way.” “Short story writing is my job,” O’Connor said in 1959, “and, as all of us who write stories will know, there is only one way to do a job and that is the way you do it yourself.”

Playwright suggests building something

Photo by JESHOOTS.com on Pexels.com

Walter Benjamin quote: “Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

Richard Schechner: “The playwright as wright — the play being wrought from the interrelationships among all the artists.”

“Tolstoy spoke of “labyrinths of linkages” to show the interconnections and at the same time contradictions of theme, plot, and movement both within an individual work for literature as a whole.” Viktor Shklovsky

A great writer needs difficulties. He needs them because in their various forms they are the means through which he is trying to say something that he can say only in one way. By linking ideas to situations. [after Viktor Shklovsky]

Viktor Shklovsky wrote,“Perception, as Shklovsky argued, is an end in itself and literature is successful not by the presence of a certain kind of content or images, but by its ability to make the reader look with an exceptionally high level of awareness — of himself and of the world.” The first requirement of what is being built is that it makes the audience look and then it makes the audience listen.

And then the writer must continue the construction with the unexpected. “A work has to be composed so that it turns into something unexpected and innovative. Sometimes dénouements conflict with the main structure of the text. Then readers will say, or at least assume, that the dénouement is in the work itself, and maybe in its ending.” Viktor Shklovsky

As Viktor Shklovsky noted, “Complex perception then is connected with scrutinizing, squinting, bulging one’s eyes and almost touching an object with them.” In order to get someone to scrutinize in that way, what is happening before them must be simultaneously understandable and unexpected. One way in which that is done is to eliminate the chance and turn coincidence into inevitability.

“Tolstoy knew very well the obstacle that all writers find themselves confronted with — one cannot keep introducing new characters.” Viktor Shklovsky

“Chekhov said that works usually ended with a person’s departure, or death. Or marriage. Tolstoy demonstrated that marriage could serve as an opening to work, the beginning of its construction, rather than its end.” Viktor Shklovsky

“Art in its endless search for perfection knows only one thing — not how to end, but how to see. What is a happy ending? Chekhov wrote that the writer who come up with a new ending for plays, besides a death or departure, would be the greatest artist.” Viktor Shklovsky

“The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera…The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.”
Walter Benjamin, quoted by Fintan O’Toole who continued with the thought thusly: “Live performers, in other words, make their own decisions, here and now, in this moment. In a filmed performance, the performer loses that power. It belongs to others – the director, the editor.

But this also applies to us as members of the audience. At a live event, we choose where we look and how we listen. In a virtual event, other people are – sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes subtly – making those choices for us.

This is what we miss about live performance: the autonomy and integrity of the performer, our freedom to shape our own responses, the sense of our shared presence in space and time.

This is about public and private. The pandemic has privatised cultural experience – we have to make it public again.”

A drama really only exists when it is played, and ultimately music must resound
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Stoppard

Stoppard at Venice Film Festival in 1990

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard

Stoppard “proposes that the playwrights ‘technique’ is the control, and ordering, of the information that flows from the play to the audience — and gave an inimitable example: ‘there’s a man on the stage and a woman on the stage. The man says “would you care for a drink?” The woman says, “yes, I think I might. I’ll have a whiskey and soda.” This mildly uninteresting exchange becomes more interesting, more dramatic, depending on the information we have it’s more interesting if she’s a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s more interesting if we know the man to be a successful poisoner; most interesting of all, perhaps, if we have already seen the man’s roommate use the Cutty Sark bottle for a urine sample.”
Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard biography

“In preparing previous plays for publication I have tried with some difficulty to arrive at something called a ‘definitive text,’ but I now believe that in the case of plays there is no such animal.”
Tom Stoppard quoted by Hermione Lee in her biography of him from 1972

“I think art is an empirical experience, and theater, because it is different every night, and because it is different from sea to sea, simultaneously, is perhaps the most empirical of them all.… Theater is an event not a text.… The event defines the text as well as the other way around.… You wrote a play in the theater was what happened to it.”
Tom Stoppard quoted by Hermione Lee in her biography of him from 1972

“’The choice of words in the right order is what I do,’ (Stoppard) said. The act of writing is as insulated as writing assignment. You don’t need anything or anybody except you and what you draw on. But once the play is in rehearsal, this entire sense of self-sufficiency is ‘blown away like a dandelion seed.” From then on, you and all around you are trying to control the physical reality, microsecond by microsecond. Everything is to do with physics: loudness, quietness, brightness and time. ‘More than once, I’ve added a couple of words to a next speech because the door was too far away.’”

Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard biography