To Be A Playwright

Janet Neipris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429593857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Originally published in 2005, To Be A Playwright is an insightful and detailed guide to the craft of playwriting. Part memoir and part how-to guide, this useful book outlines the tools and techniques necessary to the aspiring playwright. Comprised of a collection of memoirs and lectures which blend seamlessly to deliver a practical hands-on guide to playwriting, this book illuminates the elusive challenges confronting creators of dynamic expression and offers a roadmap to craft of playwrighting.

1

THE TWELVE HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL PLAYWRIGHTS

For me, the stage will always be a place where large things happen. Most plays are about unique individuals coming together in moments of crisis, which lead to conflicts, which lead to confrontations, which lead to resolutions, and finally to change.

Plays are a process. They are subject to human error as well as spontaneous magnificence. They are acted out by people who have daily lives, whose cars break down, whose children break down, and whose dogs run away. They are supported by a stage manager, lighting, set, sound, and costume designers, as well as a director, all subject to the same dailyness. Plays are attended by live audiences who change from night to night, according to the weather, time of day, and their own lives. If you ever doubted that each audience as a collective has its own personality, sit through the run of a play and see the transformation of the play every night.

There is an aliveness in plays because they celebrate the dynamic of the moment, not telling about “how” it happened, but rather being there as the event occurs, as the characters come to a kind of realization, the “a-ha moment.” You are writing about people putting themselves on the line, in most instances, with no moonlit hills to hide behind, except metaphorical ones. On any ordinary day, when placing two unique individuals together, anything is possible.

In creating the world of a play, we are filling a space that formerly went unused in the universe. For the playwright, the world of ideas corresponds to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars, the light of stars that have long since ceased to exist, and we pattern the actions of our characters on a reality which we create and which ceases to exist outside the text and its performance. Our work lives in the theater, by its rules and by its whims. Early on, as playwrights, we learn that the law of certainty is not certain at all. Yes, if we toss a coin in the air, 50 percent of the time it will fall on heads and 50 percent of the time on tails, but only if we toss the coin into infinity. In our lifetime we will not see this law of averages play itself out.

A win is not promised as a playwright. The best we can do is practice habits that do not guarantee success but auger well for it. We do the best we can in an uncertain world. We run down the center of the road well armed, understanding that the slings and arrows of both good fortune and unfortunate fortune will hit us; what we don’t do is hide in the bushes where nothing has the chance of hitting us. The playwright is out on the road. The playwright endures by being a warrior and sustaining a financial reality. The days of the starving artist in the garret are over.

As an educator of thousands of playwrights, as well as witness to my colleagues in the theater and on the Dramatists Guild Council, I have observed those habits that appear to be common to successful playwrights. If Freud was correct that love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness¹ then success is becoming the best of whom we are and locating and embracing our uniqueness.

In all the years of teaching I have never encountered the same voice twice — dozens of love stories, countless efforts of characters to escape their beginnings, hundreds of mis-steps which lead to an excess of misfortune, numerous Oedipus-like stories where we watch the hero ride the waves naively to his or her own destruction. Not one voice is like another. So hold to your voice and only write what no one else could write but you.

Preliminary observations in a day of a successful playwright:

1. Get up

2. Make a pot of coffee

3. Sharpen pencils

4. Feed your animal. If you don’t have an animal, buy one

5. Forage for food in the fridge

6. Consider writing something

7. You are out of bread. Go to the market

8. Gas up the car while you’re out. You are only on half full

9. Call your mother. It’s her birthday

10. Vow to start writing

11. Turn on the computer

12. Check the e-mail

Stop. It’s lunchtime. Meet a friend for lunch and complain about the state of the theater… a typical day? Sometimes. But let’s begin again. New day.

Writing for the theater is a moral as well as an intellectual challenge. How we act, not what we say, fashions our identity as serious writers for the theater. In other words, the playwright is simply one who writes plays, one who piles up the pages. That is the true fabric of our being. Someone can say all they want that “I am a playwright,” but as we know, character is action, and we, as the creators, know the truth of our dailyness. Our success as playwrights lies in the deep habits of that dailyness — the unalienable truth when we get into bed in the deep of the night — who we truly are, how we really live our lives, not how we say we do.

So, the twelve habits of highly successful playwrights:

1. Focus

Focus infers a clear vision of the play you are writing, a centering and entering process — going for the very heart of the question you are asking in the play. We write, as Joan Didion said, to discover what it is we are writing about. It’s helpful to understand the generating moment for our plays, because we want to keep coming back to it like a homing pigeon. It delivers the roots of the work and so gives us clues and reminds us of the focus.

You begin writing with an amorphous oozing ball in your hands. You then take a bat to it and hit it again and again until it becomes harder and smaller and you can hold the essence of your play in one hand. Call it theme, call it spine, but focus your attention on it. I often write the focus of my play, once I get it, on a card and hang it above my computer. Also above the computer is a permanent index card reading “No one asked you to be a Playwright.”

The index card for my current project reads, “The Necessity of Forgiveness.” The previous project was “A Gift Is Only a Gift if Someone Can Afford to Accept It.” By keeping the center of the play clearly in sight, the playwright tries to hold to the line and spine of the play and not take side trips into the lush countryside. No play can be about the entire world.

So, find the focus and stay there. Find the question you are positing with each play. The following are some of the questions I have asked in my plays:

• Should we forgive violent actions?

• Should the victim forgive the perpetrator?

• What is the nature of evil?

• Can you impose love?

• How far will we go in the name of friendship when our private desires are called into play?

• Where is the separation between parent and child?

• How can you know a country simply by studying its history?

Focus also means keeping to a writing schedule. Mark it out in your calendar. It doesn’t matter what time of day, or how long, or where. I know one writer who writes one page a day. That’s his rule. If he exceeds his expectations, that’s a spectacular day. This writer completes at least 365 pages a year. In a good year he writes two projects or one project with six rewrites. But he is regular and keeps to his schedule.

2. Passion

Passion is what sustains perseverance. You must believe that the play you are writing must be written. The same as you have to know what your characters will fight for and how far they will go, you have to believe you would go to the mat for this play, like a parent for a child. You have to believe that you are the only one in the world who could tell the story. Write from your greatest strength and your joy.

I once began to write a play at the suggestion of an artistic director of a regional theater. The subject — the life and loves of an eminent American playwright, Lillian Hellman, and her life with Dashiel Hammett — was fascinating, with opportunities for research into the personal life of this writer through her letters and interviews. The subject had never yet been done and was eminently commercial. It would be hard to believe this project would not excite any living playwright.

I received the rights to the material and began. But the more research I did and the more I learned, the less I was in love with the subject. It remained a great idea, but not for me. The director who had suggested the subject called to ask, “Do you hear the play singing yet?” “No” I replied, “but that will come.” Well, it never did. So after six months of work, with many scenes outlined and written but no fire from inside, I abandoned the project and never looked back.

Someone else eventually wrote that play, but I was grateful it wasn’t me. Write from the heart. Believe in the fire. It’s what delivers the work. It keeps you honest. Passion comes from our strongest beliefs and questions, those things in our society which anger us, those patterns of human behavior that betray the soul out of greed, jealousy, sheer opportunism, and ambition. Passion requires conviction and conviction demands a moral stance. Know what you stand for and have your characters do battle in its name.

3. A Clear Understanding of the Process

Playwrights who are successful understand that our careers have topography. Only when we have come to the end of our days can we see the shape of a whole career, how it adds up. And this is the thing — it all counts, but the shape of each of our playwriting paths differs as much as the shape of our bodies.

I had an occasion recently to name three alumnae awards at New York University. When I identified one playwright for the award, she was shocked. “You don’t want me,” she said. “I’m not famous like the others who are getting the awards. I just have this tiny stuff done in teensy theaters no one ever heard of.” But she was wrong. She had maintained a constant presence in small experimental theaters across the country. She was working in the theater and ten readings finally did lead to a production in New York. Trust the process of your own path and don’t look to anyone else’s pattern.

Having a clear understanding of the process also means the craft. We are always lost. As writers our job is to be lost. We start out knowing nothing but the glimmer of an idea. The world of one play cannot prepare us for the world of the next. We are always explorers, breaking fresh ground, and there are no certain answers.

Expect to be lost until you find your way and then lose it once again. At the same time, do not mythologize craft. There are governing rules of theater that are common to all good drama: a character has to be in a different place at the end of the play than at the beginning, obstacles have to escalate, one scene must push the next scene forward, and so forth. Think of yourself as a shoemaker making a pair of shoes, each one different, but all constructed of the best materials, sewn firmly, each one an original, each one with the mark of the craftsman.

4. Perseverance

The race does not always belong to the swiftest or the most talented. Nothing is as heartbreaking as to watch a writer of medium talent persevere, believe in him- or herself above everything, and subsequently outrun the more talented writer who does not have the stamina to stay in the race.

Make no mistake. This is not a race to win, but a race to stay true to yourself and your vision. If you decide writing for the theater is not for you, then stop and become what you really want.

But if you want to be a writer, there will not be a cheerleader at your back. Be determined to write the best you can and about something that catches your passion, and then do battle.

5. Living as a Warrior

As a writer, you are going into battle every day. Therefore, you have to live as though you are in training. Get enough sleep. Exercise. Eat healthy. Don’t lead a social life that is killing you, and as one warrior writer friend wisely stated “Don’t piss it away on lunch.” If you believe in the connectedness of mind and body, this is a purely intellectual profession that requires physical stamina and clarity. Preserve your energy for your work. Don’t squander it away. Save the best of yourself for your work. The legend of the dissipated writer is much overrated.

6. Rewriting as Opportunity

The most experienced writers see rewriting as a possibility to make the script better, to throw away their darlings, to edit, to make it lean and mean, to pin emotional moments down to paper like a butterfly, and to make every line integral to the character or the plot.

We have to learn to listen and hear the fat and cut it out, to hear the missing beat and write it in. “We must,” as one theater critic told me at the beginning of my career, “want to hold on to our plays as a mother would a child. Oh let me have it just for a while longer and I will make it better.” Remember, you are batting around that oozing ball until it is hard as truth.

7. Take on Large Themes and Paint a Complex Canvas

The best theater is hard work for audiences, but it rewards by making them rise to its challenge. If we want to raise the stature of theater, we must tackle complicated and difficult subjects. Effort is precisely what many of us have been avoiding in the theater. It requires us as playwrights to make clear works of art about complex subjects. We live in a universe t...