Writing Talk

Interviews with Writers about the Creative Process

Derek Neale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429842573
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing Talk includes interviews with nineteen well-known contemporary writers, exploring the ways in which they research and find their original ideas. Working across genres such as fiction, scriptwriting, radio, life writing, biography and more, the writers offer insight into how they interpret, hone and develop these ideas. The conversations examine the roles of technique, craft, language, reading, memory, serendipity, habit and persistence. They offer technical detail about the creative process and give unique insights into the borderlands between genres as well as offering rich, personal insights and universal resonances. A wide-ranging introduction surveys the reasons why we are intrigued by the mysteries of individual writing practice and how these illuminate critical attitudes to literature and performance. Offering a rare glimpse into the creative process of some of this generation's most eminent voices, Writing Talk is a must read for anyone interested in how stories are found and made.

Interviewees:

Alan Ayckbourn, Iain Banks, Helen Blakeman, Louis de Bernières, Sarah Butler, Andrew Cowan, Jenny Diski, Patricia Duncker, David Edgar, Tanika Gupta, Richard Holmes, Hanif Kureishi, Bryony Lavery, Toby Litt, Kareem Mortimer, Michèle Roberts, Jane Rogers, Willy Russell and Sally Wainwright.

1

Alan Ayckbourn

Alan Ayckbourn is an award-winning playwright and has written more than eighty stage plays. He has at various times been a writer, a director and an actor, and for several decades was artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where many of his plays premiered before transferring to the West End and Broadway. His tragicomedies satirise middle-class manners and relationships and are set in apt locations – gardens, bedrooms, lounges and once even on a boat. In this interview, he discusses the considerable challenges of staging the latter, typifying a fascination and inventiveness in his approach to theatre. His first West End success was Relatively Speaking (1968), and subsequent plays include The Norman Conquests, a trilogy (1975), and A Chorus of Disapproval (1985). He was knighted for his services to theatre in 1997. Here, he discusses his plays Absurd Person Singular (1974), Bedroom Farce (1978), Way Upstream (1983), Woman in Mind (1986), Man of the Moment (1990), Things We Do for Love (1998), Absent Friends (2001), House and Garden (2003) and his book about directing and playwriting, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (2004). The interview took place at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2003, with his wife and collaborator, Heather Stoney, also present.

Why does the stage retain a very special attraction for you?

I’ve always been a stage animal. My simple answer is, all my best ideas seem to turn out as stage plays. I’m one of the very few people who make their living entirely from the stage, and you can include most of the big writers in that, the Stoppards, the Pinters and so on. They all, to some extent, rely on movies particularly to supplement their incomes. I’ve been very lucky in that respect.

You have to listen to other people to learn about what you’re writing. It’s very difficult, sometimes, to be objective about your own work, but one of the things that has often been said about my work is that most of my ideas for stage are in fact films. I wasn’t really aware of this till someone pointed it out: I often use a filmic idea and translate it for stage. There are several examples of that in my work. In a play such as Bedroom Farce, which has three different little sets on the same stage, one of the things it employs is the old film cliché of cross-cutting. Cross-cutting in film is nothing very original or new. But when you see it on stage, it becomes quite novel. I’ve been responsible for this; translating a lot of filmic normalities into stage abnormalities.

In your book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking, you said that dialogue is one of the last things to be written. Is that always so?

One of the imperatives of writing for stage is structure. Now, structure doesn’t necessarily mean a traditional story with a beginning, middle and an end, although it’s quite a nice thing to have. It can just mean a progression from point A to point B, and that can happen within character. But often it’s within a situation. Situations change from the beginning to the end, and I think it’s very important to identify this structure before you start covering it with dialogue. Of course, the dialogue comes once you’ve identified the characters, and the characters come as a result of the situation or the theme or the motif that you wish to pursue in your play. To start with dialogue is a very grave mistake. Using a rather extreme metaphor, it means you’re painting the chassis of a car before you’ve actually built the engine. You’re actually starting the wrong way round.

Doesn’t any of the dialogue come to you from the start?

I always try and build the play. I always have a strong sense of where I’m going and have had always. Sometimes that journey will change. I have started out with a play where I’m quite certain this is how it finishes, and then to my surprise, some weeks later, I find I’ve gone to a completely different destination. But normally that is not the case, and with the very early plays I storyboarded them, like they do in movies, frame by frame. This is what happens: Jack meets Jill, they talk, Jill leaves, Jill’s mother comes in, admonishes Jack, and so on. Each little brick is put in place before I start with the dialogue. And partly, this is because dialogue is the fun bit. It’s the bit when the characters find their voices. I know what they’re going to say, roughly, and I know their attitudes and their thinking. Often those voices are quite bland to start with. They’re anodyne. Jack speaks very much like Jill. But as I go on with the play, I begin to clearly hear voices coming out, and Jack develops a slight stammer, or talks in more staccato sentences. But this happens once you give them their voices. I find this has to happen when you are familiar with the workings of the characters.

What constitutes good dialogue?

Dialogue carries a lot of responsibility because, of course, it’s also what you don’t say. Good dialogue, for me, is primarily the purveyor of character and of attitudes, and often attitudes which the speaker might be unaware of. Betraying a prejudice in the use and choice of words – the choice of words is very important. One of the things I say about good dialogue is, you should be able to put your hand along the left hand column – provided you put the character’s names down that side – and you should be able to identify the characters from the way in which they speak; the shape of how they speak. With sentences over three words, obviously, but for any substantial speech, you should be able to say, ah, that is so-and-so, and I know that because that’s the rhythm of their speech. It’s the window to the soul, if you like and, of course, it is also the primary key for the actor to unlock the character for themselves when they come to interpret it.

And it should be speakable. That sounds obvious, but some dialogue is literally quite unspeakable. You can see actors, their tongues are glued to the roof of their mouths trying to get all the words out. Dialogue has nothing much to do with all the things you were taught at school. An actor wouldn’t know a semicolon if he met one. Most of my sentences have full stops. I use full stops, just because that’s the way you musically want speech written. Commas are useful, dashes and dots are lovely. It’s dialogue that’s speakable. It’s never really meant to be read. It’s always meant to be heard, like musical notation. Obviously, there are people who talk about the beautiful dialogue of Bernard Shaw, but some of Shaw is very [wordy and] hard to say. Whereas some of the best dialogue is quite terse and unbeautiful.

If you put a tape recorder on at a party, for instance, and record a group of people all together, if you play it back later, what is amazing is how very few people manage to finish a sentence. That’s partly because other people cut in on them to finish it for them or because they’ve guessed the end and want to move it forward. Good dialogue is also about variety. This is a technique which goes right back to Shakespeare, and probably beyond that. The short, sharp, sudden exchange of a few words between people can suddenly accelerate a scene forwards, whereas a long, slightly more carefully thought-out soliloquy can have the effect of slowing the play. Dialogue can gently indicate the pace of a scene, if it’s written right. One thing that always fascinates me is the placing of words. The Germans put their verbs at the end of their sentences, which makes it very difficult, sometimes, to translate my plays, because sometimes the joke is in the noun, and the nouns go before the verb. English is wonderful in that it is almost infinitely flexible. You can make up words in English quite easily, and I have done in my time, and nobody’s ever questioned them.

You’re well known for writing your plays in an incredibly short time. Could you talk about your drafting process?

I write a play once the master plan is set. I have the structure in place all in my head, and I have a working knowledge of the characters, a passing acquaintanceship with them. I know who I’m starting with. So, the writing is very fast. It is often four or five days to get that first draft done. The first draft is very much an acquaintanceship with the characters and, as I say, often their dialogue – their speech patterns – develop during that draft. They don’t start that way. The character who is speaking at the end of the play, on the last page, often has a completely different speech pattern to the one that started seventy pages earlier. I will then go back on a second draft, and revoice the character. Sometimes I’ll replot, though not very often, because the plotting has usually been well marked out.

Plays are artifice, to a certain extent. If you have a scene in which a bookshelf is going to fall down, say, as in Things We Do for Love, it’s very useful if you’ve referred to the bookcase in advance. I’m always more pleased if I can have incorporated that. The audience register this at the beginning of the play. We’ve heard about that bookcase before; we’ve heard about the bookcase again in act two. And then they forget it, because nobody seems to mention the bookcase, and then, at a moment towards the end of the play, the bookcase collapses at a tremendously dramatic moment; there’s a sort of eureka from the audience – I’m glad I hung on to the bookcase at the back of my brain. And sometimes you retroplot what you have to say or establish, such as the bookcase. But the second draft is often very much more just going back and revoicing the characters. I will sometimes do what I think an actor would do when they’re reading a script. You say to the actor, you’re going to be playing Penny, and you know they’ll read Penny’s role right the way through. They’ll register the other characters, but they’re much more interested in Penny and what her plight is. That’s as an actor would do. I will often do that. I’ll go through as one of the characters, and just follow her or his role through, in their voice. It’s often pruning rather than adding, and sometimes reshaping, and saying, no, no, no, that’s much too forceful for her, she’d never say it that way; she’d say the same thing but she’d be much more snide about it, much more sort of furtive in making her views felt. But I would never do more than three or four drafts.

The agonising has happened months before, really. It’s building a case to write the play in my own mind. Am I ready to write this? Is the world ready for it? And then, that awful moment of jumping into the water, and saying, I’m going with it. I’m going to swim for the other shore, and I may drown halfway across. It’s that first establishment of a thin strand, however tenuous, between one bank and the other, which you have to establish before you begin to build it up with character and strengthen it. I’ve written sixty-three, sixty-four plays, I think, and there is a certain assurance, I suppose, in the construction. Every play is totally different – at least I hope it is, but you’re never that sure. At least the process is in its place. I can afford to make the journeys a little bit more casually than I used to, in that I don’t have to have everything in place. There is nothing worse than seeing a dramatist having swum a few metres out, to find they don’t know where they’re swimming to. I did a course with some young writers a few years ago, and there was one girl who’d written a wonderful first twenty pages, and then had no idea where to go. We spent a year trying to decide where to take this twenty pages. I was getting frenzied. I used to write scenarios in my sleep about how to finish this wretched play for her. But of course, in the end it was her play, and she just sat there waiting for the characters to decide, and I said, they’re just going to sit there forever, like Miss Havisham, with dust gathering on them. This poor man and this poor woman. I said, well, why doesn’t she push him out of the window or something? Let’s get going. That is always an object lesson to me: never start something you don’t have an idea how to finish, because the muse is not going to be there to help you in the end.

You said you need a few days for the writing. How many days, months or years do you need for the planning?

It’s usually a mystical nine months, probably a year, but nine months is a good sort of average. Once I finish a play, one is then completely empty. There’s an awful feeling of being un-pregnant, which for me is never very healthy, and sometimes this lasts for some weeks. And then you pray that you haven’t written your last. Then one morning, a tiny, tiny germ of an idea will arrive, and I hardly dare breathe, because I’m not quite sure, but it gives me a tingle of excitement. I always am a great believer that more than one idea needs to congregate. You can’t make babies on one idea. So, we then wait and see what happens, and usually something else will join it, if we’re lucky. Maybe it’s a character, maybe it’s a setting, maybe it’s something that complements the idea. And I think, yeah, that’s a great idea to write a play about the notion of leadership, what a good idea. But we’ve got to put it somewhere and then, wow, we could put it on a cabin cruiser on a river. That’s going to be fun. And those two ideas will suddenly gel and make a way forward. And that process will go backwards and forwards. I always compare it to a small boy with a marble or something. I put it away in my pocket and take it out and polish it occasionally. I would look at it and it’s hopefully grown a bit bigger. And I have a sort of time frame, because I’m very lucky in that I run my own theatre, and I’m able to schedule plays that are but a gleam in my eye. There’s ‘Alan Ayckbourn sixty-five’ scheduled for next year, which I hope to heavens I write. It’s too far away even to think about, but I just pray that some time between now and next May I will have written this startling ‘A.A. sixty-five’, which everyone will be desperate to see, no doubt. Most of all me.

Is it true that in the past actors have had to wait for scripts to drop through their letter boxes the night before the first read-through?

That used to be the case. I used to have to drop the scripts in. That was in my daring youth. I used to write for a permanent company. I remember finishing a show on a Sunday night, and one of the actors was mildly dyslexic and said, please, I don’t want to sit and read a play in public. And there was a television crew in, filming, and he said, I’m not doing it in front of all these people unless I get the script. And I said, but I might be a bit late. And he said, that doesn’t matter, just deliver it. Eventually we looked at our watches, and Heather was working with me, putting it together, and she said, ‘Well I’ll drop it in, but it is four in the morning’, and I said, ‘Well, he can read it very early’. So, she took it round in the car, and she opened the front gate of his digs, and she tiptoed up and she pushed it very quietly through the letter box. She was pushing it through and suddenly the script just went, zump! Somebody had pulled it in from the inside. He’d been sitting in the hall, half asleep, waiting for this script. Desperately unfair, isn’t it?

When you rework the first draft, how do you do it? Are you the only actor involved at this stage?

When I revoice, I certainly revoice on my own, sometimes out loud. I sometimes find that while talking, with certain characters I will actually go and improvise them. I used to act so I’ve still got the actor in me, although I wouldn’t care to step on stage these days. But I will sometimes go for a walk with the character, and I will interview him, and say, what do you think about the current situation in the world? And he’ll sound off, or she’ll sound off. It just gives me a speech pattern. Sometimes I improvise them in the shower.

The actors don’t come into it until quite late. The characters are finished, and the script is formed by that time. But the thing is that Alan the actor is way gone before [the actors see it]. I would never dream of giving an actor a line-reading, and often they will read the lines very differently from the way I’ve read them.

It sounds like something you have to work out on your own.

It’s very late on before I show someone else, and the first person is always Heather. She is the first person to read it, sometimes on screen, although she prefers them in hard copy. And the casting director is next. One of the most exciting points is sometimes you know which actor you want, and you go hunting for them straight away, but sometimes you have to find new actors, and you go auditioning. I will often read with the actor, and it’s the first time it’s heard out loud, which is quite exciting. It always gives me a bit of a buzz. It’s comparable only with the first read-through, when you get the full ensemble in voice. That’s exciting. And the exploration starts in the rehearsal period.

How much of your creativity is driven by practical considerations?

[Sometimes], in the sense that I need to try and keep the cast sizes down. But I think that’s quite a good consideration. Economically, managements love five-handers rather than eight-handers, and eight-handers rather than twenty-two–handers (when you probably wouldn’t stand a chance in hell of getting it done, except possibly by one of the big national companies, but even then, probably not). The other things are that, actually, economy in theatre is a very good concept to embrace. If you write the function of one character and share it between six, that is bad economics in terms of concision in writing. I will often combine the roles in a story, so that one character takes the place of two. I say, oh, well look, if Jack is also the bloke who murdered him, then we’ve got a double role for this person, and it’s a much more interesting character to play, albeit somebody in Equity’s just lost a perfectly good job.

There’s also the physical constraints. But again, this is more to do with artistic considerations rather than anything else. For the sake of argument, if you write a play with twenty-six locations, instead of your Oxford Street [set], which you wanted in scene four, if you’re lucky you’re going to finish up with a bit of Christmas decoration hanging down off the ceiling, and that has got to be Oxford Street, mate, with a recording of some traffic. That is just the nature of theatre. You know we can’t move from location to location in the way that films can, nor do we want to. Sitting watching people moving scenery all night is probably not the most enjoyable thing to do. So, we use economy of location, unless, in the Shakespearean way, you want a shifting general location where often it’s not even defined. That is a choice you make early on. Also, in my case it’s quite interesting that all my plays up to 1975 had two entrances, and after 1975 till the present day they’ve had three entrances – or can have.

Stage craft is such an infinitely practical craft. I think you take responsibility for far more when you write a play than you do when you write a film script, when you hand it on to other people who make a lot of the decisions for you. The director, not least, but also, location planners will shape the script. With theatre, you make a lot of these decisions quite early on. And it gives you control of what you want to see, but it’s also a big responsibility. This is one of the things I always stress to new writers – which is to take responsibility for the visuals. It is not enough to have a written text, however well written, if you cannot also indicate what the accompanying visual thing is likely to be. I’m probably over-obsessed with this, because I know ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Alan Ayckbourn
• 2 Andrew Cowan
• 3 Tanika Gupta
• 4 Jenny Diski
• 5 Iain Banks
• 6 Willy Russell
• 7 Patricia Duncker
• 8 Bryony Lavery
• 9 Kareem Mortimer
• 10 Michèle Roberts
• 11 David Edgar
• 12 Jane Rogers
• 13 Hanif Kureishi
• 14 Helen Blakeman
• 15 Richard Holmes
• 16 Louis de Bernières
• 17 Sarah Butler
• 18 Toby Litt
• 19 Sally Wainwright
• 20 Andrew Cowan – Reprise
• References
• Index