Talking to Myself

There’s a scene or two in the movie The Commitments where the character Jimmy Rabitte is seen interviewing himself about his own (self-imagined success).

I’m not too proud to admit that I used to do that, from time to time. At a certain point, I had some long commutes between school and work and home, so I’d talk to myself about what I was writing as a way to keep my brain from turning into mush after hours of driving. It also may have satisfied some other, more narcissistic need, but maybe that’s just the mush talking.

But I’ve been interviewed for real as well, a few times here and there. Recently, I got an e-mail from one of the cast members of the recent production of my adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ asking me some questions as part of an interview for/from their playwriting class. Since I completely missed any opportunity to record the many brilliant things I said while I was there for the show, I thought I’d include it here as a sort of coda to the production.

I don’t pretend for a moment that this is in any way an informed point of view. For what it’s worth, reading over this a few days after I sent it, I found any number of spots where I should have said something different. I’ve resisted the urge to clean things up a bit and make myself smarter. For whatever that’s worth…

What?s the hardest part about the work of a professional playwright?

Full disclosure: If a professional playwright is someone who works full-time and supports themselves as a playwright, then I am most certainly not a professional playwright and should be immediately ejected from the interview.

However, if a professional playwright is someone who has had their work produced by a professional company, then I suppose I can continue without feeling too much like a poseur.

To your question then: There’s no single overwhelming challenge working as a professional playwright. The internal and external difficulties you face are myriad and often overwhelming. I know many, many people who started off down a similar road and — for any number of reasons — decided to stop. In most cases, their internal motivation/desire wasn’t sufficient enough to overcome the external pressures.

You have to want to write, to write plays. Not for money (God knows), not for fame (don’t get me started), but because you love to write . . . and you have to be strong enough in that love, that you can tune out the external realities.

Externally, it’s difficult to find a theatre willing to take a chance on new work. Most theatres simply can’t afford the risk in the current economic and creative climate. An unknown play by an unknown playwright isn’t a particularly compelling draw for audiences, whereas more established work (last year’s Broadway hit, Shakespeare, Sondheim, take your pick) is more reliable at getting people in the seats and keeping the doors open.

Added to this, I am my own worst enemy. I don’t write the sort of plays that might have an obvious hook for producers or audiences. I don’t write about social issues for instance, which is often what people are looking for. That’s a convenient position for me to adopt, as it allows me to adjust my monocle and beret, dismiss rejection and keep writing under the assumption that I’m just too daring or unique for the commercial mainstream.

Which all goes to say that I am extremely grateful when someone does choose to produce one of my plays.

Internally, I struggle as well. Because there is little or no financial reward for playwrights — at least nothing substantial enough to survive on — then I have to spend my days paying the bills in other ways.

Finding (and sometimes fighting for) the time to write is the biggest challenge I personally face. Invariably, it’s in the evenings or on the weekends, stealing an hour or so (sometimes much less ) wherever and whenever I can in order to write. I liken it to the people you see scrounging for spare change in the couch cushions and picking up pop bottles on the sidewalk in order to make ends me.

I scrounge for time. Fifteen minutes between meetings, a good half hour while the kids are having baths and getting ready for bed, five minutes waiting for my turn at the barber . . . that’s when most of my work happens. When I get a longer block of an hour or more, I’m in Heaven.

What was your first published work? What did you think when it was published?

I’ve never had work published, although a number of my plays have been produced so I’ll talk about that instead.

It never really hit me, having something produced for the first time. I loved seeing it done, but I was fortunate to know a director who wanted to do the play and so it was fairly seamless the first few times I had something produced.

But the first time that someone produced one of my plays without any connection — not a friend from college, a colleague, someone who knows me — well, that gave me a hope I didn’t know I was lacking: “Someone wanted to do this, not because they knew me but because they loved the work I’ve done. It wasn’t charity or obligation all those other times.”

But in each and every case — whether it was a connection or a cold reading that led to the production — I have always said the same thing to myself afterwards, since the very first one: “Please God, please please please don’t let this be the last time…”

What did you have to go through to get it published?

Since I’m unpublished at this point, I’ll answer the question from the production side of things: I had to get used to the necessity of promoting my own work and commit myself to the task.

I have worked for years in marketing and am fairly good at it. But when it comes to marketing my work, I lack a lot of confidence. Sending scripts out to contests and theatres around the country, agonizing over the cover letters and application forms, worry if I should have typed the envelopes instead of handwriting them . . . it’s a grueling process and it’s very easy to let it slide.

But it’s the crucial last step and if you don’t do it, then all you have is a box full of paper no one has read. Getting rejections back is no big deal to me. I’ve had some fairly significant rejections in my life — on a creative level as well as a personal one — so that doesn’t bother me.

What bothers me is the feeling that I should be doing more. Finding the time to write is hard enough, as I said earlier. Finding the time to do the right thing with the writing is even more difficult.

Typically, what you have to go through — either for publishing or production — is just a lot of boring, grueling paperwork . . . the sorts of activities that have about as much interest as doing your taxes and are in many ways the opposite of the activity of writing.

What is your favorite part of being a playwright?

Apart from the actual physical act of writing — which is my favorite thing in the world to do — the best thing about being a playwright is watching someone else bring it to life.

I had the good fortune to hear the author Neil Gaiman give a lecture a number of years ago. He’s an award-winning novelist and screenwriter, but he made his mark writing comic books. At the lecture, someone asked him what his favorite medium was and he said comic books — because when his part was finished, he got to hand it off to someone else who would bring it to life and, in essence, he got to shift from being the author to being the audience.

He likened it to being an architect and designing a house but being delighted and surprised when you walk through it and see how they’ve built and decorated what you did in the blueprint.

Being a playwright is an awful lot like that. I know some writers struggle with feeling like they lost control of their work — the recent profile of Edward Albee in the New Yorker a few weeks ago really horrified me at how obsessive he is about the direction and performance of his work. That kind of thing seems to be the opposite of theatre to me. Or, at least, the kind of theatre I love.

I have good ideas and from time to time I write them well. But it’s the electrical charge of someone else’s mind rubbing up against those ideas — the director, the performer, the audience even — that makes them glow with life.

I get way too much credit, in my opinion, as a playwright. I have the easiest and the most fun of everyone involved in the process.

What kind of education did you get for the job? What would you recommend?

I am so uneducated, I’m not sure that I’m even qualified to answer this question.

My education as a playwright was fairly informal, trial-and-error. I had a head start because I was an actor for a number of years and worked with a very good director who tolerated my lack of training and process and helped me cultivate my skills as a performer.

But even as an actor, I had a very textual and meta approach to the character and the play. I was, in essence, looking at things from the author’s side — understanding the shape of the story and what my character needed to be in order to bring that to life for the audience.

There was no presence of Method at all, no emotional connection internally. I was never “in the moment” and I was always aware, at a microscopic level almost, of what the audience was seeing.

I’m not certain that, had I been educated in the process of playwriting, that I would be a better writer. However, I would be more connected to the professional side of things. I’d have better connections, I’d know more about how to get things out there in front of agents and producers, I’d have a professional foundation and training that could better support my writing. That’s the biggest value I’ve seen with my educated colleagues.

My cousin is a professional playwright, she went to school for it. It’s odd because we were never close, grew up thousands of miles apart, and both ended up in very similar pursuits. I’m not a competitive person at all, but there is a sense for me when I look at her accomplishments and experience. All of that came from her education.

My advice would be, if you want to do it, start as an undergraduate and major in Theatre. Forget about trying to find a proper major to make your parents happy or to give you something to fall back on. Now’s the time to do what you want, lay the best foundation you can for yourself. Dreams have a shelf life, after all.

So pick your major and take every damn class you can, work on every show (play your part, if you get one, but also work backstage and in the box office and in the costume shop, know it all inside and out), go to auditions during the summer at your local repertory and civic theatres, direct short scenes with your classmates, dig in to every aspect of the world that you can, and above all else you need to write every day and ask people to read it.

If you’re up for it and you can afford it, find a good graduate school — not the one that has the reputation for turning out great writers but the one that’s a good fit for your personality. Beg, borrow, and steal to get accepted. Mortgage off small portions of your immortal soul if necessary . . . and then do it all again: Take every class, go to every show, audition, etc.

And write every day. Even if you skip all the rest, you have to write every day. You are not a writer unless you’re writing. Having good ideas don’t count.

I didn’t do all of those things, some days I wish I had.

What are the most important skills? Most overrated?

Most important: Listening. Keep your ear to the ground, there’s a lot to learn from if you pay attention. And there’s a wealth of voices out there. Listen to everyone around you and learn how they show everything about who they are and what they care about in their words, the things that they say and don’t say. It’s all right there and if you can learn to see those things, you can learn to create them for your characters.

But also learn to listen to your own work, learn to listen for the false notes and find the broken pieces that you need to fix.

The most overrated?

(pause)

Despite what I said earlier, I think education can be extremely overrated. It’s not a magic bullet and I know plenty of writers who spend their time in graduate school being coerced into writing like their professors, playing the name-that-literary-fad game. I’m not convinced that it’s necessary for everyone.

But, on reflection, I think that money is overrated. Especially for a playwright. This isn’t the place to cash in. Get your work out there, get it seen by as many people as possible . . . it’s not the remuneration (although, again, God knows…) but the audience.

Clive Barker is not a favorite of mine by any stretch, but someone who’s career and singular vision I respect. A few years ago I found a couple of volumes of his plays in a used bookstore. They were from his early days and, although I more or less hate reading plays, I picked them up out of curiosity more than anything else.

I didn’t expect them to be very good, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading them. There were little flashes of Brecht and Stoppard and Beckett — playwrights that I like a great deal.

But what impressed me most about Barker was his foreword which said (paraphrasing from memory): “If you’re a small theatre company with no money but you’d love to do one of my plays, don’t be afraid to ask. I’ll make the big professional companies pay royalties, but theatre is meant to be done and not just read. We can figure something out…”

I thought that was terrific and quite surprising since this was at the height of Barker’s popularity and he was selling millions of copies of his novels and writing/directing films and making a lot of money (actually, maybe that made it easier for him to say…)

Regardless, it’s an approach I’ve tried to have with inquiries about my work. Getting paid is great, but let’s not stand in the way of getting the show up and running. In that same spirit, I put scripts out there for free download at my website in the hopes that someone will want to do them.

I don’t worry too much about people producing my work without permission — it’s a small enough world and instant karma’ll get them in the end (if I don’t get them first).

How often do you write? What sort of thing do you write?

I try to write every day. At one point in my life, I had over five hours of uninterrupted writing time. I was younger, less experienced in my own process, so I wasn’t very productive. I wish I had that time back now.

But, one way or another, I’m writing every day.

As far as what I write, it’s a fairly broad spectrum. Plays, obviously. A lot of short stories and poetry. I am about halfway through my first novel, so that’s what is taking up a lot of my focus these days.

But I also write as a big part of my day job, which has been very helpful for me in my creative life as it’s taught me how to be more economical and efficient with my time, how to manage and keep deadlines, and how to know when (and when not) to listen to input.

Topically, most of my work deals with a handful of issues related to the supernatural, mythology, and fantasy. Even if it’s a realistic setting with naturalistic dialogue and action, the undercurrent of the play and plot is likely to be supernatural. I like living in a world where we’ve got something larger and unseen superimposed over everything around us. I like writing about it as well. Neither the world nor writing would be as interesting to me without that other, unseen world.

The most personal aspect of my writing is my poetry.

What is one piece of advice you would give an aspiring playwright?

Oh, you only wanted one piece of advice? Sorry.

Well . . . not just for playwrights, but everyone who wants to write, I think I’d have to reiterate what I said earlier: Write every day. This is your only chance — this fifteen minutes, this half hour, this afternoon — to write what’s needed today. If you wait, you will be different, the opportunity will have shifted, and what you could have written will have been lost.

Neil Gaiman, again: “We owe it to each other to tell stories…”

Don’t be afraid.