The first three weeks from seven, and my first mentor meeting on process has now elapsed in my Arts Council and Peggy Ramsay Foundation-funded Protected Time to Write project. This is blog 4 in a series of 10 tracking a playwright’s process from initial ideas to first draft, in a bid to share some of the learning that’s coming out of it.
You can click on the links here for Blog 1, Blog 2 and Blog 3.
Blog 4 first appeared on Lane’s List on April 20th 2015.
A hundred questions for the characters. Dynamics grids. Character bonds. Mapping the structure. Mapping the locations. Listing wants, needs, desires and obstacles. Exercising the metaphor. Mining the subject matter. Combing the research. Scene choices. More research that won’t leave me alone. Drivers. Tensions inner and outer, human and animal, emotional and spiritual. Conflict centres. Organising principles. The ‘what if’ questions.
Aaaaaaaannnnd creative paralysis.
This list above is a limited roll-call of things I give other writers to do when they write plays. Not all at the same time, of course, and never all to the same playwright. Yet they’re all things I feel I have to do in my process at the moment before I write this play as a script.
I think I’ve been a dramaturg for too long.
Quick personal history: I pretty much learned how to write ‘for real’ (i.e. the stuff beyond academic training) through (a) adaptation of texts for young companies and (b) having to codify elements of my practice to enable me to communicate it to others.
This was partly because I really genuinely wanted to be a dramaturg, and partly because I was getting offered teaching and workshop gigs and had to pay the rent (why on earth at 24 people felt I was ready to teach others I don’t know, but I’m grateful nonetheless).
I also remember now that I followed a path of dramaturgy because I didn’t feel back then, at the tender age of 24, that anybody would really give a stuff about anything that I had to say about anything. I wanted to work in playwriting but I didn’t feel ready – didn’t feel brave enough – to be a playwright.
This was the aftermath of the In-Yer-Face generation, the playwrights on whom I was weaned, and the Monsterists were coming up fast behind with their big bold audacious Olivier-stage-sized-imaginations and, frankly, the industry was already getting saturated with wannabe playwrights. There was a career to be had, helping them to learn their craft and calibrate their expectations, and also after two years in a Literary Department of a new writing theatre (unwittingly trained by some fairly fierce individuals) I was ready to break free and make some of my own dramaturgical rules.
I say rules – I mean principles. Tutors of playwriting will usually always say either that rules are there to be broken, or that the word ‘principles’ can protect the brain from slavishly obeying ‘rules.’
More importantly though, ‘principles’ brings to mind a sense of values for me: the politics upon which your own particular understanding of playwriting is wrought, your own particular understanding of dramaturgy and what it should offer others.
I’m big on structure in plays and always have been – but I’m also particularly switched on by the structure of process.
I believe what we do when, and why, has a lot to do with how our plays turn out in the early stages. I’d say about 95% of all the dramaturgy I’ve ever done, in any context, has been about applying principles of process to a pre-existing draft: and certainly to very established pre-existing ideas. This has made me a very useful dramaturg.
It’s also made me a very principled playwright. And those principles – that sense of process too – has nearly always been something I’ve been required to share with others. Back to the beginning of my writing career again: processes with young people usually, with teenagers or schools or young companies, and then also with community groups. Courses are run, subs are paid, curriculums are being followed… theatres or other institutions are providing learning environments within which professional creativity can prosper.
But there’s still some learning to be done, often with people who have no professional background. So other people are relying on somebody to structure their creativity. My creativity then dovetailed into it – they were symbiotic processes really, feeding one another, until their need for process unwittingly became my approach to writing full stop: that became ‘how I did it.’
I’ve already talked about being on my own (or avoiding being on my own) in earlier blogs, and that’s been a very useful learning curve: that conversation has to be part of my process in the early days. I’m not a garret writer and never will be. But this last week or so has been something new.
I’ve been panicking. I’m doing the work, but I’m panicking. Yes things are a little chaotic at home – wife 8.5 months pregnant and fatigued then more recently, actually ill; relatives geographically too far to pop round and help so Daddy-day-care kicks in unexpectedly and the diary is shaken up; toddler toddling and tantrumming; workmen in the house; other projects vying for attention – but the work has still been happening, in fits and starts. Time has been protected, albeit not in the big happy chunks I’d anticipated it would. The work is getting done, even if I’m behind schedule. It’s there, in my notebook, I can prove it. But I’m panicking nonetheless. Why?
If any of you have ever filled out an ACE application form, you’ll know there’s a section called ‘Activity Plan’.
This was by far my favourite bit of the form. STRUCTURE.
As my wife will testify, if I have to so much as make a piece of toast, I will have the plates, butter, jam and chopping board out in advance and GOD ONLY KNOWS what happens if they are in the wrong order or somebody WANTS MARMITE INSTEAD YOU BASTARDS CAN’T YOU SEE I’M TRYING TO MAKE FRIGGING JAM AND TOAST HERE AND THERE’S A PROCESS.
I painstakingly planned out the days and weeks, what I’d be doing when, with whom: research social, research historical, character, treatment, rough draft, redraft… Seven weeks and five meetings lovingly shaped and crafted. For example, the research period is now over. I am currently on the character period. After paternity’s over, I am writing a treatment. Good. All present and correct. I know where I am. I can cling on to it.
Well frankly, F**K all that for a game of conkers.
I am beginning to learn that playwriting isn’t linear because the imagination isn’t linear and because real life isn’t linear, at least not in a constantly-all-the-ducks-in-the-same-pre-ordained-row kinda way.
I did know that already of course, but I’d never realised until now quite how much my insistence on linearity in this project – my process-dramaturgy-informed-approach to playwriting – was being quietly destructive. That activity plan is bearing down on me like a promise to some big funding gods in the sky that will strike me down if I so much as budge away from it.
Worse, it’s making me waste time. If I don’t have the whole lines of consecutive days all in a neat row like the activity plan said, how can I possibly start?
By stopping being a diva for one, and also being kicked up the bum in timely fashion by Kaite O’Reilly and her perfectly-poised rant about writers too often avoiding doing the work because the timing wasn’t right.
‘…the difference between writers and would-be writers (or artists and makers), is one gets on with it, whilst the would-be sits around talking about doing ‘it’ when the time is right and inspiration strikes, bringing the idea. I can be very scathing of this, calling it a form of laziness, an avoidance of doing the actual work. In kinder moods I know it can be the result of fear – of failing, of succeeding, of committing to oneself as a creative being, of finally taking on ‘the dream’ only for it to reveal itself as a nightmare…’
A research contact got in touch with me last week. I really wanted to meet them. But the first thing I did was internally panic. IT IS NOT RESEARCH TIME ANYMORE THAT IS NOT WHAT IT SAYS ON THE ACTIVITY PLAN AND NOT WHAT I PROMISED MY DRAMATURG.
The meeting was incredibly inspiring, helpful and informative and brilliant. It didn’t bloody matter in my process when it had arrived. It would only have mattered if deep down my gut had said ‘this isn’t what you need to be doing now and, actually, you know enough about this already so crack on with the other thing.’
I’ve left guts and instinct out of the structure of my process. Sure, guts and instinct have been allowed to flourish unmediated during my research time, because, y’know, that’s when it’s allowed to happen isn’t it? Synapses firing, following leads, being a bit of a playwriting detective. After that I need to bloody well pin things down and make choices.
Well, yes. But, also, no. It’s a bit of both, a balance, a bit of… dare I say it… NON-PROCESS.
Or maybe that is the process, it’s just not one I recognise. My process has been over-structured. Right now I am really bored of writing the word process over and over.
I had a great meeting with a writer and sound artist the other day who said he’d never used the same process twice. I’d heard of this, but never really believed it before. But he’s got great integrity and I completely trust him, so had no reason to doubt it. I’d just never really properly comprehended how brave that was.
So much of my work as dramaturg, and my learning as a playwright has been through helping others with their pre-existing stories and scripts. There’s a big, big gap there which is about this stage I’m in now, as a writer, in-between knowing A LOT and actually having THE THING. Not even a rough draft, just the story outline. And my process – the one I set myself, the sheer bloody-minded miniscule detail of the thing – is now starting to derail me.
I’m taking a break from it. I realised when talking this through with my mentor that process is not where creativity begins: it’s something you can use to help guide your creativity once it requires it. Creativity has to be given some bloody space to do its thing.
That’s where that pen-line picture above comes from. I sat down for a coffee after that meeting and drew a shape on the page without knowing what it was. I decided it was the outline of the fictional nation within which my play was set.
30 minutes later I had the map as you see it, and two A4 pages of the nation’s constitutional history. That’s never been part of my process.
But then neither has sitting in the shade of a churchyard frantically scribbling potential plot-drivers for 45 minutes on the back of a pre-school leaflet (the only available paper) whilst my two year-old had an unexpected nap in the buggy. But it was all part of my creativity.
Creativity doesn’t always need process – but my writing processes in the past have always needed… well, process. Structure. Not always for me, but for others.
Now, it’s just me. So as far as I’m concerned, creativity can keep running free for a bit.
