I’m approaching the closing stages of my Arts Council and Peggy Ramsay Foundation-funded Protected Time to Write project. This is blog 8 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, Blog 3, Blog 4, Blog 5, Blog 6 and Blog 7.
Blog 8 first appeared on Lane’s List on July 27th 2015.
(After the reading, comes the thinking. Nudity and muscles optional)
This week was the reading of my rough draft (or, if you read my last blog on this project, the ‘House Two’ draft that precedes the ‘House Three’ draft), and I was anticipating learning a lot about what was and wasn’t working in my play.
I had my armour on. I had friends and strangers in the room ready to share their interpretations, instinctive reactions, and answers to my handful of simple questions about the piece. It was tough, and it was very useful.
What I wasn’t expecting – but knew the minute it hit me, whilst both listening to the read-through and the conversation afterwards – was how far the writing itself had divorced from what I’m good at: from my writer’s voice, essentially, which I’d spent all that time thinking about at the beginning of the project so that whatever I wrote could be spoken through it.
I emphasise writing itself here to predominantly mean style and form – not the overarching ideas, themes, concept, character journeys or even deep narrative structure, all of which I still have great confidence in – but rather:
Style: the text on the surface that ends up in the characters’ mouths. The words they speak; how they’re crafted; how their point of view on the dramatic world they inhabit is communicated; whether it’s dialogue, internal/external monologue, heightened, naturalistic, stylised, storytelling; whether they’re servicing action or opinion or exposition; if they come across as roles, ciphers, symbols or fully-fledged three-dimensional characters (all of which can be valid given the right choice of world – fairy-tale, myth, political drama, farce and so on).
Form: the broader structural choices that characterise the play’s architecture, or shape. At one end of the spectrum, you might have a fluid timeframe – no evident ‘scene breaks’ and something that moves back and forth in time and space, through internal and external character landscapes (imagined as well as real), deftly sliding between past, present and possible futures via narration, poetry and dialogue, tumbling over one another (my most recent reference point for this is Owen Shear’s beautiful text for Pink Mist, though I wasn’t a huge fan of the production). At the other end of the form spectrum might be naturalism – fixed time, fixed space, linear, photographically real or at least as mimetic of the real world as it can be.
For me, style and form are the two elements that hugely flopped in the reading. And to me, that’s worrying and strange. I’d rather be faced with a story that didn’t work.
Why?
I talked about ‘writer’s voice’ in a previous blog. For me, style and form carry the melody of a writer’s voice, being the most immediate qualities in the music of a play. Think Beckett, Crimp, Crouch, Churchill, Barker, Kane and how their notation, dialogue and form are immediately recognisable. But I also believe the creation of a writer’s voice goes much deeper than that.
I would consider a playwright’s voice to be constructed rather like an orchestral score. There are multiple instruments chiming together to create one distinct overall sound. I realise in light of the script reading that I’ve done pretty well focusing on the bass notes of my voice in this project – the ones that hum deep down, communicating the muscle of the idea – but the melody is badly faltering.
So to continue the musical analogy: a composer’s ‘voice’ is formed by how they use the string section, woodwind, percussion, brass and so on – but in playwriting, we’re talking world, story, theme, setting, form, characters, style, point of view on the action, and so on (choose whatever categories make sense for you). Those are some of the major choices you’re making and, when you make them, they should be carrying your voice within them somehow.
In the final playing – back to the orchestra again – each of these separate instruments has been orchestrated to come together and create a singular sense of ‘voice’. Think Mozart or Bach or Handel – immediately distinct musicians, their orchestrations comprised of multiple individual instruments, but all belonging to the same singular composer.
I mentioned before that I felt my bass notes were in good shape. So for me, those playwriting instruments that thump deep down are:
1. idea selection
2. choice of theme
3. creation of concept
4. your singular point of view on the world of human behaviour
5. theatrical understanding
6. whatever the deep narrative spine of each of your plays is
NB: ‘Narrative’ here should allow multiple definitions rather than just ‘story’ – narrative being any sequence of moments that accumulates over time and space to communicate a sense of human change.
So that’s voice dealt with. But why go into so much detail?
Because the major positives from this reading were that the bass notes of my voice are largely thudding away in this play quite happily (with the exception of theatrical understanding, which I’ll come to in a second).
Here’s the checklist-to-self:
The idea of characters constructing present and future stories to twist their (and other people’s) versions of reality round to meet their own – and the collisions that emerge as a result – was immediately commented upon.
The theme of the need for faith and belief in relation to this habit was also noticed. The overarching concept of creating a fictitious country, so that it could support both political and mythological realities – though still flawed in execution – was picked up on.
What is my point of view on human behaviour? See above on constructing stories.
The deep narrative spines of (a) a country’s collapse and (b) a bereaved mother facing the executioner of her child were still in competition, but were present.
Then I come to theatrical understanding, not quite so strong yet and – with a bit of luck – pull this whole blog full circle.
I’ve always liked to think of myself as a theatrical writer. My most successful work has exploited a combination of muscular language, a bare space, the audience’s visual imagination, the fluidity of time and space that the stage then affords you, and the externalising and poeticising of internal human transformation. You might think that makes me sound like a pompous git, but for me they are my big writing strengths.
Back at the end of my research process, I think I had all those elements of voice that I describe above ready and waiting. I had theatrical understanding emerging through the upper notes of my voice. My choices back then about form and style were echoing my strengths as a writer (empty space, power of language, theatrical ambiguity at heart of piece but relevant to main character’s internal journey, stripped-back décor). I felt in good shape.
Then a gauntlet of risk and scale was thrown down for me. It was exciting. It was articulating the entire point of the funding, to reach beyond myself and what I already knew how to do. It sounded scary but necessary.
So I picked up this gauntlet, but without realising it then – before a treatment, before any deeper character work, before four more weeks of solid prep and writing – my hands were so full that I dropped the bits of my voice that sang.
On reflection, I also know right then that my brain made me hear something weird, which absolutely wasn’t said to me.
Your current writing style is done with. You know how to do it. We’ve all seen that now, so what’s new? Break away. You’ll only move forward in your career if you do the thing you’re not so good at and get better at it. What you do now – all that poetic, heightened, direct address scaled-down stuff – it’s not real playwriting. Anybody can write one-person storytelling monologue stuff and pretty words. This stuff over here – that’s what you should be doing now.
I can’t stress this enough – this is my entirely self-inflicted version of some incredibly good dramaturgical and career advice, which I’ve recorded in the blog linked above.
But sometimes, the gap of interpretation between objective external advice and self-belief can be the cruellest of all.
I’d say the draft I heard read this week had about 10% of my ‘upper voice’ in it: the poetry, the storytelling, the internal emotional landscape externalised. The rest felt wooden, forced, expositional and – as one actor brilliantly and fairly characterised it – ‘specious’.
I’ve been trying to be a writer I’m not, and interpreted that challenge of growth and scale in the most literal way possible – a huge-cast play, moving away from my writing voice.
Aaah – now I get it.
This is why most of the process of writing that draft had felt mechanical. This is why it had at times felt boring, why it had felt untruthful and strained. This is why it had felt like an exercise, a bitter pill I had to swallow to get better, a bit of a chore.
Why the hell didn’t I stop?
I suppose I just characterised all of that as ‘first-draft-itis’ – that advice that you just need to get the bad draft out, eyes closed, bash bash bash at the keyboard, don’t get it right get it written etc. and then you’ll know better what it needs to be.
And from the outside, yup, that’s exactly what has happened. This blog and the reading this week has absolutely given me that. So why a massive navel-gazing moment, Lane?
Because it’s really important that I acknowledge that it wasn’t ‘first-draft-itis’. If I put it down to that, I’ll never learn the most important lessons that have come out of this whole project in terms of my process:
Value your strengths: master better what you are, not what you aren’t
Listen to your gut and your heart: learn to separate difficult writing from untruthful writing
Don’t strain to ‘be political’: any human truth you feel you’re expressing will be a political act anyway
That writer out there you think you should be: is YOU
There have been two other notable pressures. Firstly, the process of acquiring this money from the Arts Council (in part) set out a massively ambitious ‘outcome’, that was about the resulting play launching me into some kind of playwriting career stratosphere or something, and that self-inflicted pressure has been merrily in duet with the corrupting internal monologue I outlined in italics above.
I actually need to remember I’ve been funded to risk failing, and in turn discover something about my process, not just get a play written: this of course develops my career by making me a more self-aware playwright. On those terms, the funding’s done its job.
Secondly, as mentioned before, this has been a context-less writing project. It’s just a speculative un-commissioned try-out. I don’t have a production company or youth theatre or venue slot or team of collaborators, and as such I’ve created a fictitious context outside of myself and my truth as a writer. I convinced myself they wanted all those things that I’m not, and that if I didn’t do them, my play would never get produced.
So my new context for writing has to be my own truth and voice as a writer, and everybody else can get stuffed (apart from you lovely people who read the play out loud, and have met me along the path of its progression – you know what I mean, anyway).
I still have big fears. I talk a better play than I write. I can’t find my heart in this idea. I’ve wasted a huge amount of money. I have to start from scratch (though I don’t, obviously). This isn’t what I’ve told people I’m doing. They’ll think I’m a fraud or a cop-out or failure, like I’ve backtracked into my regular boring position of writing safety. I can’t write big plays and therefore I’m not a real writer.
These fears will recede at some point. Maybe not even during the course of this new draft, but they will, they will, they must.
And what next? Well, there was one beautifully clear question, one of the first that emerged in the post-reading discussion and that told me almost everything I needed to know:
Are you writing a fairy-tale or a political drama?
The outcome of all this is that I need to re-speak 23 scenes, 12 characters and 115 pages back through my own voice by mid-September – and now, my funded writing time is officially over.
And in spite of that – perhaps even because of it – it’s not since the early research period that I’ve felt most free in my writing.
