David Nuemann calls it: “shitting a choice.”
If there’s one thing playwrights struggle with the most, it’s finishing. Their plays, that is. I have spoken to many playwrights who tell me they have no end of wonderful ideas. Yes, it never seems that coming up with the idea is the problem, especially among young playwrights. They merely need to walk out their front door and several ideas attack them like creative muggers. But what they lack, very simply, is the stamina to finish a piece of writing. Many of them are constantly stuck in a “process” and few of them will get halfway through their current play before they get bored and decide to move on to the next plotline that is eagerly demanding their attention. Creation is not their problem; completion is.
I myself struggled with this and, in some ways, still do. Plays are not easy things to write. Good plays make the process seem effortless but it’s a clever ruse. There is the rare occurrence when, sitting down at your computer or typewriter or legal pad, the play simply flows out of you from beginning to end. You have a moment of crystalline clarity wherein everything simply falls into place: characters come out fully fleshed, situations fail to lose their prickliness and complexity, plots unravel with tenderness and surprise, and everything goes as smoothly as if rowing with a current. As I said, these are rare occurrences. Mostly, playwriting is an uphill battle between time, will, imagination, and logic. And few and far between are the playwrights who have truly come against these forces without realizing that sometimes the key to success is merely finishing.
The desire to edit is strong in every artist, but most especially in writers. We assume that every sentence we write has to come out perfect because we so often judge our first drafts against others’ final drafts. One of the most comforting things I have ever been told when it comes to playwriting I was told by Stuart Spencer on our first day of a workshop together. Stuart is the wildly successful author of “The Playwrights Guidebook” – which, if you have never read, is immensely helpful for young up and comers looking to delve into the world of theatrical writing. We were arranged around tables, Stuart at the head, and he turned to us and simply asked, “Do you realize how many drafts there were of A Glass Menagerie?” reminding us that what we read is the result of years of hard work and revision. That play, just like any other, did not come out fully formed and brilliant. I had a similar experience in a class on dramaturgy where we read early drafts of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The scenes were clunky, the writing stilted, and half of the play was simply a prose document outlining how the rest of it would run, with annotations like, “Krogstad and Nora will speak – great scene.”
The trouble with writing is that we fail to see the dreadful drafts that great men produced before they refined them into masterpieces. Instead, we as writers attempt to create masterpieces on the first go, focusing our attentions on editing what we have instead of finishing what we have. I myself am constantly pushing to finish, despite what I might think of the writing, attempting at all times to reserve judgment, before I take my little red pen to the manuscript’s page. Getting lost in edits before edits are necessary is the surest way to not complete anything. Every word can be perfected. The trick is all in the timing.
So then, how do you ensure that you will finish? This is a nugget of advice I have gleaned from a two-year graduate program at Sarah Lawrence and it may seem deceptively easy, though in all actuality it is not.
The key to success is the deadline.
When I set out to write a play, I will often get halfway through it before I realize that my own attention and passion is beginning to wane. This is natural; it happens to all people. We want it done and we want it done now. It is at this crucial stage that I collect together a group of actors, friends, or rivals and set a date. I say, “In three weeks, I’ll be having a reading of the first draft of my new play. Are you interested in reading the piece out loud and perhaps providing some feedback?” This does two things, psychologically. The first is it gives me an end point. Oftentimes writing a play can be like rowing over an ocean. Every page you finish, every inch you get closer to the horizon, seems like a mere drop in the bucket. There are still more pages to write; the horizon is forever one step out of your reach and land is nowhere in site. You have a vague idea of where you’re going but you have no idea how long it will take you to get there. This can make the process seem intolerably endless. When will the play be finished? Who knows? Failure thrives on such vagaries. But with a goal, with a deadline, one knows exactly how long one has to finish. Land has been spotted on the map. You have three weeks to get there. Suddenly, the writing seems so much more manageable because there will be an ending. There will be a date where one says, “What I have written I have written and there it is: my first draft.”
Attached to this is another very important idea: that of collaboration. Writing can be a terribly isolating endeavor. To some it seems like magic. I disappear into my room for a few months and suddenly, viola: I have a finished script. No one observes the pains, the stresses, and the frustrations we writers quietly bare: the blips of logic that keep us up at night, the motivations that become clouded, the theme that just doesn’t seem to be coming through. It is often in these situations that the only person holding us accountable for what we are producing is ourselves. Now, I’m not sure about you, but I am a rather forgiving taskmaster when it comes to uncompleted work. “Ah well,” I say. “I’ll finish it when I finish it.” Meanwhile, it languishes half completed while my attention slowly falls to other things. One more story left half told: is there anything more depressing? That is why I encourage writers to get others involved as soon as possible. Theater is a collaborative art, and when others know and expect a product, it is easier to produce that product. Because now, you are not the only one holding yourself accountable. Now, others are invested. And they are expecting a play. A play that you yourself need to produce (since no play I have ever known has written itself). There is a certain level of pressure to this situation but the pressure is manageable because, in the end, your friends and collaborators will accept whatever it is that you have written and however much you have written. But that desire to finish and present a finished product to them is often just enough fire to keep the playwright producing. They have a deadline and people are counting on them. These two factors have helped me finish many a play. These two factors have helped me to “shit choices.”
And that’s really what it comes down to when you are in the throes of writing. You can argue, you can debate, you can test and try out several different decisions (and what is writing but an unending series of decisions, each as fallible as the next). But in the end, you have to make a choice. Even if that choice winds up getting changed in the very next draft, even if at the moment you are unsatisfied with it and know it for what it is: a simple place holder. Still: you have gotten one step closer to completing a first draft of your play. Then, and only then, can the knives come out, can the babies be killed, can the revisions commence. Because, no matter what, you and your audience have a completed thing. You can observe it from start to finish, from lights up to final blackout; you can test and weigh the sum of it; and you can take it for what it is as a completed piece of theater and from there you can decide how best to proceed. Because, no matter what, there is a completed version of the play in existence. It may not be the best version of the play, but I have often found that editing is infinitely easier and more enjoyable than creating new material. And, as a first draft, you may be entirely unsatisfied with it. You may realize that the play you have before you is full of choices you have made to drive yourself to an ending, a play that is, in essence, “full of shit.” But, as I am very fond of saying to young playwrights and to myself, that’s why it’s called a first draft. Beautiful gardens often grow from nothing more than earth and a great pilings of shit.
the prolific playwright 