The Playwright Prompt.

I haven't really had time to post here over the last few days. However, I did respond to an interesting prompt from journalist and theatre-lover Davi Napoleon. Since the article she's researching might only use a paragraph or a few words of my response (if any), I might as well put the full text on this blog. Why not, right?

The prompt was, "Can playwriting be taught? Have you become the playwright you are because of or in spite of playwriting classes you took? Or were these classes just irrelevant? Did anything outside classroom experience feed your development? Are there ways playwriting teachers can be helpful? Ways they can be destructive?"

Here goes.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Warning: May contain tangents. Actually, that's less a warning than a promise, but "Promise:" doesn't look good at the top of a page.

I have to say, it's damn hard to pick through my work and try to identify why it turns out the way it does, or why my process as a writer works the way it does. I mean, have you ever tried to un-bake a cake and figure out if you were using Grade A eggs? (And did I steal that line from somewhere? Can't think, it's almost 2 AM. Maybe I should write this tomorrow.) While I've had some good teachers, there are very few elements in my work I can directly credit to any of them in particular...however, I can tell you what they may have shown me, or convinced me to pursue. Also, I can tell you what I was reading obsessively at any stage on any particular script, or which writer's influence made something I was trying to imagine suddenly seem possible.

To be clear, my classes were not irrelevant. In fact, I have something I call the Luke Skywalker Complex, where I completely latch onto the ideology of a teacher, totally believe in it for the duration of the class, and afterward let my subconscious pick and choose the parts that I actually like while I go in search of the next teacher (or another writer to read obsessively). I guess I just can't do these things by halves. This is possibly because of my own insecurities, but also possibly because even when you disagree, what you can always get from a teacher is an understanding of their aesthetic.

I don't mean aesthetic in a hoity-toity, intellectual, latte-sipping sense. All right, so maybe I kind of do, but the way I think about it is, what is cool about plays, mine, yours, Sam Shepard's? What works, and why does it work? Totally subjective, totally open to debate, totally necessary to listen to someone, inside or outside a classroom, because finding out what's cool and why is really, really important. Disagree, start a nasty rivalry, but approach each statement fully and take it at face value, because the people who are willing to discuss how to write plays might be the only ones who will ever want to talk about this with you. If nobody's eyes begin to glaze over, it is entirely possible that you are sharing something important.

Three-quarters through college--I had already taken playwriting and screenwriting courses--I got to witness a playwright named Gian DiDonna explain the basics of dramatic storytelling to a room full of ten-year-olds. This was just amazing. The way he said it gave these grade-schoolers a leg up on many creative writing majors. It took less than ten minutes of clear, slow, thoughtful explanation, and the kids were off, hacking out their first scripts, feeling the power of doing so, even starting their first battles against the format (and, in one memorable case, against Gian).

So, if form is all you're interested in, you can actually learn the basics pretty quickly, and start banging out plays. But then, if form is all you're interested in, you probably don't actually like plays, or watching plays, or writing plays. This is also a reason why there are writers who are deathly afraid that any training at all will spoil their work--if there are rules, man, I'm, like, totally limited! Okay, okay, I can imagine a scenario wherein too much training, or a particularly controlling teacher, can hurt one's work, but it hasn't happened to me, and if it has, then I don't know it because I'm the one it happened to.

It seems to me that a good teacher's training can be crucial if he or she comes along at the right time, but you never know if that's what you needed unless you already got it, or are simply at a total loss without it. Aside from that, you're relying on your influences, your life, your loves, and the way you connect all those to the outline you just wrote down. This may not be helpful at all, but at least I believe it.

Thanks! I hope this will be of some use. If not, it was fun all the same just trying to corner my thoughts on the subject. I may actually re-read this tomorrow and beg you to forget I wrote some of it.

Best,

Russ