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Playwrights on Playwriting — Beginning
How do playwrights get ideas? How do they begin writing their plays? What do they do to get the first draft completed? Below are some thoughts from playwrights on how they begin.
Ideas and Getting Started
“I’m a thorough planner. I don’t write from nothing onto the page. There are five stages of the writing process for me. There’s a lengthy period of months and months of mulling. I move from what Peter Brook describes as “a formless hunch” to starting work on a play. I’ve got to go very slowly with it. The slowness is key. Then I will start researching — reading around the subject I’m writing about. I might look at art, listen to music, watch movies or interview people — to just start filling up the sponge. From the research comes a lot of note-taking: I’ll do exercises to start generating material, and that will take a month or so. Then I’ll start to land on the characters in the play — what they want, what’s stopping them from getting what they want. After that, I’ll figure out how many scenes the play has and how many characters are in each scene. Then the process of writing is like painting by numbers. I really love that because it allows me to work very quickly. The tension between slowness and speed is really useful. Simon Stephens (Birdland, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Heisenberg) from Broadway.com
