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Playwrights on Playwriting — First Drafts
Once you’ve got an idea for a play the next thing to do is get it down on the page. The first draft. For some writers the easiest stage, for others the most daunting. Here’s how some playwrights go about it.
First Drafts
“Plays often have no more words than a longish mid-length short story so it is possible to write a draft in a week or less. I wrote Temptress’s ten thousand words in three days of lying on a couch, napping, listening to music, reading and writing the occasional burst of dialogue. I write a first draft by hand and so quickly that afterwards some of it is illegible even to me. But it’s best not to linger over dialogue at this point. Get it down and move along. That helps generate pace. A reader can skip past the less interesting parts of a novel, and a viewer can fast forward through a DVD, but the audience has no control over the speed of a play and may drift off mentally if you don’t absorb them deeply in the action.” Philip St John (Maxine, The Sylvia, On City Water Hill) from Writing.ie.
“Give yourself permission to write really bad first drafts and write things that feel crazy, offensive, and dangerous. Write about the things that terrify you. Go look at the first page of the first draft of “The Homecoming” in the British Library. Pinter wrote things and crossed them out. A lot.” Emily Bohannon…
