In her memoir
The Writing Life, the novelist Annie Dillard (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) recounts a conversation she once had with a painter of her acquaintance. At one point, she asked this man a very simple question - how did he come to be a painter? The answer she got was even simpler.
"I liked the smell of paint," he replied.
The answer is instructive. Ms. Dillard asserts that if one wishes to devote their life to a certain endeavor (especially an
artistic endeavor), they must love it on more than just an intellectual level. It must be elemental. So while her painter friend surely found deeper things to explore as he developed his craft, it was that most basic sense of smell that served as the launching pad and foundation of his artistic pursuits.
Ms. Dillard goes on to extend the analogy to writing. She advises that if you want to be a writer, you need to have more than just a desire to express your thoughts or tell stories - you have to truly love words. I was thinking about this the other day while working on a play of mine, and it led me to a thorny question. If a playwright's first love is for (and loyalty is to) the theatre, does he need to have the same love of words and devotion to the craft of writing as the novelist? Or, put another way, are playwrights
really writers?
Being a playwright myself, my knee-jerk reaction is to say, "Well, of
course we're really writers! We're every bit the wordsmiths that novelists are!" But the questions bear investigating.
Clearly, a novelist (or journalist, or poet, or essayist) has to have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of writing - grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc. It would be difficult to take a New York Times op-ed piece seriously if it flouted the basic principles of sentence structure. (Granted, there are a number of safeguards in place such as proofreaders, copywriters and the like to ensure the work gets published with as few errors as possible, but you have to assume that no editor is going to buy a piece that is simply riddled with grammatical problems.) But people don't speak the way that they write, and playwrights are always trying to stay true to the rhythms and language of every day speech. Even when writing in a heightened or stylized language - such as iambic pentameter - the starting point is still a person's natural speaking pattern.
So if I come on to the theatre scene and I say that I am writing plays about poorly educated, working class people with limited vocabularies, can I get away with having writing skills that are no better than the characters who inhabit my stories? After all, who would know better than me how to make these people sound authentic?
I don't know how to come up with a definitive answer to that question, but my impression is ... well, yeah. You could
get away with it, for a while. But what about the next play, and the play after that? Even if you continued to write for this same class of people, language is so full of subtlety and nuance that a gifted and dedicated writer could always find something new to explore (and thereby continually enthrall his audience). But the writer who's just "getting away with it"? I'd like to think - or is it hope? - that the cracks would eventually begin to show and expose him for the Johnny-one-note hack he is.
Take another look at painting. (Works great as an analogy, doesn't it? I guess it's because it's so, well,
visual.) Picasso spent the last part of his career trying to get back to a childlike state of making art. If you were to take a cursory glance at his later work, you might say to yourself, "Oh, those are just a bunch of stick figures.
Anybody can do that!" But when you take a closer look, you see the subtle mix of colors, the spatial relations, the depth of thought that went into the work that produce a feeling in the observer that no child's drawing hanging on the refrigerator could (unless, of course, you are the proud parent of said child). This was possible (as was cubism, as was the "Blue Period") only because Picasso had mastered the mechanics of painting, and mastered them at an early age. In other words, you can't go off the beaten path without a good set of walking legs.
To me, the biggest difference between playwriting and other forms of writing (yes, even blogging) is that there are actually
more rules that need to be followed, not fewer. While working on a new piece, we have to keep in mind that we are not only writing for a mass audience, but for actors, directors and designers who are going to bring that work
to the audience. We have to have a grasp of dramatic structure. We have to have a flair for rhythm. We have to paint as many pictures with words as the novelist, but do it in such a way that the actor has something to
actively do while they're onstage (or else it becomes performance art). A playwright who is ignorant of these rules or takes a lazy approach to his writing shows great disrespect to all of those people who must work together to bring the play to life, not to mention the poor audience that must sit through what will undoubtedly be a deadly night of theatre.
I think that to be a playwright, you have to love words
and theatre. What's more, you have to master the fundamentals of both. It's not an either or proposition. Good drama is hard, and it's hard earned. But history has surely shown that it can be done.
Who says you can't serve two masters?
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