quotations about playwriting
I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Notebooks
Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought nevertheless to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays--to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.
HAROLD PINTER
The New York Public Library Literature Companion, 2001
Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger--without even knowing it is happening to you--of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not the public view of itself.
EDWARD ALBEE
Stretching My Mind
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
stage directions, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Playwriting is a physical craft, and it's a thing that requires muscle, intellectual and emotional. People who are afraid of that, people who are afraid of doing damage--those are the people who'll never make it. You have to be willing to be a killer.
MARSHA NORMAN
The Art and Craft of Playwriting
Because playwriting is by necessity a collaborative process, the playwright's work has to be robust enough to survive the interventions of the rest of the creative team, but supple enough to absorb their input.
FRASER GRACE & CLARE BAYLEY
Playwriting: A Writers' and Artists' Companion
When I was a kid, another of the prime reasons to be a playwright was you would have a poster with your name and the title of your play on it that you could then hang in the living room of your inevitable penthouse.
JOHN GUARE
introduction, Theater Posters of James McMullan
All theories of what a good play is or how good a play should be written, are futile. A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards makes an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.
MAURICE BARING
Have You Anything to Declare?
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
The difference between a live play and a dead one is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the latter the plot controls the characters.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.
VINCENT H. O'NEILL
Death Troupe
Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't -- like me right now -- people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.
TRACY LETTS
"Tracy Letts Is Still Haunted by His Past", New York Times Magazine, March 21, 2014
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
HENRIK IBSEN
attributed, Four Major Plays
What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Paris Review, fall 1981
People fail to realize the technical conditions of drama, and think that, in the case of so simple a matter as playwriting, everyone is as good a judge as his neighbor. With regard to music and painting, you will hear people modestly confess that they have no expert knowledge, though "they know what they like." With regard to drama, they are troubled with no such diffidence. They not only know what they like, but they know what you ought to like, and more especially what you ought to despise.
WILLIAM ARCHER
The Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-valuation
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
T. S. ELIOT
New York Post, September 23, 1963
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
He who would write for the theatre must not despise the crowd.
CLAYTON HAMILTON
Theory of the Theatre
When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
AUGUST WILSON
The Paris Review, Winter 1999