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TONY KUSHNER: Part of the exciting thing about being a writer in any medium is that you discover
things inside of yourself, people inside of yourself and knowledge inside of yourself
that you—you had no idea that you had.
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When people say write what you know, I think the first question should be how do you know
what you know?
I mean, when you say write what you know, aren't you really saying write what you're
lazily conscious of knowing as opposed to what you probably know that you don't realize
you know.
Anybody who has written about human consciousness you know that the structure of human consciousness
is flat and horizontal.
It's vertical as much as it is anything and there are depths and depths and depths and
y'know as Whitman says, we contain multitudes.
So part of the exciting thing about writing in any medium is that if you start to dig
around in there and use there words and the muscular activity of writing you discover
things inside of yourself, people inside of yourself, knowledge inside of yourself that
you—you had no idea that you had.
If your'e writing a play and you—and you believe that you are teaching people something
that you know and they don't know, you have to condescend to them.
You're going to be bored because you're going over information you already have and consequently
you're going to bore them which I think for a playwright it's the worst sin of all.
Because you're still an entertainer.
An audience gets very smart very fast.
It's hard work to stay ahead of them so if your'e just recycling stuff y'know—it's
okay to be gay, be nice to gay people then you know that already, you pretty much know
everybody in the theater knows it and we're all bored and we sign the pledge and go home
and watch Breaking Bad or Project Runway or RuPaul's Drag Race and have a much better
time.
I think the reason writing teachers tell you to write what you know is because writing
has a lot to do with specificity and detail and if you're not real and specific, you don't
know what hour the sun comes up or y'know where in Tennessee this jar is or whatever,
your poem isn't going to be any good.
And so writing teachers tell people write what you know so you'll be y'know dealing
with—but y'know it turns out even though when I started in Afghanistan in 1997 most
people weren't thinking about it, I knew very little about it—it turns out you know a
lot about it.
You read a few books, you think about it, you meet some Afghans and you start to y'know
find commonalities between your experience and other people's experience, you take a
few guesses and sometimes they turn out to be absolutely accurate which is pretty swell.
It's an enormously important exercise for you.
I think it produces the best writing and you really do discover that, y'know, I mean it's
just a mistake to believe that your conscious enough of your own interior to know what you
may or may not do and then also when you finished writing it, especially if you're a playwright,
you give it to actors.
When I wrote Caroline or Change, it was a musical about African American, primarily
about an African American woman who works as a maid in 1963.
Of course I was scared to do that because I'm white, I'm Jewish, I'm gay, I'm male,
but one thing that helped was that I knew the person who was going to play the lead
role, Caroline, was gonna be an African American woman and in the case of the production, I
knew that the director George Wolf was going to be—was an African American and that in
my collaboration with them, the things that inevitably I got wrong, they'll help me fix
and then the audience will help you fix them because the audience will tell you, part of
the thing of being a playwright is to learn how to read an audience and they'll tell you
very quickly what you got and what you didn't get and you start to make adjustments and
y'know it's never about being right.
I think the information that's important is almost as significant to show an audience
what you're reaching towards as reaching towards it and getting it and being willing to fail,
as Melville says, is an important part of that if you're afraid of a shipwreck.
You're never going to leave the shore and never go anywhere.
So I think you hazard a lot and you may get there and in some ways you absolutely won't.
All art fails.
All art is Orpheus trying to get Eurydice from the underworlds.
It's all about trying to get the dead to come back to life.
I don't think we would make art, plays or anything else, if we didn't have trouble with
mortality and so all art always fails because as far as we know, it's never actually resurrected
the dead and it never will so failure is a big part of it and embracing it I think is
an important thing.
[Music]
I'm Tony Kushner and I'm encouraging all of you to subscribe to THNKR.
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