I think when I started writing,
I would write sort of more personal things that were related to my own life,
or my starting point would be friends
or people that I knew that I was really interested in.
And I think now... Now much more,
I tend to write about people or situations that I want to learn about
and understand a bit better.
'Write what you know'
is about what you know in your heart
or emotionally what you've experienced,
rather than what you've literally experienced.
And absolutely you can write about what you've literally experienced,
but I feel like that's maybe one play, or two plays.
And for me, I feel like a lot of what I've literally experienced
in story terms isn't that interesting.
But emotionally, I can connect to loss
or heartbreak or hope or...
revenge, you know, feelings,
or anger or whatever it is,
and actually, it's that that I write about,
but just setting it through another character, another world,
which is how I feel like writers tell stories
which seemingly on the surface are not their own,
but are still their own, even if the characters
and the world it's in don't resemble their own life.
I would encourage a young person
to write about something
they find interesting,
because if you don't find it interesting,
and it doesn't make you feel something - some kind of emotion,
some anger, some sadness, some rage, some passion -
then I think it's going to be quite hard
to convey that to someone else, to the audience.
If you're going to write a play,...
..you're going to have to stay with that story for a long time.
We can all kind of write half a play
and get really excited about it, and then go,
'Oh, it's not quite working - I'll just leave it. I'll put it away.'
But the real trick to it is to stick with something.
So if you're not really excited by that something from the beginning,
it's going to be really, really difficult to see it through.
I think about story first, more so than dialogue.
I think about what needs to happen to make a story better understood
and I think about what needs to be said
versus what needs to be shown.
All of my work, whether poetry or theatre,
works in the political sphere.
I think it's important, to be a black man in the UK
or in the west in general and for politics not to come into your existence,
and the clearest and most productive outlet for that
is through the work that I create.
I think all stories naturally have a beginning, a middle and an end.
But I think, writing a play, you can be as free as you want
with how you show that story, how you tell that story.
You can just take one moment and explode it.
You can work backwards.
You can... You can just have plays where
you're looking at an idea and exploring an idea, and it's not necessarily
a narrative that's following one particular character.
And the freedom of that -
that you can tell the story any way that you want -
is what I find really exciting about writing for theatre.
I wish there was a formula where I could go,
'Right, it's Monday - I'm going to write a play today.
'I'm going to start writing. This is Act I, this is Act II...'
I really do wish, because that would make life so much easier.
And it's great to have a framework, if you can find it,
but part of the job of the playwright
is to construct a new structure.
I've always believed that
each story has its own sort of organic, intrinsic structure.
And it's the job of the playwright to find
that structure within that story.
You have to keep action rolling.
I don't mean big car chases and stuff -
I mean the sort of consecutive results of what happened before,
like dominoes, yeah.
Moving one thing, moving the next thing forward.
Even a really long play, if it's really good,
there won't be anything there that's unnecessary.
Everything will be there and you'll go, 'Oh, we need that,
'because that's going to happen later.' We need to hear that story,
what seems like a shaggy dog story,
because in Act V or whatever it is,
they're going to come on and that's going to have some meaning.
Have a clear idea of what you want the play to do.
I like that question rather than 'What is your play saying?'
I think 'What is your play doing?'
Have a clear idea of what you want the play to do to the audience.
Whether you want to move them,
to inspire them, to frighten them, to terrify them, to excite them.
You'll have an understanding of why you want to do that,
which will be a kind of an emotional or intellectual understanding.
But have a clear idea of what you want to do,
and then a clear idea of what your play does.
And the difference between what your play does and what you intend it to do
will be the space in which you redraft.