The most important thing is to start.
And I think
the second most important thing
is to not be judgemental when you start writing,
and you should let your first draft be absolutely terrible,
and you don't have to show anyone your first draft.
When you're writing a first draft,
do not worry about it being absolute rubbish,
because it's only when you've done a sort of quite bad first draft
that you'll be able to look at what you've written and go,
'Oh, OK, that character is really strong.
'And that thing that happens to them there needs to happen at the beginning.'
And you can start to move things around and shift things.
Your first draft doesn't have to be like...
you know what your three acts are and you're just notating them.
The process of writing can be the discovering of structure.
It's OK for a lot of your early writing
to be about splashing about in something and finding out what's there.
I'm not a very organic writer.
I can't just have a blank page
and just kind of go with it.
I need to have some plan
and some framework to work within.
So I tend to do a kind of almost prose version of my story
and do cue cards, one for roughly each scene,
so I can kind of see what the story looks like, I think,
and then go through the kind of wild first draft
which may veer off from that.
If you've got your ending,
then it draws the whole story towards it like a magnet.
So, I'm very...
uncomfortable until I
And when I've got the ending, I can relax a bit
and allow the river of the play to move
more organically, because I know it's got to find where it's heading.
I've never had any idea
how something can end.
I mean, that may be obvious
in the plays, but, for me,
there would be no point. What would be the point in starting
if you knew the end?
For about 15 of my 20 years working as a playwright,
I've been a real planner.
Like, I really plan my plays.
The first stage is just kind of getting...
There's a phrase of Peter Brook,
where he described the 'formless hunch'. Yes?
Where you have this idea that there's kind of something
you kind of want to write about, and you don't know what it is.
When you get the formless hunch,
the most important thing to do is leave it alone.
Because if you start working on it too soon, you'll kill it.
You've got to let it be.
If it's any good, it will last with you for six months, nine months, a year.
If it doesn't, it's not good enough.
Then the next thing for me to do is,
if the idea's survived for six months and it's still there,
then I'll start researching it.
And between the idea and the research period
is, like, mulling it. It's always there.
It's there in the back of my head, it's there when I'm walking the dog,
it's there when I'm having a shower, it's there when I'm having a swim,
it's there when I'm rehearsing other plays,
it's there when I'm watching other plays,
just imagining them in the theatre. And that's like the mulling period.
So there's the idea, the mulling, the research.
And the research can be I might go and meet people
whose lives are in some way related to the subject of the story.
I might read other plays, I might read books,
I might watch films. I'll try and fill up a notebook
with ideas about the play that I'm writing.
And then the next stage will be the planning.
The planning stage for me
is when an idea is crystallised around a character in action.
In other words, a story.
I'll work on that. I'll really plan and develop and nurture the character.
And then I'll structure it.
I'll decide how many scenes,
how many characters, where the scenes are set, when the scenes are set,
what happens in the scene, what's the action of the scene.
And then the last thing I'll do - the last thing, the very last thing -
will be to write the dialogue.
Finish the play, print it off, leave it,
and then read it as though you're an audience member
experiencing the whole thing.
Don't read it with a pen in your hand - just sit and take the hit.
And compare that - the experience of reading your play,
having had that period of reflection and separation -
with what the intended experience was.
Don't read it on a screen. Don't read it on a screen.
Because if you read it on a screen, you'll change a full stop to a comma
and imagine you're doing a rewrite.
The temptation to place your cursor on the line will be too acute.
Read it on the page.
I work with others,
because the conversation with somebody else,
digging away at the material and...
going into workshops and getting people reading it
and exploring and evolving ideas
is totally, for me, key to my process
and the kind of work I like to see as well, actually,
that has really evolved and has many brains and hands in it and on it.
So, yeah, work with others. Show your work to them,
listen to what they say, get actors to read it out,
read it out yourselves.
There were 14 drafts of
I arrived with 60 hours' worth of audio research
from the travelling to all of those countries -
to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana.
And all of that was whittled down to an hour and 45 of text.
There were just so many other things that didn't go into the play.