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"Being boring is the most offensive thing anyone can do"
Dave Armstrong
Dave Armstrong
Playwright Dave Armstrong
PRACTICAL WRITING TIPS FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
Tooling Up
Mark Amery writes with advice from playwright tutors Gary Henderson and Ken Duncum
In this series designed as forum for sharing playwriting tools, we look at, as our guest advisor Gary Henderson puts it so well, "How to find that nice clean through-line, when you seem to be sinking in a morass of words, sub-plots, blind alleys, ideas and themes."
First draft tends to be when many writers are looking for some perspective, and hence some dramaturgical input. It is here when the writer must turn from what they know instinctly, to what they must now craft. It's much like a muscle in our body - it has its instincts but then must be exercised to perform certain tasks effectively. That first draft stage is often about making what you have written instinctively dramatically more engaging in terms of exercising what your play has to say. Sometimes the new writer can feel they've got a little lost in the world they've created, and need to find the path that leads us through this world. It's a good place for asking questions.
Dramaturgy is often about asking the right questions at the right time. These might not always directly lead to solutions, but they should help you clarify both your concerns and the strength of the work - what the pathway is. Sometimes it can be of great value to have someone else asking the questions, but ultimately you as writer have to ask them of yourself.
Following his recent time as playwriting lecturer at Otago University, Gary Henderson provided a masterclass at the Aotearoa Playwrights Conference which included simple, direct questions the playwright can ask to clarify characters, story, structure, and theme.
These questions are not always relevant - plays needn't be written by formula - but they provoke investigation into what is there and help you clarify your own understanding of what you're on about. Rules can be good things to test out your work against, in the knowledge that if you're going to work outside of them - and an audience's expectations - your work needs to be all that much stronger.
Ask yourself the following basic questions and write down your answer in a short sentence. (Note the writing down bit - getting things worked out with clarity on paper can be a really useful part of the clarification process):
What happens in your play? (The plot)
What is your play about? (The theme)
What are you saying about that thing? (The point of why one is bothering to write the play in the first place - the dramatic premise)
Gary suggests that every moment in a play should support that dramatic premise.
For most playwrights, character drives a play.
Who is the central character?
What do they want?
What's stopping them from getting it?
What do they do about it?
Many will baulk at the notion of a ‘central character'. Bear with the exercise however -electing one doesn't mean throwing your other characters into supporting roles. The exercise recognises that most plays have a central conflict and that we the audience will consider one character's journey the most important in what the work says to us, even if the other characters are vitally important.
Ken Duncum quoted Robert Bresson in his APC04 masterclass: "Only the knots which tie and untie inside the characters give the story its movement, its true movement". People want things all the time - now, by the end of the play, in a lifetime. Look to reveal internal conflicts to make your characters alive and interesting to us: Where would your character rather live? Rather work? What do they wish they'd done? What event in their childhood affected them? What do they admire about their parents? What do they dislike? What are your character's contradictions? (they're giving/ but a sucker, confident/too proud) What are their flaws? Their passions?
Gary also suggests asking the following questions of your characters and their relationships.
What does the character want? Why?
And - for each relationship between pairs of characters...
What does A think about B?
What does A think B thinks about A?
...and vice versa.
Enjoy exploring the world of your play. Check out how much you really know about your characters - the pasts, their present, their hopes for the future. This is valuable information to have up your sleeve when it comes to keeping work cooking and can help provide characters whose wants and needs are as complex as ours. When Royal Court Young writers Tutor and playwright Simon Stephens challenges his students to ask the hard questions, foremost is "to stare unrelentingly into the soul of your characters and ask of them what it is they want. It is not easy. It is far more complex than writing a few quips."
Gary suggests these sets of questions can also be used as a starting point when starting writing a play and making up characters. Speed up that instinct! Spend only a few moments creating a character and start asking the questions.
Another quote care of Ken Duncum, from Lajos Egri who wrote the ‘well made play‘ classic The Art of Dramatic Writing: "Real characters must be given a chance to reveal themselves, and we (the audience) must be given a chance to observe the significant changes which take place in them."
When I was a kid I read that book, Where Do Babies Come From? For a while there, I thought my Dad found me in his beer at the pub.
Now that I'm a grown-up, I'm more interested in titles like Where Do Playwrights Come From And How Did They Get There?
One answer to that question would read something like this: Playwrights come from funky houses next to the zoo in Wellington and they have cats called Barry Manilow and Lola. At least Dave Armstrong does.
After the success of his play Niu Sila and the still-in-progress success of King and Country, he's obviously ‘made it' as a playwright.
Dave Armstrong thinks that's rubbish. "I'm a failed maths teacher who's delighted that no one's found me out yet. I feel like a con artist," he says. "My father used to say ‘This country has an artistic establishment and heaven help anyone that's not part of it.' If we do have an artistic establishment I definitely don't feel part of it," he says.
Armstrong has been writing funny lines for seventeen years, mainly for television. His credits include Skitz, Bro' Town, Public Eye, The Semisis and Spin Doctors (for which he won an AFTA television award for best comedy script). In the 90s he wrote words for Te Papa, Axis Advertising Awards, Marmalade Video and Housing New Zealand.
He's also written a book, True Colours, covering the 1996 general election. The book was described by Warwick Roger as ‘The best book written about New Zealand politics, and one of the best books written about New Zealand.'
Niu Sila, which he co-wrote with Oscar Kightley, premiered at Downstage in 2004 and has had seasons in almost every professional theatre in New Zealand. His play King and Country is doing the festival circuit and Circa commissioned him to write The Tutor, which will premier at Circa Studio in November this year. And there are four other play titles in his file at Playmarket.
"I'm delighted by Niu Sila's success, but to go around saying I'm successful? What does that mean? I'm certainly still paying off my mortgage. I had a full time job as a TV writer, so had I made it then? You've never made it. There's lots of things I want to do. I've got millions of ideas for plays. I've never written a novel. There's no career plan, no master plan. Success is great but you don't expect it. You do your best and you hope people like it. People become a cropper when they think they are successful."
A common thread in how Armstrong's projects are developed is that he allows his ideas to marinate until the optimum moment. Niu Sila was written seven years before its first production and The Semisis started as a three-minute sketch. Armstrong's current TV project, Seven Periods With Mr Gormsby, started as a theatre monologue fifteen years ago. "Me and Danny Mulheron wrote it for a late night show at Bats theatre. Everyone liked it, although some were shocked and outraged. We did it again at Downstage for a comedy festival and in Auckland. Then Danny was sitting in a meeting with TVNZ and Tony Holden said, ‘Got anything else?' and Danny talked about Mr Gormsby. All the fictitious characters that were in Gormsby's head we now had to make into real characters. We didn't start by going ‘We've going to make a million dollar TV series' because we would have been kidding ourselves. We got to the essence of the humour and put that on at Bats at 11 o'clock at night. Then we refined it."
"I germinate ideas. Good things take time. And you have to throw a lot of ideas out," says Armstrong.
Another thread in Armstrong's work is that he writes what hasn't been seen on a New Zealand stage before. "There's one line in Niu Sila that used to crack everybody up - ‘Bloody islanders. They use their stoves as heaters,'" he says.
"Without trying to sound PC, I think it's very hard to write about contemporary New Zealand without a good knowledge of Asian, Samoan or Pacific Island and Maori issues. It's not about just thinking you should, it's about their stories being so bloody interesting. So it's like cooking without spices. I don't care about representation, only in telling it like it is."
Armstrong says that if you're written a Chinese character who gambles, people think you're saying that all Chinese gamble. "I used to worry about it but now I don't. In King and Country two of the characters are Maori and one of them steals stuff. But that happened, and the other Maori character doesn't - he's a very honest and god-fearing. But the other one steals, and that makes him a great character.
"You get what I call the Sri Lankan Motorbike Gang Phobia. People are scared to write about Maori characters that are violent, say, so they make the violent character a Pakeha, or middle class. That's all right because you do get violent Pakehas but it doesn't quite ring true. I got censored for something one time because I wrote a Maori gang member, so I said, ‘Shall we should make it a Sri Lankan motorbike gang then?'"
The people who are most worried about being called racist are the ones who are ignorant, says Armstrong. "They don't want to get found out how ignorant they are."
"One guy in my soccer team said he loves theatre because you suddenly realise you're not the only person thinking that. I love that. That's why I do it. You want your audience to go, ah, you too huh. Oh god, you thought that and you felt bad about thinking that. Yah."
Another thread - Armstrong knows when to involve other people. "One thing I have learnt through working in television is I know when a play needs a workshop, or a talk, or everyone to shut up and let me get on with it. I don't sit in rooms for hours and hours saying, ‘What can I do?' I do a little bit of that, but more often than not I realise it needs to be seen by people and I need to see it on the floor. You've got to go through quite a lot of process and it can take a bit. Process is very important to me."
Missing deadlines is not a part of Armstrong's process. But acknowledging process can also mean acknowledging flexibility which has been the case with his commission for Circa. "The hardest thing is saying to someone, ‘Look I know I haven't delivered it but I'll get there. I had a really interesting experience with The Tutor because I did a draft and wasn't happy with it. I got feedback from the director and then we did a workshop that exposed grievous flaws. We didn't even have a reading at the end of the workshop because the play was in such a parlous state. It was one of the most back to basic experiences I've had. It was scary," he says.
Armstrong has twenty pages of ideas stuffed in a bottom draw. Marinating. "There's a lot of good material if you just shut up and listen. For example, quite a lot of people think I've written a clever, brilliant line but I've just heard it and used it. If you can get yourself in situations where you're not the dominant culture then you find really interesting things, like the (father) character in The Tutor, he's so funny. ‘Geezzz I'd love to fuckin' have you as a tradesman, I'd say, have you painted the house, and you'd say, no but I've changed its attitude.' I know guys like that. You couldn't write that without knowing those sorts of people. You've got to know them well so you can write for them."
Armstrong thinks there are epic stories in suburban streets and kitchen sinks. "And it's just a matter of them being told. New Zealand is a very rich country for that sort of thing. Sometimes drama is in the weirdest places."
Finding the time to write is the reason why Armstrong hasn't written more plays. Although he thinks that time can be an excuse. "I worked with someone who had a full-on day job and he wrote three novels between the hours of 5am and 7am. How much do you want to do it? Without sounding right wing, get up."
Armstrong thinks he's either a dramatist with a light touch or a comedian with something to say. "If I go to a play and it's just funny and light, then there's no point to it. Or if it's not political, or doesn't have something to say about the human condition, I'm bored. And if I go and it's heavy and full of messages and there's no lightness, I get bored. For me being boring is the most offensive thing anyone can do.
"I don't feel at the height of my powers. I still find it the hardest thing to write a play.
I'm a big respecter of theatre. And writing is the most honest profession there is. There are no short cuts."
Playwrights come from anywhere - they are born as playwrights and they grow up that way, they listen and wait, they work damn hard and they trust their ideas. Like Dave Armstrong.
Michael Wright talks about getting back to the "ah-huh!" moment of your play. He says rewriting can sometimes get too gluey and you need to remember what grabbed you about your play in the first place.
Wright is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His books on writing include Playwriting in Process, Playwriting Masterclass and Playwriting at Work and Play: Developmental Programs and Their Processes.
He suggests six line exercises when you're stuck. The beauty of having to write something in six lines is that there's no time for set-up, exposition, monologues or boredom.
Another exercise was to invent a story using eight or ten plot points. We then changed the order and took out anything extraneous. Many of us had the same experience - we dropped two plot points and point six became point two. Spooky.
Wright referred to the patterns of movement in your script as tension and release, like inhalation and exhalation.
On the art of rewriting - "Say you're stuck with your play... move it out of the mode of being a play to re-think and re-explore. Write it as a treatment or pitch, like you only have one page's worth of time to sell your play idea to a producer: what would be the hottest, most dramatically compelling things you could say about the play's story and characters? Anything to make it fresh and exciting and to bring out the most interesting colours."
Kristo Sagor is a young, passionate playwright from Germany who almost bounced off the walls. He eats sweet pastries for breakfast and doesn't like taking breaks. Since 1999 Kristo has had twelve plays published, which have been presented in many theatres, in Germany, Sydney and New York.
Sagor is also a maths freak and that's basically how he works out his structure. He never rewrites. I repeat, he never rewrites. He says it bores him and makes him lose his original idea. Instead, he calculates and mathematically creates plots and characters in his head before he sits down to explode out a first draft in a week.
I can best describe Sagor's workshop in the manner in which it was given: a mix of insightful tid bits delivered in a passionate, if not slightly mad manner:
"Stage directions should be poetic - you'll kick your reader out of the fantasy by using words like ‘actor' and ‘stage'... If you don't know why something in your play is beautiful, that's okay... The grammar of a language is the sum of all the rules without knowing... The beauty of your story is the mathematical connection of the characters and the scenes... Language is your best tool... Words that describe ‘good' and ‘bad' give the generation of your character i.e. cool, hip... An audience will love it if you can explain and describe things they can't express themselves... The world is complicated so art should be complex... Ah, Kristo, can we have a break soon? Use heart-opener words, where the audience will say, "Oh, my Grandmother used that word"... Use text differently i.e. create a sonnet like an obituary that explains the demise of a relationship... Use patterns, break them without people knowing it... No matter what a character is saying, they're really talking about their relationship with other characters or the world... Kristo. Break. Now... A squeal is the death of magic... Keep the secret of your character from your audience... A good title is one where other writers say, ‘Shit, that should have been my idea'... Lucky we don't all smoke."