Years ago, my good pal John Yearley, a gifted writer who absolutely needs to be a playwright because his humanity or his writer soul naturally seeks its expression through dialogue, said the following about a someone who neither of us regarded as much more than a mediocre hack. As we discussed one piece of recent writing which, like all the others we'd been aware of, had sorely missed its mark in terms of just plain being something we'd want to read, let alone listen to, John remarked:
She just doesn't love language. That's the problem.
And once he'd said it, I knew he'd hit on something so simple yet so powerfully true about all great writing, even good writing. It's always composed by people who find language fascinating. And so the word choices are not arbitrary, as though grabbed hastily off the first available K-Mart shelf. Instead the words feel inevitable and still there's a freshness, a vitality to the crash of this word and that idea, or that repetition with this turn of phrase. Great writing helps us peek under the hood of what it means to be human and while attempting such a miracle there remains another layer that winks in the direction of language itself, encouraging us to adore the words themselves almost as much as we adore the humans whose brains collect and assemble them.
Truman Capote might call this the difference between writing and typing.
I've been working with a number of individual writers lately, coaching them on the development of the next new work. And there's a way in which this sort of focused attention on a writer's efforts is more intimate than teaching a group writing workshop. And it's also quite a bit more scary to me. In a group setting I feel my job is to gently suggest, to nudge the discussion hither or thither in hopes that the assembled group of writers might make some shared discoveries about each new draft that gets presented. As such, I feel a bit like a conductor. I may point to the bassoons here, the percussion there, and if 85% of my ideas about what really needs the group's attention are caught, I feel we've made a successful workshop.
In one-on-one work, by contrast, I feel much more pressure to catch everything there is to be caught in terms of ways of seeing an evolving new work. Somehow it feels as though without the benefit (and the intrusion) of other people in the conversation, I'm far more conscious of each little detail I choose to overlook because in my private catalogue of this writer's hierarchy of artistic needs, some are just more critical to the whole undertaking than others and it's up to me (and only me) not to let us get distracted by one of the less revealing flaws.
One question I find myself asking again and again as I review these new drafts of new plays and musicals is a variation of Yearley's question about whether a writer clearly can be observed to love language. I find myself returning again and again to a fundamental test of the would-be playwright:
Does this writer need human beings interacting on stage in a room filled with strangers observing it in order to tell this story?
If the answer isn't a full-throated Hell Yes! then the next question we must not shy away from is simply: Why? Why must this thing appear to the world as a play rather than as an essay, a poem or a novel?
I don't want us to be able to answer that last question in any kind of coherent or articulate way. But I'm pretty sure that whatever new play or musical we're writing better damned well be making a serious go of it for us. That much seems clear.
P.S. Isn't "mediocre hack" redundant? Probably. I should go back and change that.
