Continuing from my last post, I was curious to find out how great playwrights physically began the process of writing their plays. This week I bring you these words from Susan Lori Parks. I love what she says because I’m always hunting for the practical within everything else that is, and should be, mysterious about creativity. It’s comforting to think we might not need Grand Inspiration to start a play, or even Great Ambition. Maybe we just need something more like a couple jump cables for our car battery. In this case, a joke or two:
SUZAN-LORI PARKS
“I’ve always been lost. I’ve never had anything to say. But maybe, you never know cause your voice changes and mutates, so maybe one day I’ll know more when I start and I’ll have something to say. Top Dog Underdog started with a joke. ‘Hahaha.’ Fuckin A and In the Blood started from a joke. I told a joke to a friend… I was in the back of a canoe and we were paddling along and I said to my friend ‘I’m gonna write a riff on The Scarlett Letter and I’m gonna call it Fucking A,’ and I thought that was the funniest joke ever—hahahaha! So I’m laughing and we paddle back to shore and I get on shore and it was really that thing where you’re still feeling it, you know? And I’m like okay, the first thing I gotta do is read The Scarlett Letter.”
Character vs. Structure
“For me it’s characters. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child. It’s gonna sound a little pathetic but I think I make up people that I want to hang out with. I make up my friends. And the more I know them, the more they tell me their life stories and their history. The more I know which rooms I want for which of those ‘friends’ to be in. And then the rest of it, the sort of—their reason for being in a room and all of the things that we would call plot and all of the things we would call conflict kind of bubble up right away, and then structuring usually happens for me on the backend.”
Suzan-Lori Parks’ story about writing a play based on a joke really resonates with me. I’ve written scripts on a dare, or to live up to a fun title. What are some jump-starters for you as a writer?
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