Demythologizing the Writer: How I Learned to Get Out of the Way
A young writer’s struggle with perspective and ego.
Auteurs bore me.
I hope this is a sign of at least some artistic maturity, as it would make the me of only two years ago laugh and condescendingly disagree. Pretension and insecurity aside, though, I’d even now understand where he’d be coming from; there’s insight to be gleaned from spending some time in what’s billed as an unfiltered representation of a singular artist’s mind. The temptation to treat a Tarantino film or a Spike Lee joint as a fearless, unwavering dive into an individual’s subconscious and want to follow suit without compromise can be overwhelming to a young artist.
Resist it.
A script isn’t a novel; it is not a finished work in and of itself and even the best version of what a script can be should be met only with enthusiasm for the potential that it represents.
For a writer, the process of coming to realize this hard truth is all at once exhausting, perspective-shifting, laborious, liberating, and necessary. The deification of writers as omnipotent auteurs, particularly those whose work is only the first step towards a larger production (playwrights and screenwriters), is not only an impossible illusion that discredits countless others and muddies one’s perception of the finished product as a whole, but is also a potential poison to the mind of any aspiring young person who wishes to craft such an identity for themself.
This won’t be an account of my own process of coming to terms with the fact that my “vision” as a playwright would never be half as useful as whatever a team of creatives could make out of my kernel of an idea- that story is short and boring (five minutes into callbacks for my first production made it clear that the person who wrote the script is often the least equipped to bring any game-changing insights to it). Instead, I’d like to use my time spent working on the 2019 production of my original script, Family Values!, to discuss the delicate, improvisatory process of learning on the fly when it is necessary for a writer to stand their ground and when it is the best thing for production for a writer to take a backseat.
As a script, Family Values! was fine. The play was a darkly comedic one-act centering on a standard American sitcom family trapped in a surreal, nightmarishly upbeat world as their lives and relationships unravel around them. Complete with a fake live audience and a laugh track, it was both written before and rendered nearly un-producible by Disney and Marvel’s WandaVision (I’m just bitter, it’s a fun show). This article won’t be about the quality or content of my not-too-remarkable, not-too-embarrassing theatrical debut, but rather the exploration of what my role in the production was and what it could’ve been had I understood then what I do now. I note that the quality of the script doesn’t veer too far one way or the other only to emphasize the notably limited ability of a play’s blueprint to carry the entire apparatus to the highest heights or lowest lows. This isn’t to say that it isn’t a core factor; if you want a great production, a great script is both a necessity and the farthest thing from a promise of excellence. The fact that the final production of this particularly average play featured both great and questionable qualities is a testament to that.
My time spent with Family Values! can be described, in a word, as humbling; this isn’t only because the first few attempts to mount any sort of production of the script were laughable failures (I might add that these are the productions with which I was most heavily involved in), but because it eventually led to my realization that once the script found its way to a director and a production team, I was no longer the creator. What I was to create had already been created; it was a script. It was a pile of papers stapled together that could perhaps serve as a guide with which someone else may create something of a larger scale. The production, which was to be created by a team of people using what I once thought was the art itself as a jumping-off point, would not be serviced by my strict insistence that the play I saw in my head be brought to fruition by people with completely different (and at times conflicting) sensibilities. It would, however, benefit from my willingness to provide the team in question with whatever they decided that they may need from me.
To write a script is to suggest that a certain story should be told. To have a production of that script brought to life is to be told that there may be a reason to tell that story and that there may be a way of telling it that is worth the time of both the creative team and the audience. To sit in on an audition room for that production is to understand that the slight variations of yourself and your limited imaginations of others that you saw telling this story in your head are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the various perspectives that could mold the suggestion of a story into something useful. It is impossible for a production that truly makes use of all available perspectives to be didactic; if each person involved in a production truly brings a piece of themself to the story and is willing to let that piece be seen, picked apart, and used in service of the foundational narrative, one singularly correct reading of the piece stops existing due to the fact that no one person has the objective ability to understand everything at play.
Writing for live theatre differs from novel writing and even filmmaking in the sense that every individual detail of every individual performance, intentional or otherwise, becomes a part of the audience’s viewing experience, inevitably impacting their absorption of the narrative in ways that not the playwright, director, lead actor nor costume designer could have accounted for. For a writer to ignore this truth in pursuit of full control over what the audience extracts from a piece is not only arrogant but also futile. This is not, however, to say that a playwright shouldn’t have specific hopes for an audience; the more specific the vision of the writer throughout the writing process, the greater the well of emotional and intellectual content for the creative team to later pull from. The key here is for the writer to understand that the writing process and the production process are two separate entities that require two separate skillsets. If the writing process necessitates that the writer sees a vivid and specific image of the production in their head, then the production process necessitates that the writer fully admits that they are the only person in the universe who will ever be admitted to that particular version of the production. While this all paints a clear picture of what a writer during production should not be, the question remains; what is a writer’s role during the production of their script?
I don’t know. I’d imagine that few do and I’d imagine that it will be a long time before I join them. I have, however, been able to scrape together a sacred few useful pointers by way of simple trial and error. I gave many wrong answers to many great questions throughout the production of Family Values!; early on, these wrong answers were the result of a false perception of the questions being asked. It was my misunderstanding that the director and actors spent the first half of rehearsal trying for themselves to understand what I had written, only to eventually turn to me to make sure that they had “gotten it right” (that’s every bit as grossly arrogant as it sounds, and I worry that aspects of the production, such as the actors’ perceptions of certain aspects of their characters, suffered significantly in service of my ego). Eventually, I came to understand that the relationship between myself and the creative team was more or less akin to that of a patient and a therapist; though I was the only one with access to all of the raw material that we were trying to make sense of, it was the rest of the team that was in an objective enough position to make sense of it.
Being a writer is not entirely dissimilar to relaying a particularly confusing and hazy dream, and being a director is not wholly dissimilar to being a psychologist tasked with using their training, perspective, and (perhaps most importantly) personal distance from the subject to try and synthesize a cohesive and digestible narrative from the abstract. When the director asked me what I believed the in-depth backstory of the Grampa character to be, it was not so that I could provide her an in-depth take on what the character symbolized in the subtext of the piece, but rather so that she could understand the larger picture of the piece of my psyche being laid out for her to make some sort of sense of.
A playwright will have many duties to fulfill throughout the lifespan of their piece. There will be times at which they will be called upon to know exactly what they want. There will be other times at which they will be called upon to swallow their pride and accept that their perspective on what they see as “their own work” is perhaps not the most practical or useful at the moment. At all times, they will be called upon to assess the situation and context of the point in the production and use that assessment to decide how they may make themself most useful in the given moment, much like any member of a production team is liable to be called upon to do. The triumphs and failures that I witnessed the production of my script undergo, both great and small, all became invaluable stepping stones on my path to becoming a more efficient component in a machine that aims to create something greater than the sum of its parts. I hope to use what I have learned to land myself in situations in which I may continue to learn, and perhaps eventually become the best version of a playwright that I can be, whatever that may look like.
