Obstacles. Those bits in the middle.

We've all had issues with obstacles--those pesky road blocks that all protagonists have to navigate successfully in order to achieve their goals. Every play needs 'em. But some playwrights have trouble finding them.

I almost always know the beginnings and endings of my plays. Can't start unless I do. I usually also know of some first-act cliffhanger or Momentously Dramatic Moment I need to have happen.

Some folks road map their projects, using index cards or spreadsheets. I think I envy that technique, but I also wonder if by the time I've drawn out the entire plot I may have lost the urge to write it. I say this because I tried it. I spent more time trying to arrange the cards so I could see them all at once, but half of them fell off the wall and behind my desk and they are still back there, presumably talking amongst themselves and the dust bunnies. 

I tried again with the string-path thing, sticking things on the wall and running strings between relevant items. Although that was a complete disaster (it made me dizzy), I did end up with a ten-minute play set in a spider web and about a dozen new political conspiracy theories so it wasn't a complete loss.

In any event, how do we negotiate the ascent up the shark fin (see diagram)? What gauntlets do we design for our protagonists to bravely fight through? What are the individual obstacles? How do we playwrights find them?

I usually take a look at the world of the play itself and see what difficulties it may provide organically.

Assuming I have my basic characters and a general idea of the world of the play, I start to think about some of the following things. Let's start with the basics:

- What does the protagonist want?
- Why does he/she want it?
- Is the protagonist good, evil, or complex?
- Why does the antagonist try to foil the protagonist's efforts?
- Is the antagonist good, evil, or complex?
- Where are the ethical limits/moral boundaries for both protagonist and antagonist?
- What actions do I initially envision the protagonist taking? What would be the results of those?
- What would be the next logical step?
- What would be the next illogical step?
- What dramatic moments do I imagine taking place within the play?
- What are the breaking points for the protagonist/antagonist?
- What are the protagonist's flaws and how does he/she work against him/herself?

Next, let's look at the world of the play in all of its aspects.
Is the world “real” as we know it, hard-wired and limited by our current reality, or is set within magical realism? If not real, what rules apply that don't in the real world (because even in magical realism there have to be rules) and how do these exceptions affect the characters? What limitations or freedoms does that world impose or allow?

Politics: What are the political aspects and boundaries? Are the characters discriminated against? Do they discriminate? Are they endowed with political power or under political restraint? What are their views? Are they active or passive? What form does the government take? Democratic? Authoritarian? Absent?

Sexual/gender: What natural empowerments or liabilities do the sexual/gender aspects of each character impose? What views of life? What past experiences? What possibilities for the future? What ways of creating joy in a relationship? What ways of destroying a reputation? Are they out or closeted? Are they bigoted or welcoming? Is it against the law to be anything but straight...or gay?

Geographical: How does the physical world of the play affect the characters' actions? Is it oppressively hot or freezingly cold? Is it dangerous? Is it unremarkable? Is it lush? Destroyed? Post-apocalyptic or Garden of Eden? In what settings does the world of the play take place: a bar, bowling alley, a castle, a resort, a tenement, a living room, a detention center? What aspects of your setting can be used to challenge a character?

Physical/Medical: Look at the physical traits of your characters and see how they relate to the world around them? What aspects make it easier/more difficult for them to interact? Are they too good looking? Shunned for disabilities? Comely/plain? Sick? Contagious? Can they speak/hear/see?

Other things to think about:

- Time/date/era of the work
- Technological: age of the plow/industrial revolution/computerization/cybernetics?
- Psychological: are there any neuroses/phobias/past events that may inhibit action?

And: Is the protagonist's goal actually reachable? Or are they doomed to failure?

I examine all the elements of the world my characters inhabit and I look to see how they can either aid or work against them. Every particular in the world of your play may serve as an organic problem or a tool used by another character to trouble your protagonist.

Just Mull. And Enjoy It.

It's called Writer's Block, that agonizing period fraught with insecurity when the creative river dries up. Writer's Block: when you need the words to come trotting out like frisky thoroughbreds, but they remain stubbornly mulish, refusing to leave the barn. (A barn you can't enter, by the way, not even to get a glimpse of them in their stalls, effectively stalling your work.)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that we've all had this experience. We're told it's not fun. It's distressing. Oh my, how good would it be if the lines just paraded out proudly as they should, in a constant cavalcade, all dressed up and looking spiffy.

It does happen. I have several 10-minute pieces and a few 2-minute monologues that just flooshed out of the vomitorium smack onto the page. Such a glorious rush. However, my pride rests on my glacially expanding canon of full-lengths (that subject, the merits of short plays vs longer ones, in another blog, farther upstream. Probably followed by “The Supreme Annoyance of 'Multiple Metaphor Pileup' in Essay Writing”).

Anyway, I digress. The creative standstill does happen. Perhaps more often than we'd like. But I take serious issue with the moniker “Writer's Block.” It’s negative. It plants the idea in every writer’s head that Something Is Wrong!—something bad that screams out to be fixed.

The term “Writer's Block” is, as Gandhi used to say, B.S. This lull in our usual flow of typing is not something to worry about. Maybe we're just tired. Maybe we had too much to eat last night. Maybe too much on our minds.

Relax, it's okay.

In my normal writing process there are periods where I sit and think about my current scribbling, sometimes for hours or days at a time. Weeks, even. It's part of the way I write. My mind goes off into the ether and I'm beyond reach. I don’t even experience concrete thoughts or specific ideas. I feel like a whale shark, mouth agape, gently trolling for krill. I’m lucky to have friends and family who recognize the thousand-yard stare and take turns feeding and dressing me. I'm betting there are a few of you out there who experience similar episodes.

I accept this as a natural part of creativity. I expect it. I enjoy it. I consider it work, as equal a part of the writing process as the frenetic mistyping that thunders out when The Big Reveal finally hits. It's like great sex: a slow, thoughtful beginning, a journey of sensual exploration and discovery that gradually builds up to a fevered climax of gushing words. And this happens several times in every full-length creation.

Let’s call this languid synaptic search Mulling. Mulling is an activity where the imagination goes in search of those magic moments that not just advance the text, but glorify it. Mulls, like whale sharks, troll for those creative krill, Epiphanies. In that massive sea of ether, each Mull needs to find its appropriate Epiphany. Because there is only one Epiphany for each of the writer’s different Mulls.

There will be false alarms along the way, connections that look exciting, promising, and juicy, yet turn out to be disappointing when the resulting sploosh of typing at last breathily subsides and the Epiphany looks around at your apartment and talks about redecorating. Alas, we must change our phone number once again and begin searching anew.

But I never worry. Ever. Because in my experience, nearly every questing Mull has found its mate. It's a zen-like journey—and it's always been worth it. I sit back, relax, and go Mulling merrily along, roaming the ether for that special Epiphany. It's a lovely landscape, and I always find equal amounts of joy in the peregrination and in the anticipation of consummation.

And frequently I find things I never imagined.  Because Mullination by nature largely involves aimless wandering, it sometimes runs into ideas, phrases and words that take me to areas I hadn't previously considered. Each one expands my landscape of possibility, and almost always the work in question benefits tremendously.

I say screw The Block. Deny the disquietude, forswear the fantods, and Get Your Mull On. Big time.

Best Advice I Ever Received About Playwriting: Learn How to Do Everything

Seems like a simple concept, and yet many playwrights continue to keep themselves away from the rest of the profession. I've heard them say things like “The more time I spend learning X, the less time I have for writing,” or “I'm not a set designer/director/actor, I'm a playwright. I need to concentrate on my writing,” or “I really can't afford the time.”

I do realize that we are squeezed for time; many of us work two jobs, have families, and whatever time we have for writing is precious. I'm semiretired and have more time than I’ve ever had to spill words all over a page. But when I worked full time I forced myself to get up earlier, trek to the coffee shop, invigorate my blood with fresh ground Costa Rican, and pretend I was on the fast track to a Tony.

We do what we can do in this profession. To take a note from the revered actor, William Shatner, I encourage playwrights everywhere to seek out new life and new civilizations within the trade. To boldly go into every part of the theatre, and learn about what happens after you set down the words that the rest of the profession hangs on.

Because, yes, without those words, there'd be little to do. But in my experience, writing in a vacuum has serious inherent liability. You’ve heard the chestnut warnings: never require the use of a whirling helicopter in a community theatre version of The Entire Vietnam War in Four and-a-Half Minutes. Never insist on 30 tuxedos and an orchestra for the closing number of your ten-minute play, My Cat Has a Cyst.

By spending time learning the crafts and working as a director, dramaturg, stage manager, artistic director, literary manager, and designer of sets, lighting, costumes, and sound, I’ve learned these playwriting lessons—the hard way. Extrapolate as needed:

• Expecting an actor to learn perfect Russian pronunciation to deliver the line “Umyay kahpusty bolshiah kahrona” (“My broccoli has a big head”) may not work out as you expect;
• Medieval dresses that hang to the ground (they ALL did) will cause your actor to go face first into the scenery if you require her to cross the stage at a run;
• Never give a legally-blind person a real sword;
• Attempting to punctuate a scene where two actors are debating work ethics while playing a game of racquetball with ball-bouncing sound effects will (a) create 30 sound cues, (b) cause the actors to lose their places at least once, (c) make the stage manager call down Biblical plagues on your head, and, most importantly, (d) annoy the hell out of the audience with repeated “thwop-ke-whops”;
• And speaking of stage managers, NEVER, EVER give them a task they have to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to accomplish to make your vision happen. They are your allies, your best friends, and the lifeline to a successful production. I'd rather have multiple root canals than a pissed-off SM;
• A reference to a recent historical event that has nothing to do with the setting, time, or theme of the play destroys the linear flow of a play;
• Asking for repeated “specials,” lighting cues that require rewiring, cue creations, and time spent in the flies may be technical overkill for a small, budget-bereft production;
• Asking for a set with the technical complexity of The Price or American Buffalo (both heavily laden with stage crap) may take your play out of production consideration. Theatre companies are (almost) all destitute. Asking for things above the average third-grader's school lunch budget may well get you a “Thanks, but we had 12 million submissions” email. My own preference, learned by trial and lots of errors: You can do (almost) anything with a black-box stage and minimal set pieces. And it's way cheaper.

Everything you do in theatre other than plying your trade as a scribe will benefit your writing. You are not just writing to create a world, you are writing to make that world credible and as easy to produce as possible. You are not alone in this work, not one bit. When you take the time to work with others and learn from their expertise, they will teach you how to be a better and more successful (produced) playwright.

The Essential Nature of Cosmic Truth Revealed. Finally.

The last question in the post-show talkback was “In your opinion, what was the theme of the play?” Decent question, and one most likely asked by matriculating theatre students of a certain, still-in-discovery age. Usually this question gets a scatter-shot result, with any number of audience members throwing out concepts with reckless abandon. (“Love!” “Despair!” “You need zombies!”)

In this case, as stated conspicuously in the text, the protagonist's crisis was a “loss of faith.” Decent premise, and certainly can lead to any number of possibilities.The protagonist, a life-long dedicated Christian, finds himself suddenly doubting the very existence of God, the supreme peg on which he's hung his entire life, the very nexus around which he has structured his beliefs, morals, and prejudices. And like most inherently good people, he feels this absence of faith is, not a flaw in the either the deity or the religion itself, but a flaw in his own system.

The Christian God is, by its very nature, perfect. And therefore, he reckons, if god does not exist, or he believes the god does not exist, the responsibility is not God’s, but most definitely his. Guilt abounds. Uncertainty. A questioning of the very nature of the fabric of his existence. So (based on the advice of his friendly neighborhood pastor to “take a vacation”) off he goes, like Don Quixote with a midwestern accent, on a quest to find . . .  he knows not what, because before this (and like many good-hearted folk who put their lives in the hands of their deity) he's never bothered to examine or question his own existence.

The non-thinking blind man begins to travel. We await the awakening of his thinking muscles. Now that hold a promise of good theatre!

And the more I think about the play, the more I come back to the remark I made in the talkback, that by the end of the play, at the point of catastrophe, just before the oh-so disappointing deus ex rectum (when the God of Resolution is pulled from the playwright's nether region to magically tie up the loose ends), I believe that the protagonist had suddenly and finally found, NO, not the answer to his question of faith, BUT, more importantly, the direction in which he was supposed to head in order to achieve his goal. This is the critical moment. We, the audience, can assume, as the character begins to wake up… discover… break out of his self-imposed modes of thinking and self-defeating reactions, discovers his turning point, that he will stumble along his way into the light sooner or later. In this and many other cases, the complete answer, the protracted denouement, the closure,  is not important. Really. Anti-climactic in many instances, I believe (yes, pun intended).

What is critical is his breakout moment, that crest-of-the-shark’s fin of rising action epiphany when he suddenly, surprisingly, and naturally knee-jerks into a heretofore completely different mindset. And it worked. The moment was honest, vital, truthful, and OMG so effin’ sexy.

And yes, most everything had worked up until (and including) that critical point. But the next scene, the last scene, was the wrap-up, and I didn't buy it. Nothing up until then even indicated the resolution the playwright presented. But there we were. Happy ending achieved. (And as some are aware, “Happy Ending” has more than one meaning these days. I mention this disreputable definition simply because a copout ending is metaphorically the same.)

Anyway. Truth. Helluva concept. Our intrepid hero seeks it, but has no idea how to find it. His pitiful wanderings are both aimless and fruitless because he’s never been acquainted with non-linear, instinctive, self-directed thinking. He doesn’t understand it. It’s not a language he can speak. So he looks for a clue, something he can recognize, something he understands the language of. His belief in God has deserted him, so he instinctually seeks something to replace it. He seeks a new set of rules he can follow, something that will give him the answers to Life. And herein lies his real problem: He seeks to replace his panacea, and does not look at himself. He who worships icons and subjugates himself to these idols cannot understand being his own god. He seeks outside direction and can’t trust his own heart. So he seeks a brand new, simple, objectively clear answer, just like the ones he’s believed up till now.

If life were that easy, drama would not exist. But Truth, like the sculpture device presented in this play, is representative. Literalism and objectivity are useless here; what our hero needs to unlock the door is a metaphor, a non-linear, abstract, figurative epiphany. When one’s own language fails, Truth must communicate by abstracts, by emotion.

Truth. Ya know . . . it sounds great, but . . . its very nature is a threat. It promises an objectively accurate mirror to one's own psyche. But who really wants to see who they are? We say we do, but frankly . . . that shit is terrifying. We spend so much time in our heads, subconsciously building up an image we can live with, be proud of, that just gets us through the day. Truth? Dude . . . absolutely! No problem. Talk to me tomorrow, okay?

And here I arrive (OMG finally) at the crux of the biscuit: truth in playwriting. The play I recently saw upon which I base this circuitous typing exercise was . . . well . . . the story moved, the characters were (almost) all interesting, and the direction was solid, imaginative, and visually stimulating. But the play itself — the text — forsook finding the truth of the dramatic crisis and settled for an out-of-left-field plot device to steer the protagonist into a revelation that supposedly settled the dramatic question. I respectfully say, “Poppycock.”

I tell my basic playwriting students this: that a denouement does not have to wrap things up tightly. And here is where I see what kind of people my students are. Life, I pontificate sonorously, is a really long and mostly boring story. Nearly every play you see is the last part of a section of someone’s life. Could be the very last section, in which they die. Could not be, in which case they go on. But, in well-crafted plays, they go on changed. Irrevocably. Some students get this in theory, others completely shut it off. For them Truth means absolute closure; everything all tidied up with no flaps sticking out anywhere. And this forces them into a mode of playwriting that can easily deny the very essential truth of human existence: that the imperfect nature of humanity denies, nay, abhors a clean wrap-up.

So, the poor befuddled students ask me, how do you end a play?

Truthfully, I reply. You’ll know it when it happens. Blank looks ensue, possibly scorn.  I try again. Let the play tell you, I say. Let the play write itself. Now the looks range from one or two quiet “I got it” smiles to notebooks petulantly slamming closed.

Explication: The stimulating device in the play in question was the protagonist’s dying mother. There were three scenes featuring her, but her element was never truly utilized. Her illness never had the emotional weight to sway our intrepid yet quixotic hero into seeking the truth of his own dilemma. No interaction, no action at all, really, between near-catatonic Mom and our intrepid hero. No, it is not our job to assume what he felt, how he was affected. How did he feel about her? All we ever saw of her was her death. That wasn’t special; mothers die all the time. Yes, it’s tragic, but without seeing the relationship itself how can we judge the effect of the passing? Did he love her? Was there a long-standing resentment? We don’t know. So her passing could not sway us to understand his final decision.

He says he suddenly no longer believes in God; fair enough. What does he do to rectify that dilemma? Does he seek spiritual answers in a quest for religious truth? No, he gets drunk, does drugs, falls in with ne’er-do-wells, and tries to learn sculpting. While on this hejira he deserts his wife (a cipher in the play; does she have a personality? We never find out. She is the true Stepford wife, dutiful, and nearly without identity/dialogue), leaves his dying mother to slowly fade away, and abandons both his daughters, only one of whom will have anything to do with him (another issue raised but never examined). But hey ... the mother's death brings him home, instills cosmological hope, and makes him beg for the love of his wife. Ooooo-kay.

Truth. It doesn't happen here. Not in this play. It comes sooooo close, then diverges at the 1:54 mark. A breakthrough—a true breakthrough--happens and then the play leads, no it LEAPS, to something that should have taken another 43 minutes to get to. Truth is the biggest demon for a storyteller.

The protagonist was not searching for his lost faith in God. That was his symptom. In any journey story, heroes travel through discoveries, and almost inevitably the greatest discovery is the one where the hero realizes that his/her original crisis was a symptom of a different problem. In this case his loss of faith in God is really a questioning of his entire life, a midlife crisis, a creeping sense of the fruitlessness of one's avocation, marriage, beliefs. The approach to and the inevitable realization of the truth of the matter: What the Fuck Am I Doing? How the Fuck Did I Get Here? What the Fuck Do I Do Now???

Taken generically, midlife crises are mundane. Boring. Dime a dozen. Its not his dilemma; It’s how our hero attempts to solve his dilemma that makes him interesting. Whether he does or doesn’t is essentially immaterial; it’s his choices along the way that tell the story, show who he is, and keep our interest. Truth is in the action.

Truth, like the sculpture that was produced by our regretful, sorrowful, emotionally traumatized protagonist at the top-of-the-shark-fin catastrophic moment, is not objective but representational. It shows a unique glimpse of a thing beyond true representation, beyond diagramming. We get a slim slice of a vision of the nature of grief, the simple yet earth-shaking nature of the ache in our hearts. Essential truth doesn't come in a chaptered book full of answers and step-by-step solutions. It comes as images, fleeting moments, epiphanies, subjective representations that speak the language for which there is no verbal equivalent, where emotions like love, joy, fear, and despair dwell. We’re not even sure our hero gets it all himself, but his breakthrough comes as he finally understands how to express himself representationally, instead of trying to replicate a moment precisely and accurately. Instead he learns that life and love and pain are instances, indescribables, non-diagrammable, unable to be boxed and labeled. His breakthough, where he finally looks into himself and sees his agony, comes in the form of a twisted clay figure that reaches to the sky, its head thrown back, and is so simple, so open, so honest, that it could have been done by a third-grader.