The Play’s The Thing

I’ve blogged a lot in the last few years about the decline of the publishing industry and how that is making it tough for novelists - especially new and budding ones - to get their works published in the traditional book market. But here’s some good news. Apparently, the one area for writers that’s booming is playwriting. According to The Guardian, “The amount of new writing produced by mainstream, subsidised theatre has more than doubled in the last six years. Many of these plays have opened in large theatres, with impressive ticket sales.”

So if you’ve been having a hard time getting your novel accepted by book publishers, maybe now’s the time to switch to writing plays.

I wonder how easy it would be for a novelist to change genres so radically. I think I’m a novelist to the core - or at least, a prose writer to the core - but I’ve also had a go at writing plays. At one time, I absolutely loved Tennessee Williams. I saw as many Williams’s plays as I could on the London stage as well as on film. I read them all and devoured biographies and letters. It was probably as much the drama and tragedy in his own life that drew me to him as his plays themselves. So, inspired by the poetry of his American South, I picked up my pen in drizzly, ol’ London and tried my hand at playwriting.

It’s quite a differenet discipline from novel writing, with the focus on dialogue and creating the drama, tension and story through the interaction of spoken language. I loved the challenge but I’m not sure I was any good at it. My stage directions were much too verbose - rather like the descriptive narrative passages you get between the dialogie in novels, strangely enough! And I included way too much detail about motivation and back story in each bit of dialogue rather than trusting that the actor and director to put their interpretation into what I had written.

Also, I found it a challenge constraining the story to a few, tight locations over a short period of time - Williams’s plays all take place in a house or apartment, building up a sense of claustrophobia - as I wanted to caper around all over the place and over a long time span, rather like a movie or the novels that I eventually published (which take place in London and several locations across Malaysia, over a time span of 10 years and more).

I had no idea how I would try to get the play publicly performed, even assuming that I managed to polish up the incompleted first draft into any semblance of readiness. Whereas there are books like The Writers Handbook and The Writers and Artists Yearbook that tell you how to get your article, story or book published in print media, it didn’t seem so easy to find out how you go about submitting a play to whoever you needed to get it to in order for it to start it’s journey towards performance. To be honest, I didn’t actually investigate it very deeply as I knew that playwriting was nowhere near a strength of mine!

I wonder also how easily a novelist would adapt to the teamsport that is theatre. We’re used to being The Author, the sole creator of the story, the sole writer of the words. Some novelists have a really hard time accepting feedback from their editors even once their manuscript has got past the various hurdles and been accepted for publication. How much more difficult would we find it taking in feedback from the director, the producer, the actors and more! And working on rewrite after rewrite - and having to face your precious words changed or improvised upon during the rehearsal process ….! Would we adapt and enjoy the creative or collaboration or would we flounce off in a huff?

I’ve never been put to the test in that way so I don’t know how I would deal with it. I hope of course that I’d rise to the team occasion. But would I?

What do you think? Have you written plays or switched between playwriting and novel writing? I’d love to hear how you handle that team side of things!

Photo: thanks to Gil Searcy from flickr.com (CCL)