Sparking ideas

Do you have any particular order that you write your plays in? Do you first focus on characters? What they are going to be like? Or do you focus on the story?

For me it’s different each time to be honest, depending a little bit on what I am trying to say. Usually I guess the one thing that is always there is some sort of spark of interest, a sort of a concept. But, and then what you do is you compromise that concept when the words come. I think it was Woody Allen or someone who once said that movie making was like that. He always started with an ideal vision inside his head, and then over the next two years he would slowly compromise at a time, turn it into something not quite so good - but I guess that makes you write the next one.

So usually there is this funny thing in my head, this idea of, that would be so cool. This play that was about this guy who ends up in the …. then I have to try to realise that, and it is compromise isn’t it a lot of it? It’s just like ‘Oh, I don’t have the language I don’t have the ideas, this will have to do’.

A lot of the times for me I start from the end if that makes any sense. Like a final image, or a final scene that yeah, that I work from there. Or I tend to write one scene which I find that I don’t tend to have to rewrite it very often. So I then know that’s the centre of the play and then just work everything off it.

I don’t tend to write from a character point of view. It’s usually a big thematic thing. You know, just what is the emotional crux of this piece that I’m doing? Why? And the thought always in the back of my mind going, if I care about this at least one other person will too, and it tends to roll on from that. That’s kind of where I start from. But it takes a long long time, and then I just write really quickly. I probably write a full-length play in two weeks, after sitting on it for about three years.

Interesting to hear Hone and Bernard’s different processes. I get inspired…. usually some sort of scene. I might have a dream or something like that, sparks off a scene in my head, and I can agree with both of them in a way, I guess it depends on the play. Some plays I’ve started with the end first. I’ve know very strongly like I did with Fire Mountain, I knew the girl had to commit suicide and that was my ending, you know, and I worked back from there. But with Ka Shue I had an image of my Grandmother, you know, complaining and waving a fist ineffectually and I started from there. You know so it just depends on the play. But structure and character I would say… that I’m driven to write…. well at least I hope something that has momentum and a good plot, and yet not at the sacrifice of the characters being well developed…. And the characters earning what happens to them.