CAN PLAYWRITING BE TAUGHT?
Marsha Norman
2007 Keynote Address
Atlanta, GA

The age-old answer to this question was always “No, playwriting cannot be taught.”  And like other age-old answers – abstinence is the only way, father knows best, etc – it’s not true at all, but it did serve a certain purpose, which was to keep young people from trying stuff the gray-hairs wanted to keep for themselves, or knew to be fraught with peril.  The “answer” also kept the gray-hairs from having to answer any number of other questions that come up in a playwriting class, such as why can a good writer write so many bad plays, or why are Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes so popular when the plays by or about them are always so long. 

The real answer to the age-old question is simple enough.  Some aspects of playwriting can be taught, and some cannot.  But that is true of everything.  You can teach someone the rules of writing a haiku, but you cannot teach them to write one that will make you cry.  You can teach people how to improve the odds of having better sex through cool techniques and secret knowledge, but that doesn’t mean that in practice, they will actually have better sex, there being so many other factors involved.  And so it is with playwriting.

There are things about playwriting that can be taught.  Christopher Durang and I have been working up at Juilliard for the last fourteen years discovering many of them.  Much of what I will say here is knowledge we came upon together. There are also things about playwriting that cannot be taught, and there is some common wisdom about plays that cannot be counted on to be true.  So here we go.

WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT

1. You can teach young playwrights what the audience expects.

There are things audience members want when they come to the theatre.  In general, they want to care about a character, see the trouble that character is in, and watch while that character figures out what to do about it.

Very early in the play, say on page 8, people in the audience also want to know when they can go home, what is at stake here –Which brother will get the piano? Will the girl actually kill herself?  What will the Sphinx-dispatching hero do when he learns he’s just married his mother?  The audience wants to know what it’s waiting for, why are you telling this story, what do you want from them.  They are like a jury, they need to know what the person is accused of so they can know how to listen to the information, render a judgment, and be dismissed.  They also need that information delivered to them in a way that they can process it, but that’s a longer discussion.

In the first ten minutes, people in the audience want to know where they are, where they are going, who is related to whom, and how things work here – kind of like what you want when you get on a plane, arrive at a wedding, or wake up in some strange bed without knowing how you got there. 

And finally, the audience expects the playwright to pay off on the promises you made them in the first ten minutes.    If you say you are here to decide who gets the piano, somebody better damn well get the thing by the end.  No amount of pretty writing or character development will save you from the wrath of the audience if whatever was at stake, isn’t resolved.  Is the marriage over or not? Is the father revenged or not?  Do the sisters get to Moscow or not? 

The chaos that interrupted the order at the beginning of the play must be dealt with and the order, even if it’s a new order, must return.  That is what the audience has come to see, the return of order.  The old version of this old rule was: Get the main character up in the tree, throw rocks at him, and get him down. Playwrights young and old could do a lot worse than just remembering this one rule.

2. You can teach playwrights how to write the various types of scenes that are useful in plays.

Writers can easily learn that an argument is the best way to cover exposition.  Writers can learn that a long monologue is usually just you the writer talking to yourself, which is not a bad thing to do as an exercise, but in the actual play, it’s better when you let the characters talk to each other.  Writers can learn how to make the characters sound different from each other.  (Take away all the names, give the play to somebody else, and see if they know who is talking.)  Writers can learn how to make the audience know the end is coming, wait for it, wait for it, and then give it to them.  And writers can learn how to write a love scene, which all good plays must have, almost without exception.

It is also important for playwrights to learn to write a good opening scene (say what’s at stake, who’s in this and where you are), a good problem surfacing scene, where the audience first gets a glimmer of what the obstacles will be, a good end of the first act (state the question the audience should talk about during intermission), a good opening of the second act (remind the audience where you are without making them feel stupid), a good climactic scenery-chewing, hair-pulling fight, (so you’ll interest good actors and get your play on) a good love scene (because that is what most audiences want more than anything), and a satisfying final scene (so the audience will go out and call their friends and tell them to come see your show).

Figuring out where and when to use these scenes is not so hard.  Read The Cat in the Hat and look at what happens moment to moment.  It’s the golden guide to writing plays.  Or you can take the important types of scenes and teach students to write them one at a time. Write a scene in the courtship of your parents.  Write a fight between two brothers over some object belonging to the father.  Write a first scene that lets us know where we are headed in this play.  Write a betrayal, write a scene where one person tries to get five dollars from the other person, write a scene where someone learns something that has a profound effect on them.  Write a scene between two old friends where you NEVER use the words “Remember when we…”

I believe deeply that students should learn to write the parts of a play before they write the play itself.  It’s like a carpenter learning to use the various tools in his toolkit before starting to build the house.  I believe that students should work on plays they don’t intend to write.  That is, write several beginnings.  Write a beginning and the end of the first act of a play.  I believe when you are considering a play, you need to write several scenes from it to see if it really involves you in some deep way, or is just one of the good ideas you’ve had lately.  After all, when you want to get married, you don’t just run out into the crowd, grab someone and say, “You.  I’ll take you.”  You look around, you think about what you want, you go out on some dates, you see if you have anything in common, maybe you live together, and then finally, you get married.  Students should understand that the commitment to a play must be made; that a terrific play can’t be written out of a casual impulse.

3. You can teach playwrights how to recognize a good subject for a play.

Most troubled plays go wrong right at the beginning, in the choice of subject.  This is the unrecoverable mistake.  If I picked out ten of you, and gave you twenty ideas for plays, it would only take you two minutes of conversation or voting to decide which two plays you would be pay to see. I don’t know why this is, but it is. Audiences are not equally interested in all subjects, and nothing will compel them to be interested in something they don’t care about. For example, audiences hate plays about how hard it is to be a writer.  They just don’t care. 

Audiences very much like stories of love and justice, both of which involve seeking and finding.  To tell the truth, I actually think the only thing an audience really wants to see is a search.  If a play can be reduced to the “Search for X”, it has a chance, no matter what “X” is.  I can’t believe it’s that simple, but I believe that it is.  Try it.  Go through the plays you love, and see if they can’t be reduced to the “Search for X”.  Hamlet, A Doll’s House, True West, [...]Lear, The Faith Healer, Sideman, Rabbit Hole, Our Town, West Side Story, Proof, they are all searches. We love to see what happens when somebody wants something enough to go looking for it.  We want to see what happens. We want to experience the consequences of desire.  Why?  Because we all want things, that’s why.  (The scientists are now saying that we’re humans precisely because we developed the ability to want things.)  And plays are about humans at their most basic.

So tell your students to write about somebody wanting something.  But they must choose a search they know about personally.  You can’t write somebody else looking for something they want.  That old rule about writing about what you know?  It’s not a bad rule. It’s just not active enough.  Write about what you want, and what would happen to you if you went looking for it.  Or if all else fails, pick some time when you really afraid and write about that.

At the end of the session here, I’ll tell you my favorite exercise for teaching kids this business about how some subjects are more interesting than others, and about how much they can tell about a play from a carefully framed description of it.

BUT NOW, THE BIG THING ABOUT PLAYWRITING THAT CAN BE TAUGHT –

4. You can teach the crucial role of story.

We love stories. We forget facts practically as soon as we hear them, but stories we remember.  Maybe it’s because we’re still living with the brains we had when we were all sitting around the fire at night, not knowing how to read, and dependent on the hunter’s stories to let us know where to look for tomorrow’s food, or avoid tomorrow’s tiger.  But we are hard-wired for hearing and remembering stories.

Stories are where we get our information about what happens, or what’s likely to happen, in any circumstance we find ourselves.  And in most cases, we decide what to do based not the advice people give us, but the stories they tell us.
We listen to stories because, if we are lucky and stable, we see ourselves as the central character in an ongoing story.  And we know what we want for characters; we want the thing to come out right.  And it’s the same thing we want for ourselves. We want to acquit ourselves well, and we want the world to know it, or at least the part of the world that’s watching.  So we’re characters, in search of our stories, so the stories of other characters matter greatly to us.

Stories, and the plays that tell them, are not mere entertainment, they are nothing less that the main way the culture passes itself along through time – whether the stories are written on papyrus, carved into stone, kept alive in oral traditions, written on paper, or printed in books and assigned in colleges. We know the stories of our people, how they got here, and what it cost them.  People tell us stories for a reason. And if we can’t figure out why we’re being told a certain story, we don’t listen. 

You can teach your playwriting students to identify stories that belong on the stage, you can help them connect their stories to old stories that have the same plot, but you must convince them that once they start telling a story in a play, they MUST finish it.  You can’t start a story about who’s going to get the piano, and drift off into how hard it is to make a piano, or what happened to the guy who used to hear somebody playing the piano across the street.  The next time you invite me here, I’ll talk about stories for the whole twenty minutes.  But I’m at the end of what can be taught.

So, THERE ARE THINGS THAT CANNOT BE TAUGHT, and here are some of them.

1. Voice cannot be taught. You can help someone get better, but a real voice is a gift, and all you can do it lean on the kids who have it.

Real playwrights just naturally listen to how people talk, and they know instinctively how to create the impression of real speech onstage. Stage talk isn’t actually real, but it does sound real.  It’s something slightly larger than real talk in size and quality, which if delivered well by an actor, will shrink slightly on its way out to the audience, and then strike them as perfectly natural once they hear it. One thing you can do for your students is insist on reading their work aloud in class.  If there are actors around, let the actors read.  If not, let their fellow writers read.  But get the students used to listening.  Our Juilliard students learn more from listening than they ever learn from anything that Chris and I say.  You can teach them very specific things to listen for, but maybe if we have time later, we’ll talk about that. 
There are also verbal rhythms that work well on the stage, and ones that don’t.  Real playwrights are musical in their souls, and the sentences they write just sound good from the stage.  This is the famous ear for dialogue you hear about.  If the audience detects something false in the way a character is talking, you will lose them.   Characters must pass a certain “reality” test that the audience administers. You wouldn’t put a robotic dog in a dog show and expect to win a prize; ditto for playwriting.

If a student is having trouble with voice, make them write like someone they know.  Make them recreate a conversation they overheard in a coffee shop.  Make them write a conversation between two of their siblings or friends.  Make them write an old person and a young person, a man and a woman.  Then let the class guess which is which.  Make it clear to them that character is not expressed by the names in front of the speeches.  Character comes from the talk.  In fact, the talk is how you know who the character is.  Boring talk, boring character.  And warn kids that they cannot successfully write a person who is boring, a person who speaks slowly, basically; a person who cannot talk in a dramatic way.  Because they are so preoccupied with boredom, kids often tend to try to write boring people.  But it only turns out to be boring.  So save them some time and pass along this information.  The same thing goes for characters who are actually insane.  They are no good on the stage.  And if there’s time later, we’ll talk about why.

And it goes without saying that you can’t have a play where all the characters have the same voice, and thus are the same person, (the author) but have different names.  This we call laziness and vanity.

The same is also true of gender differences in language, but that’s a longer conversation.  But the short version is if you want to write two men in a marriage, write two men.  Don’t give one of them a woman’s name and hope no one will notice.  Men and women speak very different languages.  And women in the audience notice this.

This is actually responsible for one of the big problems women writers have in the theatre.  They write women speaking the way women speak, and the men who read the plays have trouble listening.  They keep waiting for the character to get to the point, they keep waiting for the event.  But in life, women are not so interested in getting to the point, or having the event occur.  Women are interested in what happens on the way to the event.  If you have promising young women writers, you need to talk with them about this subject.  Given that most of the judging of writing in this country is done by men, women writers need to find ways to make their language comprehensible by men.  This is not a casual remark.  This is how things are.  Somebody once told me that the plays of mine that the critics liked best were the ones where the women had guns.  So you could advise your young women to try that trick too.  “Gender differences” in writing is another thing we can talk about in this glorious free time we’re going to have after I finish reading the speech.

2. Observation cannot be taught.  Or it can, but it’s tough.

If a writer cannot observe what happens around him/her, and write about it with some compassion, then he/she should go into journalism.  The theatre depends on subjectivity, not objectivity.  And you need to be able to write all the characters with the same degree of compassion.  Demonizing people is the province of politics, not theatre.  You can give kids exercises where they go out and watch something, then come back and write about it.  That will help.  But what you really want in a writer is an outsider, somebody who always feels like they’re looking in the window.  That’s when you really notice what’s going on under the table.  Or what unlikely object is on the stairs, and who else sees it.

3.  A sense of theatricality cannot be taught.

Plays are about conflict.  We come to plays to see things happen.  Plays must contain mistakes, surprises, reversals, murders, betrayals, fights, overheard conversations, secrets; in short, dramatic action.  Plays are not conversations. If something doesn’t happen, it’s not a play.  Or it’s not a play that’s going to find much of an audience, anyway.  Because so many young writers spend their lives listening to readings, they begin to think that a play is the stuff people say to each other while sitting in a line of chairs.  But it is not.  Nor is a play a string of unrelated events, even if they are killings, murders, fights, etc.  A play is a series of events arising naturally from the situation the hero is in, and what he/she does about it.

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There are other things that cannot be taught,  - like why it’s better to write a play quickly - and other things that cannot be counted on to be true (the main one being that you can read a play and know what it is), but this seems like enough for now.  I have only one warning, in conclusion. 

Sometimes I am accused of teaching an old fashioned kind of theatre, a rule-bound universe where what I say is true.  But I’ve broken as many rules as the next person in my writing life.  So I have adopted this dogmatic persona for a reason.  I speak the way I do – telling people what the rules are, for the purpose of stating, more or less, where the boundaries are in the writing of plays.

As many of you know, I like to watch extreme sports.  One of the events I find most staggering is the trick bicycle riding where the kids go up the ramp, flip over twice, take their hands off the handle bars and then come down landing with no feet on the pedals.  This is like Richard Foreman or Susan Lori Parks, or any of the other rule-breaking writers of our time.  I don’t know how these X-games kids learned to do the fancy rule-breaking tricks.  But I do know that the first thing they learned to do was ride the bike down the sidewalk.  And I know if they don’t land with both wheels on the ground, the audience is not impressed, no matter how hard the trick was.  In the theatre, as in extreme sports, though you may get some points for trying something difficult, you win by finishing the event, by satisfying the basic requirements, which in the theatre, come from the old rules.

Once you know the fundamentals, then, to use another extreme sports metaphor, if a student wants to duck under the fence and ski the fresh powder on a slope no one has ever tried, tell them to go ahead. Break the rules all they want. Just remind them that if they get lost, it’s the dreary old rules that will get them back on course and back down to the lodge in time for drinks.

Teaching people to write plays is the best thing in my life, next to talking to my children.  Yes I suppose I have valuable information to pass along, and I can keep them from wasting a bunch of time on the wrong subject, the wrong approach, even the wrong names for their characters.  But what I love is to see what people are writing about.  It’s like a kind of eavesdropping on a generation I don’t belong to.  Or maybe more significantly, it’s like watching a play that nobody knows the end of yet, a piece being written by all the young writers about their world and what’s going to happen to it.  I am pleased to be here with a group of people who believe as I do, that theatre is essential in our lives, and that teaching it will help them say what it has felt like to be alive in their time.  All we are trying to do, is let the art of the theatre use us to pass itself along.  And I am very proud to join you in this life, and this lifetime.

Thank you very much.  And I’ll take some questions if we have a minute.

A Question and Answer Session followed this Keynote Address.

– END –

Transcribed by: Denise Halbach