How Writing for the Stage Has Taught Me About Writing for the Page
Creating subtest, collaboration, and connecting with an audience.
This week, the Canadian premiere of my play, Apples in Winter, is opening at Here for Now Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. Because of that, I thought this would be a good opportunity to write about some of the differences between writing plays and novels, and how playwriting has helped me with fiction.
I started out as a playwright.
Well, if you go back far enough, I started out as a kid who wanted to be Princess Leia, which led to acting, which led to writing plays, which then led to writing books.
The Storytelling Tools
One of the biggest differences between writing plays and writing books is how thought is communicated.
In a play, you have words and action. That’s it, sort of.
You also have silence, and tone of voice, and body language. And so much story can be communicated through these. What a character doesn’t say can be just as communicative about who they are, what they want, and their state of mind, as what they do say.
If a character’s words and actions do not match, for example, if a person says “I loathe you” while stroking someone’s hand, a story gets built in that juxtaposition.
In a book, I can describe how a character is speaking, but a play, although I can give stage directions, they have to be very spare. Nothing (she intones) makes an actor more annoyed (she emphasizes) then directing them from the page by drowning them in adverb-laden stage directions (she says sincerely).
(see what I mean?)
As a playwright, I can’t spell out the subtext. I have to put all the clues into the script so the actor and director can understand how a scene is meant to be played. An actor is looking to the script to understand what their character wants, and to figure out all the different ways they will try to get it. If you’ve done your job as a playwright, which means the character’s intentions are clear, the relationships are clear, the stakes are clear, then an actor is able to take the words you give them as dialogue and lay the subtext underneath them. And that’s where the true magic of the story lives.
In fiction, yes, you can describe how something is said and write a paragraph on the thoughts behind the words. But sometimes it is better to communicate this through subtext.
Nothing is as fascinating as knowing there’s something else going on that is just beyond our grasp. Sometimes characters lie. Sometimes characters lie to themselves. Their actions betray them.
If a reader has a sense that there’s more going on under the surface, that will draw them into the story. They’ll want to pay attention (and keep reading) to find out what’s really going on.
Collaboration
A playscript is incomplete.
It is a recipe or a blueprint. (Both metaphors work.) It’s a recipe for a chocolate cake, it’s not the cake itself. Or it’s a blueprint for a house, but not the actual building.
A playscript is not the final form of the story so when you write a play, you are writing for a different audience than when you write a book. When I write a play, I am writing it for my hopeful future collaborators: actors, directors, designers. All the artists who will then take my blueprint (or recipe) and bring it to life.
I love the collaboration of plays, but it also means giving up some control. Each collaborator is going to bring their own interpretation to it. An essential part of collaboration is letting other ideas come into your idea. That doesn’t mean being untrue to your vision, it means making room for other ideas that can add on to the original. That can be hard to do, especially when you have a very specific picture of what it should be in your head. But here’s the thing: no one else is in your head. Sometimes, no matter what form you’re writing in, if a reader doesn’t get it, it might be because you haven’t yet communicated clearly what was in your head on the page.
In creating plays, I have learned that sometimes—oftentimes—the idea is made better when other people are able to bring their own ideas in. It doesn’t diminish my idea, it helps me see it in a more multi-dimensional way.
In fiction, the collaboration is different. The end result is more of a single vision, but there are other important people whose voices are part of the process. My experience collaborating in theater has made it easier to get feedback from my editor and early readers. I know that their ideas are not meant to be threatening or to undermine what I’ve come up with, instead they are meant to add to these ideas. To deepen them and ultimately, make them better. Does that mean I take all these ideas? No. There’s a balance that each writer needs to find between what you listen to and what you don’t.
The Audience
Apples in Winter has had a lot of productions in the US and the UK, and now Canada. I’ve had the opportunity to see some of these and each one has been different - different sets, different choices being made by the actors, different audiences. It’s like hearing a song played at different tempos or sung by different voices, you can still hear the song but its a new experience each time.
This is the best test of the elasticity of your story - - does it still work with these different interpretations?
I think the same is true for a piece of fiction. Does your story speak to a wide variety of readers? Does it have the elasticity to live in all those different imaginations?
When I watch my play with an audience, I am getting their response to the work in real time. It’s both wonderful and uncomfortable. Imagine, as a fiction writer, watching someone as they read your book. (Okay, that sounds very creepy and I would never do it.) Spending all this time watching audiences has given me a better understanding of my reading audience.
In theatre, an audience is a living organism. It makes noises, it shifts around, it sometimes it gives a verbal response. Sometimes it laughs at a line one night but the next night it is silent. As the writer, it can be nerve wracking to sit in the audience at hear the shifts and coughs and (oh, horror) cell phones going off (insert me gnashing my teeth here). But it’s also a good reminder about how little control we have of how our written work is received.
Whether it’s a book or a play (or a graphic novel or an opera), all the writer can do is put the story out into the world. How it is received is affected by the experiences and biases and opinions of the person receiving it. Whether they’re hungry or their back is hurting them or if traffic was bad. Any of these outside things can impact how they receive the work, and that can be hard to stomach when you’ve labored over that work for years.
If the work feels real, if it’s giving the audience (or reader) some kind of authentic experience, if it’s the best thing you can put forward into the world, then at a certain point you have to trust that it will be received. Not always in the way you envision, but that doesn’t make it less worthwhile.
I see it as an hourglass. The writer takes all of their experiences and opinions and biases and hopes and fears and funnels it all into the story.
And then an audience/reader see or reads that story and adds in their experiences and opinions and biases and hopes and fears to make meaning and connection. Their response to the work is a product of all of this.
All you can control as a writer is that narrow connection point of the story. Of course I would like to be able to control how people respond to my work, but obviously I can’t. And that’s something that after sitting in lots of audiences and talking to lots of readers (and reading lots of reviews) that I’m slowly starting to be okay with.
Thanks for reading.
Congrats on the Canadian premiere of your play, Jennifer! And absolutely loved this craft exploration of writing plays vs writing novels — your experience with both offers up incredible insights!