Playwriting Challenges Quotes

It's difficult for writers in the theatre. It's difficult for writers in the theatre.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.

My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.

When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.

I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it's only once the play's out that the pain is gone.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

My generation of playwrights have grown up writing for studio theatres, and so the task of writing for more than ten or so actors is a huge challenge. Logistically, it's like doing an enormous Sudoku. Making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time in the right order instantly sends me into a cold sweat.