the most important thing is to start and I think the second most important thing is to not be judgmental when you start writing and you should let your first draft be absolutely terrible and you don't have to show anyone your first draft when you're writing a first draft do not worry about it being absolute rubbish because it's only when you've done a sort of quite bad first draft that you'll be able to look at what you've written and go oh okay that character is really strong and that thing that happens to them there needs to
happen at the beginning and you can start to move things around and shift things your first draft doesn't have to be a like you know what your three acts are and you're just you know you're just notating the process of writing can be discovering your structure it's okay for like a lot of your early writing to be about splashing about in something and finding out what's there I'm not a very organic writer I can't just sort of have a blank page and just kind of go with it I need to have some plan that and
some framework to work within so I tend to do a kind of almost prose a version of my story and do cue cards one sort of for roughly chien so I can kind of see what the story looks like I think and then go through the kind of wild first draft which may veer off from that if you've got your ending then you it draws the whole story towards it like a magnet so I'm very uncomfortable until I do have the ending actually and I kind of wouldn't I've got the ending I can relax a
bit and allow the river of the play to move more organically because I know that it's got to find it where it's heading I've never had any idea how something's gonna end I mean that may be obvious in the plays but for me there would be no point in what would be the point of starting if you knew the end for about 15 of my 20 years working as a playwright I've been a real planner like a real plan my plays the first stage is just kind of getting oh there's a phrase of Peter Brook
where he described the formless hunch yes where you have this idea that there's kind of something you kind of want to write about and you don't know what it is when you get the formless hunch the most important thing to do is leave it alone because if you start working on it too soon you'll kill it you've got to let it be if it's any good it will last with you for six months nine months a year if it doesn't it's not good enough then the next thing for me to do is if the idea
is survive for kind of six months and it's still there then I'll start researching it and that between the idea and the research period is like mulling it's always there in the back of my head it's there when I'm walking the dog it's there when I'm having a shower it's there when I'm having a swim it's there when I'm rehearsing other plays it's there when I'm watching other plays just imagine imagining them in the theatre and that's like the mulling period this is the idea the mulling the research and the research can be I might
go and meet people who are whose lives are in some way related to the subject of the story and might read other plays and might read books about watch films I'll try and fill up a notebook with ideas about the play that I'm writing and then the next stage will be the planning the planning stage from me is when an idea is crystallized around a character in action in other words of story I'll work on that a really plan and develop and nurture the character and then I'll structure it I'll decide how many scenes how
many characters where the scenes are set when the scenes is set what happens in the scene was the action of the scene and then the last thing I'll do the last thing the very last thing will be to write the dialogue finish the play prints it off leave it and then read it as though you're an audience member experiencing the whole thing don't read it with a pen in your hand just sit and take the hit and compare that the experience of reading your play having had that period of reflection and separation with what you
what the intended experience was don't read on a screen don't read it on a screen because if you read it on a screen you'll change a full stock to a comma and imagine you're doing a rewrite the temptation to place your cursor on the line will be too acute read it on the page I work with others because the conversation with somebody else digging away at the material and going into workshops and getting people reading it and exploring and evolving ideas is totally for me key to my process and and the kind of work I
like to see as well actually that has really evolved and has many brains and hands in it and on it so yeah we work with others show your work to them listen to what they say get actors to read out read out yourselves there were fourteen drafts of barbershop criticals I arrived with sixty hours worth of audio research from the traveling and all of those countries to South Africa Zimbabwe Kenya Uganda Nigeria and Ghana and all of that was whittled down to now 145 of text so there's just so many other things which didn't go
into the play
