Writing anything we want

So last week I did a lovely event about women in theatre at the Southwark Playhouse. It was organised by The W Project, set up by Teo Connor and Loren Platt to celebrate and empower women in the creative industries—their wonderful blog is full of inspirational women. It was a post show event for Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play The Hairy Ape, and director Kate Budgen, filmmaker Elisha Smith-Leverock (who made the play’s excellent trailer) and I began by telling our stories of becoming and being women artists.

A couple of themes kept recurring. One was confidence, and whether women might be held back because (generalising wildly here) men tend to be more confident. I definitely have to steel myself to speak in workshops or rehearsals, to ask for what I want, to think of myself unapologetically as an artist, and (worst of all) to pitch. That’s one of the reasons I love being a founder member of Agent 160, where one of our core aims is to be mutually supportive, and where I feel part of a creative community.

We also talked about what women make art about—whether we are encouraged to make work from our own experience while men can write from outside theirs, whether our work is seen as marginal and subjective while men’s is universal and objective. The very first play I (co-)wrote, in a freshers’ festival at university, came about because two men said they needed a woman to “write the girls”. I owe them a massive debt for introducing me to theatre (if they hadn’t, I’d still be trying and failing to be Sylvia Plath) but I also wish I’d said “yes, but let’s just all write all the characters”.

Since then, my characters have included: a tree-sitter, thenovelist Joseph Roth, a fashion photographer puppet, an East Anglian wolf biologist, Gertrude Bell, a Plaistow boxer, a doubting rabbi, a Moldovan belly dancer, a grasping brothel madam, aninsomniac Shah.... I could go on. I have written about Iraqis, and Jews, and people with seizures, and women, and people who live in north London, and people who fancy the wrong kind of men, yes, so I have drawn on my own experience, but I poured just as much of myself into writing the insomniac Shah because that’s what writing is: an act of creative empathy.

When I told people I was doing an event on women and theatre after The Hairy Ape, they all asked why. The testosterone-fuelled play, with a mainly-male cast, and a key scene where they sweat it out in the hellish stokehole of a transatlantic liner, seemed an odd counterpart to an event about women. But as we sat on the stage and talked, it started to seem a really radical choice. If women can direct plays like this we must be getting somewhere.

Cross-posted from the Agent 160 blog which has lots more about women in theatre.

Chaos and coherence—how Homeland's given me a whole new way of thinking about writing

Am I the only writer who saw this scene in last week's Homeland and wished Mandy Patinkin would come over, look at the tumbled chaos of my work and make sense of it all, while I had a good night's sleep? This is the after-shot—Patinkin's character Saul has arrived to find that Claire Danes's Carrie has had a bunch of ideas that are scattergun but not random. He works out a structure for them.

It got me thinking about how chaos is as crucial to writing as coherence. And then I read this brilliant interview with Philip Ridley who says writing a play is

"like an explosion in reverse, you know when you see an explosion in reverse it begins with all this crap and rubbish all over the place, and then you play the film back and all these bits of detritus come together and they form a house, boom: 'oh, it was a house.' Whhhhhomph: “oh it was a chimney”. And that’s what creating something is like, it feels like it’s all out there and all you’re doing is kind of collecting it and gradually putting it together."

I think this is how I start writing—like Carrie frantically scrawling and underlining and scattering pages, I let rip and dream, dig, play, explore, follow my instincts, follow wrong turnings, get lost... It's anarchic and exhilarating. It can also feel a bit crazed and hectic.

Sadly I never wake up to find Saul has found a structure for my rumpled ideas; I have to do that myself. And that's the second part of the process, where the colder, more analytic work comes in. This is the bit with index cards and coloured pens and lots (but not too much) coffee. This work can be fun too—Stephen Jeffreys taught me that—but it's very different from the other kind of writing.

In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande says the writer has to have a "dual personality". So one half has:

"the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the 'innocence of eye'..., the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were newminted...instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see 'the correspondences between things' of which Aristotle spoke... 

But there is another element to his character...It is adult, discriminating, temperate, and just. It is the side of the artisan, the workman and the critic rather than the artist. It must work continually with and through the emotional and childlike side, or we have no work of art."

From now on, I'm calling these two kinds of writing Carrie and Saul.