"Advice I Follow"

Deborah Zoe Laufer

Most of the advice I’ve gotten about writing, that I believe to my core and repeat often to others, is not advice I follow. Most great writers I know say, “Write every day, preferably when you wake up, even if you think you have nothing to say.”  I think this is excellent advice. I don’t follow it. But it sounds like a wonderful idea.  In reality, I write infrequently. In bursts. I finish things with a knife to my throat. Or a deadline, actually. Feels the same.

I have wonderful writer friends who tell me they have an exact outline and they know where their story will end before they begin. I have equally wonderful writer friends who say they write with only the next moment in sight -- that each line is a surprise to them. Both these methods sound right to me.

So… I’m not the best person to come to for advice.

But I know what I like in a play. I think plays can be successful without any or maybe all of these things, but this is what I like. I like characters with big problems who want something desperately. If it’s a comedy, the problems have to be just as big and they have to want the something even more. I like it when the playwright doesn’t let her characters off the hook easily. When they have to get down and dirty and maybe even ugly fighting for what they want. I like it when pretty much everyone in the play changes by the end. I like to see things on stage that just wouldn’t work anywhere else – that I wouldn’t expect to see in a movie or TV – maybe a certain theatricality, an unusual structure, a window into someone’s interior monologue. I like funny. Even in a heavy drama. Life’s funny if you’re paying attention. I worry when there’s nothing funny in a play.

People talk about how calamity brings them together. How, in the midst of a terrible event, strangers around them become immediate friends. There’s a shared experience and a recognition that doesn’t exist at any other time. We’re suddenly all just human. We know everyone around us is shaken and scared and moved by the same things. And we come together with that shared experience. That’s what theater does for me. I’m sitting in the dark, amongst strangers, and we’re all watching someone experience something – something big. We don’t have to be in the middle of a tumultuous marriage like George and Martha. We probably haven’t lost everything and are desperately looking for a safe haven like Blanche. Perhaps we haven’t found ourselves with very little at the end of a long career like Willy. But we recognize these people. That we’re all just trying to figure out what it means to be human at this particular time in the history of this tiny planet. And we laugh together. And we cry together. And we breathe together. And we don’t have to go through the flood ourselves to feel that connection to the rest of the race. For a brief two hours. And maybe, sometimes, we can carry that feeling home.

Questions about her work may be emailed to Deborah Zoe Laufer at dzlaufer@bestweb.net.