"9 Touchstones"

Jessica Goldberg

Here is some advice that was given to me when I first started writing plays.  They are the touchstones I return to every time I sit down to write.

1)  Write what you know. This doesn’t mean write word for word what happened in your life, obviously that would be boring. Nor does it mean you can’t write about things you haven’t experienced firsthand. To me ‘write what you know’ means write about things you feel deeply, things that drive you crazy, things that you feel passionately about. Write about everything and anything from a personal place.

2) See lots of theater. If you study playwrighting in school, the question of what is theatrical will inevitably arise. Some might say the theater has to have limited locations and characters, but then look at Shakespeare. Theater is different than TV, it’s different than film, and the more you see the more you will discover what works on stage and what doesn’t.

3) Plays are about character and dialogue. This is why I love the theater. I remember how excited I got in my first playwrighting class when I realized I could tell a story through the things people say to each other: the things they reveal, the things they keep hidden, the lies they tell other, the lies they tell themselves. What people say in plays is who they are.

4) Don’t forget the weather. One of my mentors at NYU, Martin Epstein, taught me this. You may notice when you get to the end of your play that you have completely forgotten about the world outside the room the play takes place in. How much different would the play be if it was freezing cold out? Or burning hot? The details of the outside world can really effect what happens on the stage. In fact sometimes they can take your play to entirely unexpected place.

5) Hear your play out loud. As soon as I’m done with a play I get a group of friends together to read the play to me around my dining room table. It’s a great reward for finishing a first draft. It’s also an opportunity to learn. It’s amazing how much different things sound out loud than they did in my head. Which brings me to the next piece of advice…

6) Rewrite. This may be the hardest piece of advice. I’m always disappointed when I hear my play out loud and discover it isn’t finished, that there are big gaping holes,  questions I haven’t answered, endings that are unsatisfying, and characters that act out of character for no apparent reason. Unfortunately it’s hard to write a perfect play right out of the gate. The good news is plays tend to get better if they’re meant to.

7) Beware of too much advice. Everyone is going to want to tell you how to fix your play. It’s important to learn how to filter the good advice from the bad. What I usually do is listen and think about it for a few days. If after a few days I can’t get the suggestion out of my head, or if I keep hearing the same suggestion from a number of people, I usually start to take it to heart.

8)  Know when to stop re-writing. There’s a point where I have to step back and say, "You know what? That kink, or that imperfection isn’t gonna go away right now. In fact I kinda love how messy that speech is, or how that line doesn’t quite make sense." Sometimes when I try too hard for total clarity and perfection I end up flattening my play. You don’t want to turn your soufflé into a pancake.

9) Persevere. Like any artist playwrights suffer a lot of rejection. My mentor at Juilliard, Marsha Norman, used to say: when they realize you’re not going anywhere they’ll have to start listening.

Jessica Goldberg's plays are published by Dramatist Play Service, Inc. Her work is also included in Vintage's Under Thirty: Plays for a New Generation.