_{Cover image: Chris Isaacs. Image supplied.}

In this article, I’ve compiled five key pieces of advice for playwrights from an interview I conducted with Black Swan Theatre Company’s Literary Director, Chris Isaacs. It’s helpful for all writers – but if you’ve ever been the type to talk about “The Play” without writing it down, this is especially for you.

Initially, I was hoping to elicit from Chris some mystical, sacred industry secrets. What I received instead is solid, tried and true advice...

“Understanding your own personal foundations of process is more important than the need for that work to have a place under a certain guise of success or not.”

Chris discusses the importance of deep discovery of a personal process as being fundamental to any kind of showing of your work. Artists who have delved into their own process and can articulate it are more ready for the work of having the work staged.  “Ultimately, I think if you want to have your work performed by any company, you need to do that personal work in the space of what your process is,” he says. This is a deeply personal process and one that can only be done by writing high volumes of nonsense and trawling through it to come up with the goods. No matter your ambition for your play, without a strong sense of how you work and what motivates you, good work is near impossible. Chris emphasised that “knowing what your craft is, knowing what your voice is and understanding what you want to say” is essential to a good script and career.

“The art is the work. It is the sitting down and putting the idea that you have into a physical thing that can be worked or reworked or communicated across to other people.”

This piece of writing advice is about volume. As Chris says, “Writing is a verb” – so surprisingly, writing is important. But also thinking about how your idea can be taken out from the figment of your imagination and worked into something that can be understood and communicated to others is key. No doubt, it builds upon the first point: knowing your process and being able to communicate an idea to others is a powerful duo.

“You have to write the thing and you have to write a terrible version because most of the time the first ten versions of it are.”

Write a bad first draft! Just do it! I’ve heard this advice over and over from Julia Cameron to Anne Lamott to Western Australia’s own prolific playwright, Barbara Hostalek. But how hard it is to exorcise the perfectionist streak that throttles us to the ground every time we try to do a bad first draft. The shoddy dialogue needs to be fixed so we don’t cringe and feel depression looming. The formatting (Oh dear, not the formatting!) must be perfect before even starting. Each character must have a 25-page Google Doc in their own name. No, no, no. According to Chris, Bad Draft x 10 = a good place to start for a successful script process. Writing terrible dialogue is painful, but it will make you a better writer.

“Programming responds to many different stakeholders for every company, including: funding bodies, philanthropy, different audience bases, and, most often, the balance of that particular season.  It’s not just about a pure artistic importance conversation – there are many factors that go into decisions around programming shows.”

If you have ambitions to submit your fresh play to a theatre company like Black Swan, you’re not alone. Chris reads over 120 plays a year that come through to his inbox. But there are bigger fish to fry than purely good work, or even topical work. Programming responds to funding bodies, not to artistic interest. So, if you receive a rejection letter, please do not be discouraged. The way Chris speaks about the industry gives the impression that it is much bigger than the sum of its parts.

“Be an absolute monster for art.”

“Read as many plays as you can,” Chris urges. “See as many plays as you can, digest and analyse as many artworks as you can, be like a truffle pig for arts.  The best chefs in the world seek out the best food, so if you want to be a theatre maker, the best kind of theatre maker, then try to find the best theatre. Read about theatre companies around the world, read about different places and absorb everything. Then add everything to the toolbox and accept that different works have different processes and different stories resonate with different people. Just absorb it! Devour! Devour! Be an absolute monster for art and engage and soak it all in.” Chris balances this with some advice to “go out and live in the world… go to places where there is not an art scene and have the same appetite for learning.”   

Ultimately, Chris Isaacs dashed my hopes of finding the secret sauce of playwriting success. But he offered something real in its stead. The working writer is not sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking. They are writing, with a humble and almost desperate attempt to articulate life. So go on. Sit for long hours writing bad dialogue tonight. I dare you!