It took me five years to write my first play, and three weeks to write my second.
Sometimes a piece requires such careful consideration on how best to express itself. Other time it is just the urgency to emote that opens and closes the process in days.
Usually, neither is more effective than the other. They are different means to the same end.
One work should not overcome your life. If it doesn’t make sense to you at this point leave it, move on, and maybe one day it will.
David Hare said that ‘we are all trying to achieve the impossible which is to write a good play about something we care very deeply about’.
If we believe in the magnum opus, a defining work of a career, it would make every piece up to it just a stepping stone. There is also no assurance that we’d ever achieve it. However, stepping stones are necessary if we don’t want to drown.
The idea of a swan song also suggests that creativity has an end point. Collectively perhaps everything we create is part of one greater narrative.
However much variety we think we’ve written, if we stood all our work up next to each other at the end I think we’d all find that common thread. The one eternal, unanswered question. I hope that at this point we’d find the answer. But life offers no guarantees.
Writers call themselves artists. It is a career which defines a person. There is no 9-5. It is something that has to be done any hour of the day and for a lifetime.
Many people will write from a young age and their writing will grow up with them. Works can stand as markers of who you were and what you believed at certain points in your lifetime.
Once we have started creators will be so forever. It will be a life filled with anguish and satisfaction. But as we all know we wouldn’t do it unless we had too.
The Next Creators. 