The Precursors

I've been writing a new play, I've got a character, and he's kind of rambling on at the moment. Not sure where he's going, but I'm following him anyway. I started thinking of the writers who got me started in the first place, especially, Robert Louis Stevenson ("Treasure Island"); my first sustained narrative, was a story called "Mistaken Pirates," (good guys, mistaken for bad guys) written in seventh grade. Kurt Vonnegut totally enraptured me in High School; his imagination, his dark humour, his crystalline sentences of simplicity ("And so it goes."). I was inspired by the guys who wrote in a frenzy: Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville, Henry Miller. I tried to avoid writers who struggled, or, guys who had "writer's block," not wanting to catch the malady.

Plus there were the writers who were so good, it was kind of intimidating: Shakespeare, Joseph Heller, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neil. (In music the Intimidators are: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan). I found my way into playwriting through Sam Shepard, a writer who has an almost musical sense, the words coming out in a blast, like a saxophone or trumpet. It was a volume of early one-act plays that convinced me that I could "do it too." I still go back to Shepard for inspiration. Kerouac too. I like the idea of writing in a blast, a stream of consciousness, where words come up in a torrent, and lead to new places.

I find that Samuel Beckett is the anti-Shepard. Beckett's work in some ways is about the impossibility of language. He reduces things to their essence. Powerful and scary work, and not what I want to be thinking about when I'm trying to discover "the flow." So there's the writers I want to tune in, and those I want to tune out, and then hopefully I can find my own channel and let it come.