Wallace Shawn on Writing

 I have never seen my Dinner with Andre, but I have seen Wallace Shawn act and find him a hoot to watch. I knew he was in the theater, I did not know he was a playwright. Thanks to The Paris Review's Wallace Shawn, The Art of Theater No. 17, I know differently now. I also learned this about writing:

SHAWN

I realize that the tradition of the Paris Review interviews is that writers describe in detail their process of writing. And I was thinking this morning that probably not many people who’ve been interviewed for The Paris Review have really been preparing for their interview for fifty or sixty years as I have—because, you know, I read my first Paris Review interviews when I was probably twelve. I’m now sixty-six, and I think I probably did think in some way when I was twelve, I will be a writer one day, and I will be interviewed by The Paris Review. All the same, even though I’m well aware that these interviews often deal with the process of writing, I don’t really want to go into that, because I don’t want to do anything that would be bad luck, and although I don’t believe in superstitions or the supernatural, I have superstitious feelings about talking about what one is working on or, in particular, one’s process of writing. What if I still have the ability to write something? I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

INTERVIEWER

What could go wrong?

SHAWN

When I think about my own case, I don’t think of writing as a professional skill. I think of it as an odd thing that I feel an impulse to do. You eat chocolate because you feel a desire to do it. You don’t develop a technique for doing it. You don’t get better at it. And I don’t want to think of writing as a skill I have that I habitually exercise according to a certain schedule of procedures. If it had to be that, I’d possibly feel that I’d rather not do it. Actually, I find the idea of writing as a professional skill somewhat sickening.

I’m not religious, but wouldn’t a religious person find something sickening about it if he were asked to think of meditation, prayer, or adoration of the universe as professionalized skills for which a method could be codified? I guess I am halfway between saying that writing is too personal, intimate, humiliating, and miniscule to discuss and saying it’s too sacred and vast to discuss. And I don’t like to think of it as a thing I do in the same way again and again. Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

Spontaneity surely is a crucial element of writing and of all artistic activities, the unpremeditated appearance of surprising things that come from who knows where, things that apparently come from somewhere “inside ourselves” but make themselves known as messages from an unknown “Outside.” And I think one might well plausibly guess that self-consciousness could possibly be an enemy of spontaneity, so I try to avoid it. Clearly, as it has often taken me five years to write a play and my last play took me ten years, I have a complex back-and-forth relationship with those strange messages from “Outside,” and I don’t want to casually take any chances with that. Of course it would be called pretentious if someone who wrote successful and popular plays excessively mystified his process of writing them, but how can anyone call me pretentious when the process I’m mystifying is largely a private activity? If someone says, I’m not at liberty to disclose the rituals I perform in regard to folding my socks, how could that be called pretentious?

This spontaneity I have experienced. I agree my self-consciousness has impeded my writing and what has accelerated is an idea coming out of nowhere. There have been times when I revise, and I see a better phrasing, a change in character, a bit of narration that I had not seen before, nor could I account for its origin. Of course, whether, that inspiration improved my writing remains, at best, unproven.

And this seems important to me, too:

I’ve gotten better over the years at going to a rehearsal and realizing what I myself don’t like in my text. And one unexpected benefit of acting in my own plays has been that I can totally change my own part without facing any public humiliation or admitting to anyone else that I was wrong. And now when I act in my own plays I always change my own part a lot. And then after a play has been performed and published, I keep rewriting it. I’ve rewritten all of my plays a lot, sometimes decades after they were first published, and in some cases I’ve been fortunate enough to have the newer versions eventually published as well. I do eventually reach a point at which I can say to myself, Well, I never really liked that line, I always hated it, and I now realize that if I hear someone say it, I’ll be embarrassed and humiliated, so I’m going to change it. It’s easier for me to do that if I’m alone in a room and don’t have to abase myself in front of a group of other people. And sometimes I even think of a new and better way to say something in a certain place, a way of saying it that may have eluded me for decades. 

sch 12/25/22