Part #3 in my response to Michael's original questions: "What is it about the kernel of a story that hooks you? How do you go about envisioning a larger story? What is it that makes you conclude that you want to write the full story (book, play, etc.)? Aside from my intrigue with this question, I think the answers can shed some light on how what we call "aesthetics" is incorporated in the actual making or developing of a work."
The third of four plays I wrote was a farce. Don't sniff. I say the most durable play of any kind written in the last thirty or forty years will prove to be Michael Frayn's NOISES OFF. Consider: Most "sophisticated" people can't name a "serious" play written in English between 1630 and 1920, but many can name farcical works by Congreve, Sheridan and Wilde. Here's this from the Wikipedia entry "Noises Off Frayn". It describes the "kernel": "Noises Off is a 1982 play by Michael Frayn. The idea for it was born in 1970, when Frayn was standing in the wings watching a performance of Chinamen, a farce that he had written for Lynn Redgrave. According to the playwright, "It was funnier from behind than in front and I thought that one day I must write a farce from behind." Just a few days ago I asked the forum if anyone agreed that a hearty laugh at a funny bit was in many ways like an "aesthetic experience". I testify that the labor one puts into creating a farce is quite like that on any other play, though the effects aimed at may be different. Just as the labor by Ibsen or Miller when creating a public-issue social-criticism "problem play" was much like the labor of Tennessee Williams in writing his private-issue STREETCAR and GLASS MENAGERIE, or O'Neill's in writing the private-issue LONG DAY'S JOURNEY. The inspiration for the farce, called RAVISHING THE MUSE, came from my family's personal friendship with Pavarotti. I observed the groupies and opera professionals who swarmed around him, and how so many of them wanted, in various potentially ludicrous ways, "a piece of him". I made my central character not an opera singer but a prize-winner novelist of #1 bestsellers. And I mixed in another subject-interest of mine, the notion of the creator's "muse", who will often clash with the writer's real-life partner. One of the ways my own experience differs from that of other playwrights is that I know of none who has spent as much time studying "hard core" technical philosophy, including philosophy of art. Still, to address Michael's interest, at no time do I think of any of that as I'm pondering or writing a play. (Unless the character is talking about philosophy, as he is in my last play, STORYTELLERS. But he says nothing about aesthetics.) In other words, all the ratiocinations about what to put in the play -- and how -- is in terms of playwriting technique -- how to build the story, how to reveal the characters, how to present all the needed thoughts and feelings in "dramatic" form i.e. "show, don't tell". Those are in effect the "aesthetic" questions in theater. Notice that Aristotle's POETICS was an analysis of what playwrights were already doing. That is, the writers didn't learn what to do from Aristotle, he learned from them. Since then, many a writer has read POETICS for, in effect, clues from those early playwrights about what might improve his own play. Michael's framing of the questions is acutely applicable to the writing of novels and plays. He makes a distinction between the initial hooky "kernel", its "inspiration", and the "envisioning a larger storyb&that makes you conclude you want to write the full story (book, play, etc.)" In the book I wrote about writing and editing a novel, I spend several pages describing the wildly disparate "initia" that have compelled writers to their desk. The fact is, writers often have to quit an idea because there isn't enough there. I've certainly done that. Think of the initial hooky idea as a sluice gate. You grab the glittering gate and pull it up. The play-ideas I've continued with have always been sluice gates that, when raised, immediately release a tumbling gush of characters and scenes, and sometimes whole plots with endings, albeit in compressed, sketchy form. Sometimes when you raise the gate, it releases only a trickle. In that book about writing, I describe the stages in a writer's "act of art" (of which there are very many in one novel): "Prelibation" -- a sense of an effect wanted right here; imagination -- the offerings, from one's inner invention, of words and events that may achieve that wanted effect; verbalizing -- when all that's offered is an event, choosing the words to convey the event; judgment of the offerings. To me, every stage involves mysterious doings in a creator's mind -- mostly, perhaps in the "imagination" part. I've said elsewhere that some of the most giddy moments of pleasure are when the writer asks himself, "Where did that come from?!" The answer to Michael's question is: If, when I raise the sluice gate, there's no flow, there's no go. But the what-and-why of the flow is largely unexplainable by me. The small platoon of characters who initially sluiced out of the wings onto my mind's stage all brought so many sub-stories I knew a full-length play was there. Indeed, I eventually had to cut characters to keep the pl ay at a tolerable length. The flow of imagination is largely unexplainable, but not entirely. My last play, STORYTELLERS began with a memory of an event from my mid-twenties. In real life the event was stunted. A much older woman came on to me -- but I didn't take her up on it. The play began when I asked myself, "What if I had?" Nothing I've written has transmogrified as much as STORYTELLERS while I re-chose the subject again and again. I wrote the first draft in five days. It was a lively, thin, comedic sex romp. But as I spent time with the characters, and they began to fill themselves out, they insisted there was more to them, more deeply human hopes and frustrations, more complexity. I found myself drawn to deal with these things, but it was clear I couldn't do that in the shallow romp-form I'd devised. I never copy real life people, so the characters' personas were imaginary from the outset, but as I wrote I kept re-imagining them. They evolved. Their occupations and preoccupations evolved. The cast was cut from five to four, so scenes were cut. But more scenes flowed in as the remaining characters grew, and the final is far, far longer than the early drafts. The play itself evolved from a comedy into the only outright tragedy I've ever written. That evolution took years. Summary to come of implications of Michael's inquiry. ************** Plan your next getaway with AOL Travel. Check out Today's Hot 5 Travel Deals! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212416248x1200771803/aol?redir=http ://travel.aol.com/discount-travel?ncid=emlcntustrav00000001)
