A Quote by Stewart Lee
I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.
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At this stage of my life I would rather try and have some small impact within a company and suffer through those things than make such a big stink that nobody can trust to work with you. It's very important in an environment of a big institution that people don't feel threatened that you're going to expose them in any way.
In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.
I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.
I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.
I think there are a lot of technocrats in the business who would much rather work with just wheels and gears and machinery. Those things interest them more than humanity and I wish them the best of luck.
A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.
For several years I've been writing 100-word pieces. More recently I've been putting them together in groups of two and three. I don't see them as sequences, but rather as companion pieces, the way that diptychs often work. The idea comes originally from the paintings of Michael Venezia who places blocks of painted wood next to each other. Proximity is a godsend. The quote is from Wallace Stevens.
I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.
I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of good songwriters, and I try to actually work on the craft of writing a song rather than just leaving it up to inspiration.
I had a lot of success in big tournaments as well - won Masters Series in Rome - so a lot of things are coming together. I've done a lot of hard work in the off-season. A lot of physical work, a lot of work on my serve and on my return game.
I can't think of anything I would rather not - rather do than get up and not do anything. I have to do something. Whether it is painting, writing, acting, shopping, going to the gym, being with friends, going out - I just am a very active person. I have a lot of friends and I travel a lot.
But I'd rather help than watch. I'd rather have a heart than a mind. I'd rather expose too much than too little. I'd rather say hello to strangers than be afraid of them. I would rather know all this about myself than have more money than I need. I'd rather have something to love than a way to impress you.
In some ways, I missed my era because I'm big and messy and have big feelings and take up space on a stage rather than being diminutive and childlike in my woman-ness.
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