Quote of the Day

All I ever wanted to do was climb some mountains and write some books. A paltry ambition, I admit, but it has served me well enough.

—Robert Bringhurst, to Guernica

A series of sketches

I write a series of scenes. Then I look at all the scenes, and then I start sculpting the play. To me, writing is like sketching. You don’t enter the canvas immediately—you do a series of sketches. Picasso did hundreds of sketches before he started Guernica. So I do the same thing, just to find out about my characters. Some of those scenes make it to the play, some of them don’t. So it is a process of search, doing a little bit of research about their lives through actually writing scenes and finding out about them. Again, some of them make it to the play and some of them don’t…

If you think of dramaturgy in North America, which is so realistic and so literal sometimes, sometimes what theaters—especially dramaturgs—ask for is more information, which sometimes can really weigh down a play. There’s only so much information a play can have. If you start putting in so much information, it becomes something completely different, it doesn’t sing…You’re serving this person, but at the same time, you’re not serving the art form. I feel like as a writer, you have to take commentaries with a grain of salt.

—Nilo Cruz, to Guernica

Quote of the Day

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don’t think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I’m not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can’t have in the theater, which is pure exteriority. That pure exteriority, paradoxically, creates a much more heightened interiority for the audience. So if you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it. When it’s done right, obviously. When it’s not done right it’s really boring.

—Ayad Akhtar, to Guernica