Diary of a play: Caravan of Dreams

Writing is easy. You just have to sit at the typewriter and bleed.

David Mamet attributes this quote to Ernest Hemingway. The Hemingway people dispute it. I have no trouble believing it. Just like when Mark Twain would make up Bible quotes and would preface them with “The Good Lord has said - no doubt…”

I have “no doubt” that Hemingway said this.

As the process of creation is still largely a mystery to me, I decided to observe myself as I try to write a new play. And I thought it might be interesting to try to make sense of it.

This is the 33rd or 35th play that I’ve written, depending on if you count the trilogy Twilight World as one play or three.

There is no elephant in the play, by the way.

The play, Caravan of Dreams, will be performed in the Desert of Maine, an environmental anomaly of 20 acres of Sahara-like sand in the middle of Maine. My wife suggested the title, which is also the name of a vegan restaurant in New York. The play and the eatery have no connection. But I believe that both are gluten-free.

So I had the title before I started to write the play. Usually, it’s the other way around, but no matter. And I thought, If it’s called Caravan of Dreams there better be dreams in it. Just like if you write a play called Death of a Salesman, the salesman better die.

There are robots in Rossum’s Universal Robots, there’s a seascape in Seascape, there’s a piano in The Piano Lesson. And yet there’s no butler in What the Butler Saw.

Hmmm.

It’s hard to talk about the process of writing a play which no one has seen or read yet. If I were to tell you how I wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, it would be different. It would chiefly be different because I did not write A Streetcar Named Desire. So everything I would say would be suspect. But If Tennessee Williams told you how he came to write it, it would probably be pretty interesting.

October 17, 2021

I started making notes for Caravan of Dreams

My usual method is to spend six months working out the plot and then a few weeks to actually write it. That’s because the plot is the hardest part.

Ricky Gervais once said that it is so difficult to have an idea, that when he does get an idea, he knocks off for the day.

I am a plot guy, not a character guy. For me, plot is everything. That is why I do theatre. I leave it to the actors to supply the character.

The great Stephen King. Fellow Mainer, but that’s where the similarities end.

Stephen King, on the other hand, hates plot. Which is ironic, because his books are well-plotted. But by “hating plot” I understand that he does not work them out beforehand. King starts with a situation (writer is rescued by a deranged fan, or an invisible dome isolates a town) and then just sees where it goes. He has said that he is always surprised. He expected Wendy and Danny to die at the end of The Shining. But when he got around to writing the end, he found that they were more resourceful than he imagined. That is where writing becomes supernatural. When the thing you’re working on starts sending messages back to you.

The Desert of Maine. It’s hard to get a sense of scale here, but it’s huge.

The chief inspiration for Caravan of Dreams is the space itself. Even in conventional outdoor drama the space is somewhat contained. What if “upstage” is hundreds of yards away? What is the story that can happen in such a space?

So I just kind of daydreamed about a caravan showing up in the middle of the desert. Where is it going? Why is it there? Who is in it? This story is not based on anything. It is as new as fresh milk. So, like Paul Simon, who says that he writes a song by playing chords and fishing around for a melody, I ruminate on this image, and wait for the plot to materialize - like black magic.

An early idea is that the caravan contained three prisoners. Weeks later, I decided that the caravan contained only one prisoner, a girl. This creates a mystery and a reason for watching. Who is this prisoner? What has she done? And why is she here? I also decided that the caravan has not stopped on its way to anything. The middle of nowhere is its destination. Why? I don’t know the answer when I ask that question. So I have to answer it as if someone posed a brain teaser to me. Am I certain that I can answer it? Actually yes, if I think on it long enough. Because I know that whatever the answer is, it’s going to be really interesting.

Here is the idea that I had on December 1: “The dreams in the play are not real dreams.”

And then I knocked off for the day.

Plots are very difficult to work out.

December 1

I do not exactly know where I am going. I’ve been daydreaming about it for six weeks. I know a lot of it, but I don’t know the ending. Which is the whole point of writing a play: the ending. The ending expresses your attitude toward the material. A King Lear where Lear dies, and the re-written 18th-century version where he lives, are two completely different plays – even if what came before the end is the same.

I have a vague idea of the ending, but it has not coalesced into something concrete.

The seeds of the ending need to be sown in the beginning. Aaron Sorkin said if a gun kills someone at the end of your movie, you better introduce that gun at the beginning. Or as sci-fi writer John Barnes says, “If you’re going to have the cavalry come over the hill, you’d better see them leaving the fort.”

December 3

I wrote down five possible endings, all of which will get to the same place. But are very different paths. Which is the right one?

Aristotle said that the end of a play should be “surprising yet inevitable.” This is the most satisfying of all kinds of endings, but the most difficult to write.

The end of The Sixth Sense is the textbook example of a surprising-yet-inevitable ending.

George S. Kaufman: “I understand your new play is full of single entendre.”

The great writer of comedies, George S. Kaufman said that the ending is the most important part of a play. He regularly worked in a three-act structure, which was the standard form in the 1930s.

The three-act structure is generally summarized as follows:

1. Get your main character up a tree.

2. Throw rocks at them.

3. Get them down.

Screenwriters will tell you that number 2 is the hardest. For me, the “getting them down” in a satisfying way is the hardest part. Kaufman says that audiences will forgive a weak beginning if you can end with a bang.

December 9

I have this vague image for the end, but I don’t know what it means. It’s like trying to remember a dream. It’s there, I just need to wait for it to fully appear.

December 10

I’m reading what Rumi has to say about dreams.

December 15

The villain is not the highest up in the hierarchy. There is one above him who will command his downfall.

And then I knocked off for the day.

December 18

I have solved the ending. After having it keep me up every night for three weeks. Now I just have to write the play.

December 26

It is eight days later, and the play is done.

December 28

I have sent the play to a friend so he can read it and tell me if it is dramatic and if there are any gaps in the logic of the plot. I won’t quote his response, but he gave me a thumbs up.

I don’t always get positive feedback from readers. Sometimes I get, “What is this?”

But the play is a living thing. It will change and hopefully improve during the five months that it is rehearsed and revised until it opens in June and then it will change and improve some more once we watch the audience watch it.

I once wrote a play and asked a friend after the performance what he thought. He said, “My favorite part was when the angels came out.”

There were no angels in the play.

Oops. Good feedback to know.

Thanks for reading. More to say as the play goes into rehearsals.