Abbey Theatre - Amharclann na Mainistreach

As the time approached to hand in the first draft of the play we’re writing for the New Playwrights Programme, we had two sessions that were closely linked: one on ‘Rereading Your Play’ with Conall Morrison, and then the following day a session on ‘Rewriting’ with Bryan Delaney.

For many writers the most exciting part of creating, or at least the most intoxicating part, is the rush of a first draft that you feel is working well. The story flows, the imagination throws up new and unexpected twists, characters develop and the whole thing seems to hurtle towards a fine conclusion.

Then the time comes to re-read the work. Suddenly some of those ideas aren’t as sparkling as they seemed, while others that do work may lack the coherency and unity needed to make a play feel complete. Conall gave us a great series of categories, many of which date right back to Aristotle, that may be useful to apply when re-reading our texts (concerning plot, character, theme and so on), and also encouraged us to ask as many questions of our play as we possibly can. After all, before re-writing can begin we need to know what play it is we are striving to write. Are there two or three different directions the play could now take? Is the play we have on our hands the same one we thought we were writing when we started out? If not, have we gone wrong somewhere or is this ‘new’ play actually more exciting than the original idea?

Of course, diagnosing is one thing, doing the follow-up work another. So often re-writing can seem like a slog: having to drop scenes that were great fun to write, weighing up difficult structural changes, or that niggling sense that this speech which we thought was key just isn’t working but we have trouble pinpointing why. Undoubtedly this can all be frustrating, but at the same time Bryan in his session used a very striking phrase: that rewriting can be ‘as creative as a first draft’. In other words: don’t be bound by what is already written, take risks if required, have the courage to experiment and re-conceive, whatever it takes to get the work right. It’s an important point to remember in those difficult moments that must be passed through before the finished work comes to light, and a lesson I will try to hold in mind while doing my own rewriting in the coming months.

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