Let’s talk about research / How much research? / Exercise your research muscle Let’s talk about research Crucial. It will thicken the work and open up one’s world. (Verity Laughton) Research can happen at various stages of writing and fulfil a variety of different functions. Sometimes it’s a great place to start, to find inspiration.  |  | I once found the premise for a play when I was browsing through one of those Things That Happened In The 20th Century books. It was just a couple of lines about a woman who threw herself off a house but it really sparked my imagination. Then, having found it, I had to do further research to get a better idea of character and how the story might realistically play out. Sometimes, research can be helpful mid-writing, if you’re feeling a bit stuck: A playwright friend of mine claims that when we as writers hit a wall or experience writer's block the best thing we can do is hit the books or the net and a solution will always present itself. Writer's block happens when we become stuck, when we don’t know how to take the story forward because we don’t know enough about the world of the play. The best thing we can do then is to arm ourselves with a thorough knowledge of this world in order to breathe life into it on the page. (Caleb Lewis) | |  |
Research doesn’t just happen in books of course. You can visit museums, talk to grandparents or elderly neighbours, or if you want to write a play set in the real estate world like Suzie Miller did (SOLD) you can go into real estate agencies and interview people. Lally Katz who describes herself as “a bit naughty about research” sees the value in research outside of books and libraries: Sometimes you’ll be going to the library to read about someone from an era that you’re writing about and you’ll have a conversation with the librarian that ends up being the best bit of your play. Or you can go and explore lighthouses in South Australia and write a play called The Lighthouse Keeper which is what Verity Laughton did. The research can be a fun part of writing because of the very fact that you’re not actually writing. You’re gathering ideas or you’re finding inspiration. You’re playing with the themes and the characters and the issues you think you might want to explore and so at this point your play is bursting with all of those things and then some. How much research? Do lots then let it go. (Michael Gow) Once the research is over, the play itself has to be written. Caleb may well have dug up a rare document that was useless to anyone except a playwright writing about sealers set in that part of Australia at that time, but having done so he then had to push that research aside and develop the idea just as any playwright would on any play that doesn’t involve a shedload of research. | | The danger is, you can fall so in love with research that it becomes this beautiful long haired historical beauty with the come hither anecdote eyes and completely forget all about plain little Polly Play with her interesting structure and challenging themes. Or worse, you allow your research to swamp the play you’re writing because you can’t stand to cut anything back. I love research but uncovering those inevitable jewels does not mean they have to appear in the final script. Sometimes you just have to let go. (Jane Harrison) Do your research. Read the biographies. Paw through the letters and documents, gloat over your school fete treasures, marvel over the links with famous people and locations, take notes, take photos, then take it all away and put it to one side and start writing your play. Because eventually the research becomes displacement activity and instead of informing your work, it starts to hinder it. | | |
Do it. Love it. Do lots of it. Then put it away, and write like the wind. (Donna Abela) Having worked with innumerable new plays, atyp Artistic Director Tim Jones makes a great point about the importance of the right research: The right research gives your play a ring of truth without becoming a lecture; Miller’s The Crucible is instructive here: Miller clearly knew a lot about Puritan America and these details give the play a firm truth as background to a great story. In this sort of period play you can’t have one without the other. Exercise your research muscle A good exercise in research (and throwing it away) can be to pick a newspaper article that looks like it could be ‘playworthy’. The article should have a character, a location and an incident. (Eg. Man attacks lion at the zoo.) Write the article into a scene. Now write a scene set on the night before the incident. Now write a scene set a week later.
|
.jpg)
“I scribble endlessly in notebooks, any idea or story scrap or insight. I rarely go back and look but just by writing it down it stays in my brain and starts to work itself into the piece.”
(Michael Gow) |