It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do—then go ahead and do it with ease.

Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan—till the first draft is finished.

Then Calvary—but not till then.

Doubt—and be lost—until the first draft is finished.

A Play is a Phoenix—it dies a thousand deaths.

Usually at night—In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster.

It is never as bad as you think.

It is never as good as you think.

It is somewhere in between and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it actually approaches more closely.

But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft.

An artist must believe in himself—Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence—but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say—He is vain—but they are affected.

Tennessee Williams, Journal entry October 5, 1941
Notebooks

Many writers work best in times of trouble: no money, the cold outside and in, even sickness and the end in view. But I have always known that when trouble comes I must face it fast and move with speed, even though the speed is thoughtless and sometimes damaging. For such impatient people, calm is necessary for hard work—long days, months of fiddling is the best way of life.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.22

Watch on the Rhine is the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees or the seasons of their colors. All other work for me had been fragmented, hunting in an open field with shot from several guns, following the course but unable to see clearly.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.21

Mr. Alfred: Did you ever find newspaper criticism of your work helpful?
Miss Hellman: Not at all. Never.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.28

[Mr. Alfred = William Alfred, Professor of English at Harvard.]

Sometimes you’re pleased, and the words take on meanings they didn’t have before, larger meanings. But sometimes it is the opposite. There is no rule. I don’t have to tell you that speech on the stage is not the speech of life, not even the written speech….I usually know in the first few days of rehearsal what I have made actors stumble over, and what can or cannot be cured.

Lillian Hellman, The Art of Theatre No. 1, Paris Review, Issue 33, Winter-Spring 1965

I’m one of the few writers in the world who has few ideas ever. I just have to wait for them to arrive. Other people have countless back ideas they are always using. I have none. I have no idea why this is. I just have to wait for a new one to come.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.106

…theories may work for one person and not another. It’s very hard, at least for me, to have theories about writing…You write as you write, in your time, as you see your world. One form is as good as another. There are a thousand ways to write, and each is as good as the other if it fits you, if you are any good.

Lillian Hellman, The Art of Theatre No. 1, Paris Review, Issue 33, Winter-Spring 1965

In one letter [to director Tony Guthrie], I told him that Candid had done bad things to me, I wasn’t working…a few months later he was in New York and we met for lunch. As I came in the restaurant door, a voice on my right side said, ‘Stop the nonsense. Get on with new work, get on with it today.’
…a few days after that, I spent the evening with Elena and Edmund Wilson. During the evening we talked of a man we both knew and Edmund asked why he didn’t write anymore. I mumbled something about writing blocks…
Edmund said, “Foolishness. A writer writes. That’s all there is to it.”
…the hardheaded sense of that was good stuff. But it did not happen a few days after I saw Guthrie. Last week I came back from Edmund’s funeral and sat thinking…The next morning I went through old diaries of the many times I had spent with the Wilsons and found that ‘A writer writes. That’s all there is to it,’ came almost two years after my lunch with Guthrie. But it is true that the next day after Edmund said it I went to work on Toys in the Attic.

Pentimento, by Lillian Hellman, p. 205

I don’t think characters turn out the way you think they are going to turn out. They don’t always go your way. At least they don’t go my way. If I wanted to start writing about you, by page ten I probably wouldn’t be. I don’t think you start with a person. I think you start with the parts of many people. Drama has to do with conflict in people, with denials. But I don’t really know much about the process of creation and I don’t like talking about it.

Lillian Hellman, The Art of Theatre No. 1, Paris Review, Issue 33, Winter-Spring 1965