Write Without Knowing The Ending
A play is a journey, sometimes it's worth going on that journey together with your characters.
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Hello! Welcome to my weekly newsletter!
Enjoy a dose of my playwriting process,
writing confessions, and all the mess in between.
Ryan Craig, British Playwright said,
“What would be the point of starting, if you knew the end?”
I think about this quote sometimes.
And how sometimes, I revel in this feeling.
Sometimes I structure my plays, and have an inkling of the ending,
sometimes I don’t. And sometimes, I refuse to think of the end.
When we watch theatre, we’re going on a journey.
We’re letting the characters unfold the plot for us.
We’re living up our chances to every single syllable and movement.
So why can’t we write like that?
Not saying you should.
But this is something I do sometimes.
Sometimes I know where I want the story to go.
Other times, I just have a visual of the beginning
and I let the characters dictate the story.
Here’s an example:
In We Are Gathered Here Today In Loving Memory of John Paul Parker Smith, I had an idea of the first visual in my head. So I didn’t know what this story is about, I just had the dramatic question: Will Christopher move on from his mothers death?
Would he? Wouldn’t he?
How would he?
What would he try?
Who else are in the story?
Do I introduce a best friend?
A narrator?
I sincerely had no idea.
So what I did was:
Write. Simply put.
I started with the first scene, then figured who would be the person Christopher would really want to interact with in this moment. Then I progressed and progressed until I got to the end of Act 1. And I thought… this is something.
Then I had a reading with friends and asked them: What do you think the ending is?
Then I evaluated if I liked their suggestions or not.
So I proceeded to
write some more.
And I finished Act 2. And I was extremely happy with it.
Deep down, I had my reservations about the end.
But I needed to hear it out loud before I made drastic changes.
So I organised another reading with a different bunch of friends.
And my god, the feedback. It was painful, but it was golden.
So then I…
proceeded to rewrite and rewrite.
And I ended up writing up a whole new act between the 2 I already had. From 2 acts, it became 3 — my instincts were right, so I rewrote the entire ending to end in a completely new way.
And I loved it!
Would I have known that the play was heading towards this direction? Absolutely not.
And I’m glad I let the characters tell me what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go, what they liked, what they disliked.
Because if I had structured it before I let them help me unfold the story,
I wouldn’t have gotten here.
Would it have been better? Don’t know.
Would it have been worst? Don’t know.
Would it have been different? Most definitely.
But I like this new ending.
And that’s all that matters.
But it isn’t like that for everything.
For POLY, I knew the endings of all of the plays.
Specifically for Polygraph and Polyamory.
So I wrote towards that.
But for Polygon, I knew the ending —
but the characters decided to take me in a whole different direction.
And one that I didn’t think I would explore.
The ending changed. And it was better.
So what I’m saying is:
You don’t need to know the ending to begin writing.
There is no hard and fast rule in writing.
Some people write the end first,
some people write the turning point first.
Everyone has their own processes.
Find yours. Evolve yours.
And when you feel like it, change it.
Not every play you write needs to have the same process.
Let yourself be stubborn.
Rules are meant to be broken.
So break them.