The mindful writer — good idea or bad?

When one is in the throes of Script Frenzy, one is encouraged not to worry about making it good. Stories abound of absolutely ripper, stellar scripts that burst out fully formed, as Athena from the brow of Zeus, with little conscious effort at shaping or editing. On the other hand, there is no shortage of crap scripts (and stories, and novels) that get shat onto the page by people who think they're channelling Truth and Meaning through their own personal connection with the Mystical Beyond. And there are also scripts that are gripped so tightly by fearful and detail-minded writers that they struggle and then, limp and asphyxiated, die. The scripts, that is, not the writers. Not right then, anyway. We all have to die sometime.

Obviously, the question is one of balance: let the river flow, but watch what it's doing and where it's going; build the occasional levee; keep the audience in mind. A play is for communicating, after all, and you can't do that if you're not thinking about how people are going to listen.

I stumbled upon this terrific keynote address by playwright Morwyn Brebner that explores this tension between subconscious and conscious craft. She makes the point that a lot of what people read into a play as being the playwright's conscious choices may not have been — in fact, the true genius of a good playwright may very well be something she is not even aware of, but which pervades everything she writes.

My friend Rod has an interesting blog post on a similar subject, looking at a (rather massive) article on Ernest Hemingway, that symbolist beloved of high-school English teachers everywhere. Hemingway was not a fan of shoehorning symbolism into a piece. On the one hand, I agree that this puts the metaphorical cart before the horse. On the other hand, I myself am not a fan of the "let it flow, 'twill all be well" school, either.

I guess it's a question of doing the most skillful job you know how to do, avoiding the worst errors that really piss you off when you see them in others' work, and leaving open the possibility that you will, every now and again, give yourself a magnificent surprise.