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With characters, again,
it depends on the initiating idea for the piece.
Other times, your situation tells you what your characters
ought to be,
or your situation will tell you
what characters will best illuminate and illustrate
what it is you're trying to say.
The hardest thing for me as a writer
is coming up with things to say,
things that I--a premise that I want or a lesson or a--
not necessarily didactically,
but I find lots of interesting situations,
lots of interesting characters,
but I don't necessarily know
what it is that I want to say with them.
And sometimes those plays linger for months and years
before I finally realize.
I wrote a play eight or nine years ago
about an actor on location for a film
who brings a local girl back to his hotel room.
Well there were my characters.
There was a sort of comparatively sophisticated man
and a very unsophisticated small-town girl.
And I thought
I could make something interesting happen here,
but I didn't know what it was.
And I sat on that idea for nearly 20 years
before I had an epiphany one night
rocking my baby daughter to sleep, and suddenly,
I realized that I could use these characters
in this situation to say something about fatherhood.
And that's how that play ended up coming into being,
and it said all the things I wanted--
it addressed all of the reasons that I found the setting
and the characters compelling 20 years earlier.
But 20 years earlier, I didn't have the story.
I didn't have the--
I didn't know what it was I was going to use them to illustrate.