Visualization, Language and the Inner Library

Author(s): Sam Shepard

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 21, No. 4, Playwrights and Playwriting Issue (Dec., 1977),
pp. 49-58
Published by: The MIT Press
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Visualization,
Language
and

the

Inner
by

Library
Sam

Shepard

I ,)

Ideas
playsemerge from
not
other
the
way around.
I feel a lot of reluctance in attempting to describe any part of a process which,
by its truest nature, holds an unending mystery. At the same time I'm hoping that
by trying to formulate some of this territory I can make certain things clearer to
myself.
I've always felt that the term "experimental" in regard to theatre forms has
been twisted by the intellectual community surrounding the artist to the extent that
now even the artist has lost track of its original essence. In other words, a search
for "new forms" doesn't seem to be exactly where it's at.
There comes a point where the exterior gyrations are no longer the most interesting aspect of what you're practicing, and brand-new exploration starts to
take root. For example: In the writing of a particular character where does the
character take shape? In my experience the character is visualized, he appears out
of nowhere in three dimensions and speaks. He doesn't speak to me because I'm
not in the play. I'mwatching it. He speaks to something or someone else, or even to
himself, or even to no one.
I'm talking now about an open-ended structure where anything could happen
as opposed to a carefully planned and regurgitated event which, for me, has always
been as painful as pissing nickels. There are writers who work this way successfully, and I admire them and all that, but I don't see the point exactly. The reason I
began writing plays was the hope of extending the sensation of play (as in "kid")
on into adult life. If "play" becomes "labor,"why play?
Anyway, to veer back to visualization-right here is where the experiment
starts. With the very first impulse to see something happen on a stage. Any stage.
This impulse is mistakenly called an idea by those who have never experienced it. I
can't even count how many times I've heard the line, "Where did the idea for this
play come from?" I never can answer it because it seems totally back-assward.
Ideas emerge from plays-not the other way around.

SAMSHEPARD 51
I don't mean to make this sound like a magic act or a mystical experience. It
has nothing to do with hallucination or drugs or meditation. These things may all
have an influence on the general picture, but they aren't the picture itself. The picture is moving in the mind and being allowed to move more and more freely as you
follow it. The following of it is the writing part. In other words, I'mtaking notes in as
much detail as possible on an event that's happening somewhere inside me. The
extent to which I can actually follow the picture and not intervene with my own twocents worth is where inspiration and craftsmanship hold their real meaning. If I find
myself pushing the character in a certain direction, it's almost always a sure sign
that I've fallen back on technique and lost the real thread of the thing.
This isn't to say that it's possible to write on nothing but a wave of inspired vision. There has to be some kind of common ground between the accumulated
knowledge of what you know how to do (because you've done it before) and the
completely foreign country that always demands a new expression. I've never written a play that didn't require both ends of the stick.
Another part of this that interests me is: How is this inner visualizing different
from ordinarydaydreaming or ordinary nightdreaming? The difference seems to lie
in the idea of a "watcher" being engaged while writing, whereas ordinarily this
watcher is absent. I'm driving a truck and daydreaming about myself in Mexico,
but, in this case, I'm not really seeing the dream that's taking place. If I start to see
it, then it might become a play.
Now, another thing comes into focus. It must be true that we're continuously
taking in images of experience from the outside world through our senses, even
when we're not aware of it. How else could whole scenes from our past which we
thought we'd long forgotten suddenly spring up in living technicolor? These tastes

I write
the
way

that's
fast
because
it happens with
me.
....

~ ~~

....

52

THEDRAMA
REVIEW/T76

from our life must then be stored away somewhere in some kind of inner library.So
this must mean that if I could be truly resourceful, I could draw on this libraryat any
given moment for the exact information I needed. Not only that, but the information
is then given back to me as a living sensation. From this point of view, I'm diving
back into the actual experience of having been there and writing from it as though
it's happening now.
This is very similar to the method-acting technique called "recall." It's a good
description-I'm recalling the thing itself. The similarity between the actor's art
and the playwright's is a lot closer than most people suspect. In fact the playwright
is the only actor who gets to play all the parts. The danger of this method from the
actor's point of view is that he becomes lost in the dream and forgets about the audience. The same holds true for the writer, but the writer doesn't really realize
where he became lost until he sees an audience nodding out through what he'd
thought were his most blazing passages.
This brings me down to words. Words as tools of imagery in motion. I have a
feeling that the cultural environment one is raised in predetermines a rhythmical
relationship to the use of words. In this sense, I can't be anything other than an
American writer.
I noticed though, after living in England for three straight years, that certain
subtle changes occurred in this rhythmic construction. In order to accommodate
these new configurations in the way a sentence would overblow itself (as is the
English tendency), I found myself adding English characters to my plays.
Geography of a Horse Dreamer was written in London, and there's only one truly
American character in the play.

If I'm
inside
right
the
I can
moment,
feels
smells,
sees,
IIIIIIIII

IIII

II

the

character
catch
what
and
touches.
III
II

in
he
I II_

II

had
if the
that
attitude
was
play
to
. . . any
correct
faults
attempt
was
them
cheating.

My

Still, the power of words for me isn't so much in the delineation of a

character's social circumstances as it is in the capacity to evoke visions in the eye
of the audience. American Indian poetry (in its simplest translation) is a prime example. The roots of this poetry stem from a religious belief in the word itself. Like
"crow." Like "hawk." Words as living incantations and not as symbols. Taken in
this way, the organization of living, breathing words as they hit the air between the
actor and the audience actually possesses the power to change our chemistry.
Still, the critical assessment of this kind of event is almost always relegated to the
categories of symbolism or "surrealism" or some other accepted niche. In other
words, it's removed from the living and dedicated to the dead.
I seem to have come around now to the ear as opposed to the eye, but actually
they work in conjunction with each other. They seem to be joined in moments of
heightened perception. I hear the phrase a lot that this or that writer has a "great
ear for language." What this usually means is that the writer has an openness to
people's use of language in the outside world and then this is recorded and
reproduced exactly as it's heard. This is no doubt a great gift, but it seems to fall
way short of our overall capacity to listen. If I only hear the sounds that people
make, how much sound am I leaving out? Words, at best, can only give a partial
glimpse into the total world of sensate experience, but how much of that total
world am I letting myself in for when I approach writing?
The structure of any art form immediately implies limitation. I'm narrowing
down my field of vision. I'magreeing to work within certain boundaries. So I have to
be very careful how those boundaries are defined at the outset. Language, then,
seems to be the only ingredient in this plan that retains the potential of making
leaps into the unknown. There's only so much I can do with appearances. Change
the costume, add a new character, change the light, bring in objects, shift the set,

54

THEDRAMA
REVIEW/T76

but language is always hovering right in there, ready to move faster and more effectively than all the rest of it put together. It's like pulling out a .38 when someone
faces you with a knife.
Language can explode from the tiniest impulse. If I'm right inside the
character in the moment, I can catch what he smells, sees, feels and touches. In a
sudden flash, he opens his eyes, and the words follow. In these lightning-like eruptions words are not thought, they're felt. They cut through space and make perfect
sense without having to hesitate for the "meaning."
From time to time I've practiced Jack Kerouac's discovery of jazz-sketching
with words. Following the exact same principles as a musician does when he's
jamming. After periods of this kind of practice, I begin to get the haunting sense
that something in me writes but it's not necessarily me. At least it's not the "me"
that takes credit for it. This identical experience happened to me once when I was
playing drums with The Holy Modal Rounders, and it scared the shit out of me.
Peter Stampfel, the fiddle player explained it as being visited by the Holy Ghost,
which sounded reasonable enough at the time.

Language...seems

be
the
. that
retains
ingredient .
of making
into
potential
leaps
unknown.
to

only
the
the
- -l

SAMSHEPARD 55

It seems
harder
the
so
not
anymore.

the

that

it

easily

gets
fooled

more
you
because

by

write

you're
yourself

What I'mtrying to get at here is that the real quest of a writeris to penetrate into another world. A world behind the form. The contradiction is that as soon as that
world opens up, I tend to run the other way. It's scary because I can't answer to it
from what I know.
Now, here's the big rub-it's generally accepted in the scholarly world that a
playwright deals with "ideas." That idea in itself has been inherited by us as
though it were originally written in granite from above and nobody, but nobody, better mess with it. The problem for me with this concept is that its adherents are
almost always referringto ideas which speak only to the mind and leave out completely the body, the emotions and all the rest of it.
Mythspeaks to everything at once, especially the emotions. By myth I mean a
sense of mystery and not necessarily a traditional formula. A character for me is a
composite of different mysteries. He's an unknown quantity. If he wasn't, it would
be like coloring in the numbered spaces. I see an old man by a broken car in the
middle of nowhere and those simple elements right away set up associations and
yearnings to pursue what he's doing there.

THEDRAMA
REVIEW/T76

56

only
all

the

the
actor

playwrightis the
to play
who
gets

parts.

The character of Crow in Tooth of Crime came from a yearning toward

violence. A totally lethal human with no way or reason for tracing how he got that
way. He just appeared. He spit words that became his weapons. He doesn't
"mean" anything. He's simply following his most savage instincts. He speaks in an
unheard-of tongue. He needed a victim, so I gave him one. He devoured him just
like he was supposed to. When you're writing inside of a character like this, you
aren't pausing every ten seconds to figure out what it all means. If you do, you lose
the whole shot, because the character isn't going to hang around waiting for you.
He's moving.
I write fast because that's the way it happens with me. Sometimes long
stretches happen in between where I don't write for weeks. But when I start, I don't
stop. Writing is born from a need. A deep burn. If there's no need, there's no
writing.
I don't mean to give the impression from all this that a playwright isn't responsible toward the audience. He is. But which audience? An imagined one or a real
one? The only real audience he has at the moment of writing is himself. Only later
does the other audience come into it. At that point he begins to see the correspondence or lack of it between his own "watching" and the watching of others.

I used to be dead set against rewriting on any level. My attitude was that if the
play had faults, those faults were part and parcel of the original process, and that
any attempt to correct them was cheating. Like a sculptor sneaking out in the night
with his chisel and chipping little pieces off his work or gluing them back on.
After a while this rigid "holy-art"concept began to crumble. It was no longer a
case of "correction," as though what I was involved with was some kind of
definitive term paper. I began to see that the living outcome (the production)
always demanded a different kind of attention than the written form that it sprang
from. The spoken word, no matter how you cut it, is different than the written word.
It happens in a different space, under different circumstances and demands a different set of laws.
Action is the only play I've written where I spoke each line out loud to myself
before I put it down on paper. To me that play still comes the closest to sounding
on stage exactly like it was written. This method doesn't work for every play,
though, since it necessarily sets up a slower tempo. Itjust happened to be the right
approach for that particular piece.

58

THEDRAMAREVIEW/T76

La Turista was the first play I ever rewrote, under the urging of Jacques Levy,
who directed it. We were in the second week of rehearsals at the American Place
Theatre when I walked in with a brand-new second act. It's a tribute to Wynn Handman that he allowed this kind of procedure to take place. That was the first taste I
got of regarding theatre as an ongoing process. I could feel the whole evolution of
that play from a tiny sweltering hotel in the Yucatan, half wasted with the trots, to a
full-blown production in New York City. Most of the writing in that piece was
hatched from a semidelirious state of severe dysentery. What the Mexicans call
"La Turista" or "Montezuma's Revenge." In that state any writing I could manage
seemed valid, no matter how incoherent it might seem to an outside eye. Once it hit
the stage in rehearsals and I was back to a fairly healthy physical condition, the
whole thing seemed filled with an overriding self-pity. The new second act came
more from desperation than anything else.
I think immediate environments tend to play a much heavier role on my writing
than I'm aware of most of the time. That is, the physical place I'm in at the time of
sitting down to the machine. In New York I could write any time in any place. It
didn't matter what was happening in the streets below or the apartment above. I
just wrote. The funny thing is that I can remember the exact place and time of every
play. Even the people I was with. It's almost as though the plays were kind of
chronicle I was keeping on myself.
It seems that the more you write, the harder it gets, because you're not so
easily fooled by yourself anymore. I can still sit down and whip off a play like I used
to, but it doesn't have the same meaning now as it did when I was nineteen. Even
so, writing becomes more and more interesting as you go along, and it starts to
open up some of its secrets. One thing I'm sure of, though. That I'll never get to the
bottom of it.