I'm Very Interested In Silence. And, More

Yeah, I Have The Detail-obsessed, Controlling Personality Of A Novelist, But I Somehow Ended Up Writing Plays.

I Was 22 And Stopped Writing Plays, And I Didn't Start Again Until I Was 25. I Was Writing Badly. In College, I Attempted To Write These More Conventional Plays, But The Theater I Loved Was Downtown Experimental Theater. I Didn't Feel Like I Could Do That Either. It Didn't Occur To Me To Do My Own Thing.

I Think Growing Up In A Small Town, The Kind Of People I Met In My Small Town, They Still Haunt Me. I Find Myself Writing About Them Over And Over Again.

I Feel Like The Reason I Ended Up Becoming A Playwright Is Because I Never Choose The Right Word. As A Kid, My Fantasy Profession Was To Be A Novelist. But The Thing About Writing Prose - And Maybe Great Prose Writers Don't Feel This Way - But I Always Felt It Was About Choosing Words. I Was Always Like, "i Have To Choose The Perfect Word." And Then It Would Kill Me, And I Would Choose The Wrong Word Or I Would Choose Too Many Perfect Words - I Wrote Really Purple Prose.

I Ended Up Becoming A Playwright Because You Can Be Grammatically Incorrect: People Speaking In Bad Poetry Or People Attempting To Speak Well And Sometimes Succeeding And Sometimes Failing. The Whole Imperfection Of It Suddenly Felt Freeing To Me.