Drinks Before Dinner

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This play originated not in an idea or a character or a story, but in a sense of heightened language, a way of talking. It was not until I had the sound of it in my ear that I thought about saying something. The language preceded the intention. It’s possible that the voice the writer discovers may only be the hallucination of his own force of will; nevertheless, the process of making something up is best experienced as fortuitous, unplanned, exploratory. You write to find out what it is you’re writing. Marcel Duchamp was once asked why he gave up painting. “Too much of it is filling in,” he is reported to have said. The worker in any medium had best give it up if he finds himself only filling in what had been previously declared and completed in his mind, a creative fait accompli. Writers live in language, and their seriousness of purpose is not compromised nor their convictions threatened if they acknowledge that the subject of any given work may be a contingency of the song.

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