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Here I am writ­ing plays, but do I actu­ally read any? I real­ized today that if I don’t see what else is out there — and see it in script form, not just on stage — then I’m going to get into a rut where I’m effec­tively writ­ing the same play over and over again. I can already sort of feel it hap­pen­ing, in fact. My four plays so far have widely dif­fer­ent sub­ject matter, but — to me, at least — they feel uncan­nily similar.

It’s not just play­writ­ing, of course; in any cre­ative area, you have to pro­vide grist for the mill. Life gives you plenty of ideas for the con­tent, but to study the craft, you really have to look at what else is out there. This morn­ing I was read­ing Patrick Kavanaugh’s book Spir­i­tual Lives of Great Com­posers and came across this quote about J.S. Bach:

Bach’s brother owned a set of com­po­si­tions, which he for­bade the younger Bach to use. Per­haps because it was placed off-​limits, that musi­cal man­u­script grew irre­sistibly attrac­tive to the young musician.

And so for weeks, Bach stole the pre­cious pages and hid them in his room, where he stayed up late night after night copy­ing the musi­cal scores by moon­light. When his brother dis­cov­ered the copied pages, he angrily con­fis­cated them. But Bach had already gleaned valu­able lessons in com­po­si­tion, as well as dis­ci­pline and devo­tion to music, from the clan­des­tine exercise.

I bought a book of staff paper today and checked out some Beethoven and Mozart pieces so I can start copy­ing scores. :) You see, it’s been so long since I’ve done any com­po­si­tion that I feel like I’ve almost com­pletely lost touch with that world. I’ve been for­get­ting the lan­guage of music nota­tion. And the struc­ture and theory behind music? Merely a memory.

I’m not saying all that is nec­es­sary to write music. It’s not. But for me, with­out it I feel like I’m churn­ing out the same thing over and over again, never grow­ing or expand­ing, never deep­en­ing beyond the shal­low waters in which I start. To get past that, I need to study the works of the great musi­cians. (That’s more impor­tant, in my opin­ion, than study­ing the theory. But I happen to be rather fond of music theory, too. :))

And I need to start read­ing plays. And poetry, if I ever want to break out of the mold I’ve been in for years. (I rarely read poetry, so it’s no sur­prise that my own poems sound like carbon copies. In fact, I think they’re almost all in one of two or three dif­fer­ent meters. It’s sad.) Par­tic­u­larly poetry that isn’t like the poetry I write. And the more plays I read, the more my under­stand­ing of the guts of the­atre will expand, and I’ll pro­duce better work. It’s exciting. :)

(One of these days I do intend to start paint­ing again, by the way…)