David had a pretty good He was working in a great university. His students loved him, his peers loved him. He had plenty of friends who loved him, and then he became a successful playwright. Life couldn't get any better except reaching the dizzying heights David reached in the theater world didn't come cheap. For most of his life, he was like anyone else. You might have the occasional tiff with a coworker or acquaintance, but generally you're well liked
by the people you care about. And all of a sudden, hordes of strangers started to hate David Williamson. Already a self conscious man, the idea of people making a living by tearing apart his every thought was almost debilitating for David. So how did he learn to train his focus onto the audience rather than the critics. My name is doctor
Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work.
On Today is my favorite Tip episode. We go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from that interview In today's show, I speak with playwrights David Williamson, and I wanted to know, on the very first preview night of a show, when there's a packed house with people watching his words being spoken for the first time, what sorts of things he looks for in his audience to see what he might need to change.
Yeah, I'm looking for involvement. I'm hoping the audience is absorbed in the story. I hope it's relating to their lives, because the thing I used to love was writing plays that impinged on the sorts of lives or reflective sorts of lives that those people were having. Now I've often been criticized because my players are about the Anglo Celtic middle class, and there are only one segment of our society. But it's a segment I know, and there's a lot of us, and we should be and we should be
allowed to have our own stories. And the proliferation of writing from other groups in society has been very welcome. But that's what I know, and that's what I do. And when I heard that audience, usually fairly middle class and Anglo Celtic reacting to it and saying wow, I know someone like that. I really know someone like that, and I've seen that happen. You can see them when you can sense them saying that. That's when it's deeply satisfying.
And would you talk to audience members during interval or at the end.
No, I'd be terrified. I'd leave Kristin. She'd do it. Survey from the women's lou and shit, hear the buzz in there and come back. I'm terribly self conscious on when I'm in an audience. I'm often accused of laughing at my own work. They look at me like, oh, I's laughing at its own work. Well, I'm usually laughing at the creativity that clever actors have brought to my lines, rather than celebrating my lines. But it's hard to tell them that. No, I'm terribly self conscious. There was a
time when I couldn't go to opening nights. I'd have to send Kristin off and get a report back. It's very tense, very tense.
Now. I imagine when reviews start coming out, that is an interesting time. I'd love to know. How how do you deal with bad reviews, negative reviews.
Well, earlier in the career I didn't deal very well at all. The first law of criticism I learned, much to my chagrin, was that the strength of the audience reaction bears no relation to the critics evaluation of the play. In fact, sometimes it works in reverse. I remember one critic writing, I sat with a black cloud above me as people fell about around me, laughing, as if this is a terrible crime that I'd written something that people
were enjoying. But a lot of theater critics think that theater is an arena of suffering that you've got to be if you're Anglo Celtic middle class, you've got to be whipped and told your horrible species that are doing terrible things to the planet and other people, and you've got to be told how bad you are. You're not allowed al off and enjoy the theater. It's a place of torture, according to some critics. But no, so I didn't. I particularly reacted badly when I knew I'd written a
hit and got no recognition for it whatsoever. In fact, got slammed for it, being told I was commercial, and I knew that my players were players of substance. Sure, they are entertaining unless you make a play entertaining. On the surface, you won't get an audience, there's no sense doing it. But at other levels they were making fairly often fairly acute observations about the patterns of our social behavior that were often quite intricate. And I knew my
work wasn't meretricious. It was actually something of substance and so to be because people were in enjoying it. To be told it was worthless was a hard pill to swallow. But then again, the human psyche is somehow structured to concentrate ferociously on all the negative and set aside the positive.
And there are a lot of positive things being said about me, But the human ego, being as it is, you tend to think, well, of course that's right, Yes, of course I'm brilliant, But what's this bastard calling me? So you obsess about the bad stuff and forget the good stuff. And it reminded me of Dostoevski, that one of the greatest novelists ever, who had his life blighted by one persistent, awful critic in the Ukraine that kept giving him a rough time and it evirtually ruined his life.
So I was a bit like that. But I got better but start. When I became prominent, it was a psychic shock because until that stage I was a lecturer and a tershie institution where students like me, the staff like me, my friends seem to like me. I was affable, nobody hated me. And then suddenly you have become prominent and you realize the arts is the most ferociously competitive field on the face of the earth. Everyone wants to be a writer or an artist or something like that.
So if you succeed, the ones that haven't succeeded have really got it in for you.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with David, and if you want to listen to the full interview, you can click on a link to the episode in the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research finding, street of gadgets and software that I'm loving. You can sign up
for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot Co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.