I was a total theater nerd when I was growing up. It was through school plays and then starting drama for year eleven and twelve in high school that really brought me out of my shell as someone who was a very shy child, and being a theater nerd in the nineties meant that I was a complete and uttered David Williamson fan and I had read or seen every one of his plays by the time that I was eighteen. Now, if you haven't heard of David Williamson, he is, I
would say, Australia's most famous playwright. He debuted his first play in nineteen seventy. After spending years as a college teacher, he kept writing and was soon releasing hit after hit. You might have seen or heard of The Removalists, The Club, Emerald City, or one of his other fifty plus plays that he has written over the course of his career, and maybe you've even held your own Don's Party for Election Night, named after David's famous play of the same name.
So I don't know if there's anyone in Australia who wouldn't have come into contact with David's work somehow, whether it's studying his plays at school, seeing them in a theater or maybe watching his screenplays on film or TV. So where did David's best ideas come from that allowed him to write hit after hit nearly every year during his theater career. And how did David deal with a lot of negative reviews over the course of his career, And why does David believe that writer's block is a
total myth. My name is doctor Romantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of Behavioral Science Consultancy. Invent him and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So you would not remember this, But when I was gosh, I want to say, like twenty or twenty five years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I won an award for scriptwriting from the Fellowship of Australian Writers and you, I think, were associated with it or you sponsored it.
And I was such a fan of yours. I saw and read so many of your plays growing up as a teenager, through my twenties and through my whole life. And I wrote you a fan letter at that point in time, and you responded and I still have that letter, David.
I hope I wasn't rude or.
You were so polite, and it really like it just it made my day, it made my month, And I was curious because I never imagined in my wildest dreams that you would reply, and I would imagine you over the course of your career. You must have received so many letters from fans. What's your approach to I guess responding to everyone that does reach out.
Well, you know, I feel if they been kind enough to want to communicate, it's very boorish not to respect that. Well, first of all, they've thought you are important enough and important enough in their life to want to communicate with, and to not answer would seem awful, from whether anyone believes it or not. Whatever the acclaim or lack of acclaim, I get out there, I see my sophice fairly ordinary, fairly easily hurt, and I can empathize with anyone else
that's fairly easily hurt. And there's nothing like plucking up the courage to approach someone that you admire and then not getting a response. So I try, and I try and do my best. I think I've answered most of them.
Wow, that's very impressive, because I can't even begin to imagine how.
Many you received.
Now, at the height of your career, you were literally putting out a play every year, certainly much to my delight, And I want to know, how did you keep up with that kind of intensity to be putting out a new play every single year, Amantha.
I think it was a question of addiction once I had experienced I first experienced the thrill of actors saying my words and audiences responding in university reviews. But when I got to full length players, that was a whole
different ballgame. That was a big effort. But when I got to the stage where I could create something really good, actors and directors would work on it, and then the magic ingredient would turn up on the first preview night, the audience, and if you've got it right, there was a palpable connection between what you'd written, the actors, the audience. What you'd written was meaning something to all those live people there in the audience, and it was a huge
buzz and quite addictive. And once I'd experienced that, I wanted to experience it again. And it's a classic addiction case. I think. I think a lot of executives are like that. If they have one of their projects flowers and comes off. They wanted to happen again. That's so true.
So what would that look like putting out a play a year? How would your year be structured or broken down to essentially hit that deadline.
Well, it was fairly laid out for me because the theater companies that I worked for, the Sydney Theater Company in the Welburne Theater Company and the other theater companies around had have a system of subscription audiences, and around about September or sometimes August, they put out a brochure with all the upcoming plays for the next year and offer it to their subscribers to buy multiple tickets. They pick tickets to all of the players or some of them,
and so they have to have that brochure ready. So by June they're really in the last stages of assembling that brochure. So going back a couple of months, they need my play to be typically there about April, hopefully before that at the latest May, they had to assess it. They had to see who they were going to cast, because that's a vital ingredient in the brochure that goes out.
It's not only Williamson's play, but x or Y is starring at it, so they had to put all that together get it out by August or September, so you had to get your stuff done by hopefully. They used to want me to have it in by March April. May was really pushing it.
And is that the full play? Because funnily enough, literally just received next year's MTC brochure in the mail yesterday, which I was excitingly, excitedly reading through. So is it the full play that needs to be ready by that point in time?
Well enough, It needs to be finished enough. It's usually only a first or second or third draft that they go on, but it has to be finished enough to attract good actors and a good director to do the play.
It can't be too shoddy or too appalling. I will work on it after it's accepted, after it's in the brochure, I will still keep working on many, usually many more drafts, usually ten, twelve fifty, sometimes fifteen drafts, and then I would get the privilege of a rehearsal, a rehearsed reading with my cast, those of who could be assembled about eight weeks before rehearsal starts, so sometimes six weeks. Towards the end of my career, I got that all the time,
so you could hear it. It's not until you hear good actors bringing the script to life you realize where the mistakes are that you've made, Like redundant information. I've said that three times. I'm really hammering that point. That passage is on the nose. By on the nose, I mean, it's too obvious. You don't need to say tell an actor that I have an actor saying I am so angry if their actions are demonstrating that they're angry. So all kinds of things like that come up in the reading.
Then you go away and rewrite again, and then there's even some shaping up during the rehearsal process itself. On the first day of the reading, you'll hope it's all right, but usually there's a bit of tinkering. But you can't do too much in a four or five week rehearsal otherwise to throw the actors, so you just hope that you've got it right. But by the time rehearsal start, what's.
That like the first time you hear a play read out or performed by actors in that rehearsal room.
It's very nerve wreaking matter because those actors are very smart. They know what works, they know what doesn't. The director is usually a very good director and knows what works and knows what does doesn't. So it's a testing situation for you as a writer to get through that unscathed or relatively unscathed. But if you've got something wrong, the actors and the director will usually alert you to it, usually tactfully, and if you agree, you work on it.
So it's a collaborative process to a certain extent once you've got those actors around the table. But hearing good actors work on your words is well I said, it's nerve wreck process is nerve wracking, but hearing it when it's working as magic you hear as I'm writing, my dialogue isn't strictly naturalistic. It's not exactly how people talk. There are musical rhythms in the dialogue which actors have to grasp on and do grasp on, and when they get it, it's like singing. They take off.
So when you're in that typically four week rehearsal process before the previews before opening night, how much is changing in a script in that I guess that in the final in the final rehearsal process, in.
The final rehearsal process, just fine tuning, maybe cutting five percent of the lines that are redundant. Usually sometimes I have had to do a radical rewriter occasionally, and that's always upsetting for the class, and they usually bear with you. But it doesn't happen all that often. But you don't want to do it all that often because it's a big up people. But there was one or two players where I saw that there was a big floor and I had to address it.
You mentioned like there have been a couple of times you've had to do some major rewrites. What's your approach to I guess solving a problem, like a major problem with a script where something is really not working.
Well. There's a player I did called Brilliant Lies.
I love that one.
Oh. That was in the early nineties, and I had the magnificent actor Ray Barrett playing the father of the two girls. And in the initial right he was a benign, gentle, sort of chap ineffectual. And I heard the read and I thought that raise wasted he I mean he could do this role standing on his ear. I mean, people all like him, but there's nothing to stretch him here. He's such a great actor. I've got to do more
than this with him. So I did a very radical rewrite and made him quite a bit darker and quite a bit more less pleasant. There was some sexual abuse of his daughters, not severe, but severe enough to traumatize them, and they had to cope with that, and they had to cope with his illness, and they had to cope with finding money to save his life and did they really want to do it? Give them the history. So it became a lot more dark, a lot more dramatic, and gave him a lot more range. And that was
perhaps the most major rewrite. And I did a lot of that during the rehearsal. And Ray was terrific because to the cast, I had a wonderful cast there and they were tolerant because they could see the play was going to sing. It was going to be a lot more powerful if we did this. And Ray went along with it, and part of that was because he knew that his part would be far more demanding, but rewarding for him and rewarding for the audience.
And so how do you do that rewrite? Like do you start big picture and then hone in on the you know, on the scenes and the dialogue. What does that look like?
Well I got the idea. I said, Ah, what I've got to do with him is not making the perfect father. I've really got to make him. And how do I do that? Well, two daughters? Do I stray into this territory? And I thought, yes, yes, let's do it. And so I write fast when it's mainly getting the grasp of the new structure. All right, I know where I'm going now, so I can do it. I can write new scenes at fairly high speed and then rewrite them at high speed and rewrite them. So we got it in shape
remarkably quickly given the magnitude of the change. But I'm so glad we did it because it turned out a much better play for it.
So, high speed writing, what does that look like? What conditions do you need to do this? High speed writing? As you refer to it.
A lot of adrenaline, Amantha, I'm a lot of adrenaline. I get excited, I get anxious, keyed up. I've got to get this right. My wife Kristen sees the glaze look in my eye and knows there's no sense trying to communicate for the next day or two until I get it right. Yeah, it's a frenzy. When it's that sort of a big job, it's a frenzy and it just seems to pour out. It just pours out. You don't know from where. Some deep recesses than you. A lot of what comes out on the page isn't from
your conscious mind. It comes from somewhere. I don't know where, but you just thank god it's there.
And what's happening around you? Like if you locked yourself away, do you have this Like is there a particular environment that you do that best friends, you'd work in? What does that look like?
Just my office? And I get grumpy, obsessed and unbearable to live with during the process. But luckily Kristen is a writer herself, so she knows the force of obsession and by and large, except when it's gone to extremes, has been tolerant.
Wow, And what do you do with all the things that can distract you, like you know, your phone for example, or email? What happens to all those things when you're in this kind of flow state.
I guess you don't notice the rest of the world, you leave bills unpaid, you leave vital calls unanswered, which I don't like doing. I mean, I'm the sort of person who gets anxious if bills are hanging over your head, and I feel awful if I haven't replied to someone.
So it's only in those states where you know you've got to get something done, where you're in a heightened state that all the rest of the world fades away in service and you're in service of the task of getting it right, with the aim of producing something that really connects and secondly, something good enough so it doesn't humiliate you.
I feel like your plays always have such unique and different and interesting premises, so I want to know, like, where does that seed of an idea from, Like when you're starting something new, it.
Sort of usually comes from observations of the life around things I've heard, things I've seen, things I've read. And what triggers me is when it arouses a strong emotional response in me. If I feel angry, or if I feel it's hilarious, or if I feel really involved in that story or what I've seen, if I'm really excited by it, then my emotional response tells me that that particular theme or situation could also excite an interest and audience.
How much would you flesh out an idea before you metaphorically put pen to paper.
It varies. I'm not big on doing hugely detailed synopsies. Usually I'll find the situation I want to write about. I'll find the conflicts that are going to drive my story. I'll find the characters and the conflicts between them that are going to drive my story. I'll sometimes write a rough outline of a couple of pages, sometimes more. I'll know where the story is vague vaguely hitting or not so vaguely but heading, and where I think it is going to end. But then as the writing process takes over,
things happen. I don't. I hear some writers saying, oh, my characters dictate to me and take me off. Another doruct well, my characters don't dictate to me. But new ideas spontaneously form, what if this, what if that? And new possibilities open out as you begin the process of writing. So in the sense it is organic, you never quite know where it's going to go. But I was very struck by the American playwright David Marmott, who said, look if I don't surprise myself when I'm writing. I'm not
going to surprise the audience. Now, the danger of that organic method is that you can go off the rails. You can sort of you can get excited about new possibilities, new branches of your story and get carried away with it and suddenly find you've got a very chaotic structure that's out of control. So the next ten, twelve, fifteen drafts are getting that structure back in order.
And with these ideas that are kind of emerging as you're writing, how do you judge whether they're worth pursuing or not?
I think with Ernest Hemingway says the greatest asset of any good writer is what he called a shit detector. You've gone. You've got to be ruthless enough with yourself to know when that idea really isn't a good idea, when it's tried, when it's been done to death, when it's improbable, when the character would just not do what you've got them doing. You've got to be aware of your organic process going off the rails.
We will be back shortly with David Hearing about how he remembers ideas that come to him at inopportune at times, and also his methods for overcoming writer's block. Now, 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, ranging from interesting research findings through to gadgets that I'm loving.
You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co, How I Work dot c. What's it like when you're in the middle of writing a script, like are those characters living with you twenty four to seven? Or is it quite contained? When you're at your computer writing No.
I find it hard to let go, as Kristin can tell you, and as I say, it's lucky she's a writer because she's a bit tolerant. When a story is forming and being executed. It's hard for me to drag my mind off it, even when I'm not at the word processor. So Kristin will occasionally turn them in say what did I just say? I've been saved by the essential of a magic facility somewhere at the back of my brain that records even if I'm not conscious of it.
You can usually parrot back the lines and get away with it, But I've just said from the kitchen that doesn't mean it goes in. No, that's true, but no, I find it hard to switch off. Often I'll go to bed and agonized because and have a fairly sleepless night because that I can't seem to find it way out of the story impass and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Then you wake up in the morning, have a shower, or have a walk on the beach
or something like that, and it'll come to you. So it's a fairly up and down emotional process.
What methods do you have for capturing all those thoughts and ideas and dialogue that come to your head in opportune times?
Often I have been really irritating myself for not having a patterned pencil or something there to call them, But I raally remember to take them round, So I try and retain them in my head till the next opportunity I've got to jot the idea down.
How do you do that, like through repetition or have you got any tricks or have you just got a superhuman memory?
Often through repetition or remembering the initials that thought and sort of memory tricks, But often I forget them. I'm really really annoyed. I should I should be sensible enough to carry a pattern pencil around me, but I never get round of it.
Well, look, I guess what what you're doing is working pretty well for you, David. Now you mentioned you know this process where you're stuck on something and you're trying to get unstuck. What are some of your go to methods for forgetting on stack, other than having a good night's sleep, hopefully or maybe a restless night sleep.
It sounds like sometimes it's a matter of just going back to the word processor and writing anything, just writing bad stuff, and that bad stuff makes you so disgusted you think up something more, and then you think up something more. And sometimes it's a process of just hammering
away at the word processor until something reasonable emerges. But sometimes it can just come out of the blue, like as I say, I was having great trouble with the ending of one of my players, and suddenly the subconscious must have been working away on it, and the solution popped into my head. I think I was under the shower. So sometimes you just slog away and hope that the bad ideas get better as you write them. And other times as if by magic the solution will appear.
Do you believe in writer's block?
No. I think writer's block is just a form of perfectionism that the writer can't stand to put anything on their screen that's less than perfect, so they'd rather not do anything at all. It's something I couldn't afford to have with a large family to support. I have no sympathy for writers that say I've got writer's block. Well, I say, get to the word process and write something it. It doesn't matter how bad it is. Just write something, and how bad it is will shock you into thinking
up something better. And then you think up something better. Just keep working, don't sit there agonizing and saying I haven't got an idea fair enough.
At what point in your writing process would you let someone else read your work for feedback? Oh?
After the first draft invaluable Kristen, my wife is the first one ever to read a draft, and her judgment is pretty good. She's got quite subtle about criticism over the years. Doesn't tell me come down the stead that it's quite tense. I give her the draft, quite excited. She goes up to her office and reads, and I wait for an hour and a half or so, and then she comes out with a look on her face, and I can tell from the look on her face
whether it's good news or bad news. When it's really good news, she's got tears in her eyes, believe it or not because she thinks it's so good. When she's got a very worried look on her face, I know there's a lot more rewriting to go now.
I feel like as an MTC or Melbourne Theater Company subscriber, there's always a lot of excitement when there's a David Williamson play on the agenda for the year. And how do you deal with the pressure of writing, Like you're the I'm writing the next David Williamson play.
Well, I'm not any longer. I've had fifty years in the business and and I've just written my memoir, which has caused me. I really enjoyed doing it, but it's been a long slog and it's just been published and it's it's a lot of words, but worth doing. But I don't want to see word Processor again for a while.
So I guess, like back in, back in like the peak of where you were writing a play a year, do you remember what that pressure was like and how you dealt with it.
It was. It was pressure, there was no doubt about it. It was pressure. I'd say, right, I've really got to get a great idea for this year. Now let's sit down, let's scan the environment. I want something powerful, I want something funny, I want something whatever. I want something that's going to affect the audiences. So the tension then was finding the subject, and there was a lot of false starts there before I actually got to decide on the subject.
But the writing process usually was exciting, tense, but exciting. That's when you get into a sort of a transcendent state and you really got to get that first draft down, which, as I said, is evolving organically and developing as you're doing it, which adds to the excitement. So that was the not the fun part, but the really in the time flow part where you just didn't notice time was passing.
And I want to know, like on the first preview night, when you're actually there and there's a packed house watching your words being spoken for the first time in this big theater in environment, what sorts of things are you looking for when you're looking at the audience to kind of see what do I need to change?
Oh, 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 reflected the sorts of lives that those people were having. Now I've often been criticized because my plays 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 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 Anglic Celtic reacting to it and saying, wow, this, 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 a survey from the women's lou and she'd 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, he's laughing at his 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 Kristen 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 do you deal with bad reviews, negative reviews?
Well, earlier in my 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 to laugh 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 are 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. Yeah, but what's this bastard calling me? Yeah, so you obsess about the bad stuff and forget the good stuff. And it reminded me of Dostoevsky, 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 eventually ruined his life. So I was a bit like that, but I got better. But at the start, when I became prominent, it was a psychic shock because until that stage I was a
lecturer in a tertiary institution. As students like me, their staff like me, my friends seemed to like me. I was affable, nobody hated me, And then suddenly you 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.
And now, of course you've got your memoir Home Truths out, David. So I'd love to know for listeners that are keen to consume that and just the stuff that you've put out into the world, what's the best way for people to get their hands on a copy and connect with you.
Oh well, as I say, in all good bookstores, it's a HarperCollins publication available online through places like Booktopia or Amazon. And I was as honest as I could be. I've spent a life dissecting the flaws and imperfections, hopefully with some degree of benevolence of other people. So I thought, well, if I'm going to I can't stand memoirs at a puff pieces for their authors who make themselves the hero of their own life. So I've tried to be honest.
I think it's also very amusing in past because a lot of funny things that have happened to me in my life. But I've also been honest about my imperfections, which have been embarrassingly bad at times in terms of my personal life. Amazing.
Now, David, if you if I would have told my twenty one year old self that I would get to spend an hour or so talking to you, my mind would have been blown back, you know, twenty twenty five years ago. And I just want to say it's been an absolute treat chatting with you and hearing about your process for creating some of my favorite plays that I've ever seen. So thank you, so much.
Thank you, Mantha. It has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and what lovely questions.
Hello there, I hope you enjoyed my chat with David Oh. It was just such a joy to talk to him, one of my lifelong heroes. Now, if you are not a subscriber or follower of how I work, you might want to hit the subscribe or follow. But now, because next week I've got Chris Oliver Taylor, who is the head of Freemantle Australia, one of our biggest production houses, and we'll be talking about what it takes to picture a successful TV idea and how he knows when he's
onto a winner. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support for Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Koda, and thank you to Martin Nimber who does the audio mix for every show and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.