In order to end up with anything you can use, you have to excavate a whole bunch of stuff you can’t use, and get it all out of your system, and then go back later and chip away at all the terrible stuff that you’ve uncovered, and find the things that go together, ideas that go together, and motifs that feel like they keep coming up; and then, reassemble a piece of writing that way. That’s also what I do for my own stuff.

I like to write onstage. I like to say a funny thing that happened to me out loud and see if any part of it gets a laugh, then take the little moment that got the laugh and expand on it. I wish I was a more studious person. I have drawers full of notebooks filled with random sentences. In one I found a note that said, ‘wet lettuce.’ That’s it. What about it? What about wet lettuce? I know that I don’t like it, but where is the joke?!

I don’t rewrite. Well, not much. I think I probably do all the rewriting that I’m going to do before I’m aware that I’m writing the play because obviously, the creativity resists — resides — in the unconscious, right? Probably resists the unconscious, too — resides in the unconscious. My plays, I think, are pretty much determined before I become aware of them. I think they formulated there, and then they move into the conscious mind, and then onto the page. By the time I’m willing to commit a play to paper, I pretty much know — or can trust — the characters to write the play for me. So, I don’t impose. I let them have their heads and say and do what they want, and it turns out to be a play.

There were things that I wanted to add. Things that I wanted to take out. Things I wanted to correct. Things had changed for me as a writer, as an author, as a thinker.

My father was a great educator for me. He taught me so many things. He named me Carlos after a brother he lost — a very brilliant young man who died at 21 in Mexico. He had written very good poems. He was an intellectual. I think my father wanted to see his brother in me, so he put books into my hands at a very early age. He fostered my literary and artistic inclinations. So he was my best teacher.

A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You’re all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you’re doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.