How much rewriting or revision do you typically do?

But that’s part of the process, isn’t it? Something might not fit in the show. Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration. And when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written. Things that seem to work well — work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece — suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

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.

Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it’s typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.

It happens in the course of writing. I can’t go on if it’s not pretty much the way that it should be. Towards the beginning of a book, I will go back to page one every day and rewrite. I’ll start out the day with some marked-up pages that I have marked up the night before, and by the time you get to page, maybe, 270, you are not going back to page 1 necessarily anymore, but you’re going back to page 158 and starting over from there.