TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Craft with Audrey Cefaly
Once you have an idea, how do you proceed? Do you take notes? Do you outline? Do you plunge right in?
Outlines, no. Notes, yes. When I “plunge” right in (which happens a lot), I think of it more like an impulse than an “idea.” David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards taught me how to loosen my grip on story. I imagine a theatrically provocative gesture (“something’s on fire” in my play Fin & Euba; “a woman gets pushed out of a boat” in The Gulf) and then I write backwards—literally backwards—from there. I move in an uninterrupted sequence, action by action, in reverse, until the “rise” bottoms out.
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