Playwriting doesn’t work like mathematics.

In math, two plus one equals three.

In playwriting, having an extra character often leads to a negative outcome.

That’s because a character you don’t need – a character that isn’t essential to the scene, that doesn’t bring any additional insight or conflict or entertainment value – winds up detracting from the scene. Worse, that extra character cheats other, important characters out of additional opportunities.

One of my students was writing a smart, fresh and funny play about a hometown guy who finally has a chance with the high-school princess. For reasons we don’t know, she’s returned home from the big city and is seeing with new eyes that our protagonist has qualities we all admire: a humble, centered, decency. We sympathize with him when the other mechanics at work tease him and root for him when the pretty woman’s interest in him arouses the envy of others. When he takes her out for dinner, he’s honest about what he can afford and what he can’t. In every way, he reflects simple human goodness.

Imagine how disappointed I was, then, when we read the scene where we learn why the prom queen has returned: Our man isn’t in the scene. Instead, we learn through the introduction of a new character, the woman’s father, that she has returned to care for him as he recedes farther and farther into Alzheimer’s disease. We get a full scene of his ranting about Commies or Nazis or insurance investigators and such, and her trying desperately to deal with it. This is followed by a scene with her relating what just happened to our hero, her new would-be boyfriend, and his sympathizing and sharing his own world of hurts.

It may have accomplished the goal of explaining – but nobody goes to the theatre for an explanation. They go for entertainment and they go for enlightenment.

When I asked the class to restructure the scene minus the father, it didn’t take long for everyone to realize we didn’t need that character. With the father in the scene, we miss our protagonist, we’re subjected to a scene that fills us with grave doubts (we all had a hard time buying the reality of the father’s ranting), and the end result is a scene of confession and sharing – not exactly high drama.

But without the father, and with the scene rebuilt to focus around the two leads, we were back in the realm of dramatic tension. Our hero goes to pick up the woman for a date but she’s flustered and apologetic – something’s wrong and she can’t go. She tries to put on a brave face, but our hero pulls the facts from her (which by the way highlights his compassion and all his other positive traits.) Her father’s sick – it’s really bad. It can’t be that bad, he says. (And here, as we hear only glimmerings of the old man’s condition, our mind is free to fill in something even more stark than we would have seen.) There is tension in what is not said – her real problem – until it is said; there is tension in what is not shown – the extent of the old man’s dementia; and there is tension in what this means for the relationship on the doorstep of what would have been their first date.

Any character that doesn’t add to the tension somehow or other in the play is a character that winds up weakening that tension. Sometimes when you add one, you’re actually subtracting from the whole.

My Shatner moment, during the Orlando’s Joint recording session.

Quintessential actor, or Honeybaked Ham? You decide.

Get up.

Urinate.

Coffee. Grape nuts or eggs. Newspaper.

Internet (email, blogs, miscellany).

Gym or not.

Ablutions, etc.

Work/write/teach.

Lunch or lunch meeting.

Work/write/teach.

Dinner with or without family, or dinner meeting.

Family time or work/write/teach.

Read/write/view.

Sex or not.

Sleep fitfully.

Repeat until finished.

After a rehearsal run-through for my play “All Undressed with Nowhere to Go,” the director gave the actors notes. Insightful, intelligent, penetrating notes that impressed me and made my head spin. Then he turned to me: “Anything to add?”

I looked up and said to the actors, “Do it better.”

And y’know what? Next time — THEY DID. Maybe that’s all they needed: “Do it better.”

I said it on a lark — and it got a big laugh (the desired response) — but it worked. Sometimes we need to know what “better” means; we need more guidance. But other times, we only need to hear that whatever we just did didn’t work and we need to do it better.

I know I have that feeling often when I look back on what I’ve written. “This could be better,” or, more often, “This needs to be better.”

And then I do it better.

After 16 years of teaching writing, both at the University of Southern California and other institutions of higher education as well as in private workshops, I don’t believe that writing can be taught. And I say that to my classes and workshops.

What I do believe can be taught is craft. (What will play, vs. what will not play – and why. And how to make something more playable.) And what I do believe can be given is encouragement of what is good, because playwriting like all writing can be frustrating and lonely and every writer’s world is full of discouraging voices including his own.

It is that latter discouraging voice – your own – that is most potent. That is the one that will stop you in your tracks. It is the one that tells you while you are writing it that the play you are writing does not work, cannot work, will not work, and that you are fooling yourself in writing it and will make a public fool of yourself if it is ever presented before an audience or even read by someone else.

You cannot listen to that voice and write anything. Including, some days, your own name.

Better to just write.

Write without the worry and write certainly without that voice in your head. Write with the freedom of impulse, in the way basketball stars effortlessly sink ball after ball when they slip into a non-thinking zone. Write as though you are on a well-provisioned sailing craft with no fixed destination and no end to your days and no storm clouds on the horizon. Write with the pulsing thrum of your blood.

Give yourself the freedom to create and you can. And then, later, in the harsh reality of the after-writing, look again at what you have written, switch on the critical voice, and edit.

Because you cannot write while you edit, and you should not edit while you write.

Whereas in times past I may have acted cartoonishly, now I’m acting in a cartoon.

“>Take a good look. If there were a prize god — an omnipotent being who correctly judged who and what should win what — this is the book He would choose: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

It will take you one day to read and a lifetime to forget.

More about this in coming days, because I’m actually considering flipping it over and reading it again. Immediately.

What the welcome mat outside every door really says: “Please wipe your feet before entering.”

That’s what we call subtext.

I don’t know how that applies here, but I’m thinking about it.