Write. Then edit.
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.