Edward Albee, Pulitzer playwright, says that, before he writes: His themes, characters, and plots have been pre-written in a process for which he has amnesia.

In his Paris Review interview, Albee echoes what many other writers have said about their own work: Most of Albee’s best work, in a profound way, has been pre-written for him. His job is to discover this pre-written material and transcribe it for publication.

Since he has amnesia for the pre-writing process, and fears that he might paralyze that process if he questioned it, he cuts off that line of inquiry by attributing the pre-writing to his “unconscious.”

INTERVIEWER

“You have said that it is through the actual process of writing that you eventually come to know the theme of your play. Sometimes you’ve admitted that even when you have finished a play you don’t have any specific idea about its theme. What about that?

ALBEE

“…To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind—in my case, at any rate—without my knowing it, before I sit down to write. So in that sense, I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is…It’s a question I despise, and it always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy—the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself. If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It’s not only terribly difficult to talk about, it’s also dangerous. You know the old story about the…very clever animal that saw a centipede…He said, ‘My god, it’s amazing and marvelous how you walk with all those hundreds and hundreds of legs. How do you do it? How do you get them all moving that way?’ The centipede stopped and thought and said, ‘Well, I take the left front leg and then I’—and he thought about it for a while, and he couldn’t walk…I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious” (1).

Of course, the intelligently-designed, pre-writing writing—which established the theme, characters, and plot—had been done consciously, by whatever personalities had done it.

1. Edward Albee. The Art of Theater No. 4, Interviewed by William Flanagan. The Paris Review, Issue 39, Fall 1966.