Neil Simon, playwright: “I’ve always felt like a middleman, like the typist. Somebody else is saying what they say, very often the characters themselves”

Neil Simon is another great writer who either tells the same old joke that many other writers tell or else acknowledges that he, too, uses multiple personality in his writing process:

“I can’t recollect a moment when I’ve said, This would make a good play…What I might do is make a few notes on who’s in the play, the characters I want, where it takes place, and the general idea of it. I don’t make any outlines at all. I just like to plunge in. I’ll start right from page one because I want to hear how the people speak…I really don’t know what the theme of the play is until I’ve written it and the critics tell me…

“I’ve always felt like a middleman, like the typist. Somebody somewhere else is saying, This is what they say now. This is what they say next. Very often it is the characters themselves, once they become clearly defined. When I was working on my first play…I was told…you must outline your play, you must know where you are going…In the writing of the play, I didn’t get past page fifteen when the characters started to move away from the outline. I tried to pull them back in, saying, Get back in there. This is where you belong. I’ve already diagrammed your life. They said, No, no, no. This is where I want to go. So, I started following them…” (1).

Neil Simon tells the interviewer that the characters are “very often” (but not always) the ones who tell him what comes next. Interviewers should ask who else is involved—a narrator? a muse?—but they rarely do.

1. Neil Simon, interviewed by James Lipton. “The Art of Theater No. 10,” in The Paris Review, Issue 125, Winter 1992. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1994/neil-simon-the-art-of-theater-no-10-neil-simon