On Writing by Neil Simon (post 2): His regular self, baffled by his writing self, does not feel like he wrote Lost in Yonkers, his Pulitzer Prize play 

“I slowly began to understand Neil the person, but Neil the writer baffled me. He was infinitely smarter than I was, cleverer, more imaginative…I could talk with ease to Neil the person. We discussed baseball, movies, books, children, and we occasionally played tennis with other real people. Neil the writer had time for only one thing: he wrote. That was all he wanted to do. I had no idea how he structured plays, created characters, plotted stories, gave flesh to boneless figures, and very often did this quite humorously. However he did that, I know I couldn’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t think the writer really liked me. He felt I wasted time…Some nights after dinner, Neil, the husband and father, would walk upstairs to his desk, putter around, look at some pages the other fellow had written during the day, then suddenly change from one to the other, sit down, and continue to add more pages” (1, p. 177).

“I’ve always wondered what composers see in their heads, but I see scenes, characters, people in conflict, whether in serious or humorous dilemmas. I never turn the picture on in my head. It just starts playing when I’m not doing something else” (1, p. 293).

“By picking up a pen and gazing at the blank pages of the spiral notebook in front of me, I suddenly lost sight of my surroundings and circumstances, and entered the world in which the characters I created were living out their own problems or good fortune. They had no interest in my immediate woes, no knowledge they even existed. Which led me to think: Did they know I was there, in their place, their room, sitting in a dark corner witnessing the most personal moments of their own inner conflicts? Did these characters even care that I was committing their words, their thoughts, their actions to paper? Were they oblivious to the fact that I might one day share their lives with total strangers, who were privy to this information only by my invitation? Since they never brought it up, I didn’t bother mentioning it to them” (1, p. 352).

“I truly didn’t know where the plays came from, where the ability to put these thoughts on the page, shaping them and forming them with clarity and intelligence started. Because of this insecurity, I felt I was not yet ready to sit down and handle a good conversation with Arthur Miller or Tom Stoppard without embarrassing myself…

“I still had not solved the mystery of where the plays come from; sometimes I had doubts that I wrote them at all. I know I didn’t write Lost in Yonkers. It didn’t come from me. I saw the play a number of times and there’s no chance that I’m the author. Yet I remember each day as I sat at my desk, the words and pages flowing from my pen, the emotions of the characters taking over all my senses, so I must assume that I was the one who wrote Lost in Yonkers. Recently, at a tribute in my honor, I watched as scenes from various plays I had written were performed. When they got to Lost in Yonkers, I listened in awe at the power of the words, and silently I said to myself, ‘God, I wish I could write like that.’ No one said you had to be sane to be a playwright” (1, pp. 440-444).

1. Neil Simon. Neil Simon’s Memoirs: Rewrites [1996] and The Play Goes On [1999]. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2016.