Author Interview Transcription

For my author interview, I interviewed Professor Richard Allen of the FTDM department on November 2, 2015.

*Richard Allen (RA)

Me: Who or what inspires you as an author?

RA: Who or what inspires me….The what is really…life situations. I know that’s a really broad answer but I’ll just see a circumstance that has inherit drama in it. Or the characters are really fascinating. So for instance, in the last full play I wrote, my father- in -law was dealing with, was coming down with Alzheimer’s. And watching him deal with it, made some what-ifs come up. So I guess the who is people in my life and the what are the circumstances they’re in. It’s a terribly boring answer but that’s really what it is.

Me: All right.

RA: I find that I’m more inspired in certain places. Like when I go to New York, I’m very affected by the aesthetic energy there and the juxtaposition. But when I’m on campus here, sometimes the conformity of the situation inspires me less than a place that has more diversity and more things going on.

Me: All right. Who or what motivates you as an author?

RA: Well, you know it depends. I was thinking of it this morning. I think that sometimes in your life the motivation is, like, to pay bills and definitely when I was writing for soap operas, which was my more affable time of writing, that was the only thing that motivated me most of the time because I had to fight and didn’t want to lose my job. As sad as it is that’s what that was. I have a published book of plays, that’s actually children’s plays about the Old Testament, and what motivated me was my wife because she led these children services so I wrote a couple of plays for her. And she said for these children services that she did, could I write more? So I just wrote because she asked me to and sometimes its very practical. When I was younger, I was fairly excited about the idea to communicate my stuff in a way that would reach mass audiences in theatre or whatever but as I’ve gotten older, that desire changes because you start to see the reality of it and what it takes to get there and how it often doesn’t and the idea that now I can post something on Facebook and everybody in the world can see it if they want to. So I guess that part of it takes a back seat but you know what’s funny one thing that is really true is that one of my disappointments with myself in life is that growing up I really loved theatre especially and film more as I got older I appreciated that and literature to some extent and TV I liked, and I really felt that the people who contributed to those mediums, contributed something that was, that I really loved and was advantageous to, you know, that as a form of art and I was motivated to be a part of that but the disappointment I have it’s just that I haven’t taken my place among the great creators of film, TV, or theatre of all time. It can still happen but you know, I don’t see it. So that was motivation, just giving back.

Me: What authors or books influenced you as an author the most? Well in your case, movies or screenwriters would work too.

RA: When I was really young, I was inspired by Neil Simon because he was a very commercial playwright who wrote really, really funny plays that came from angst but they derived comedy from that. And then even more than Neil Simon, Woody Allen especially in the 70s. The films he made were really, really funny but spoke of real pain, anguish, and insecurity. So Woody Allen was probably the most, you know, influential in that way. I was also very influenced by, this is going to sound pretentious, but Cervantes because Don Quixote that story I first learned it as a musical from Man of La Manza got me to read the novel at a very young age. But that story of till the windmills has always been a big inspiration for me. And, um, I really like a screenwriter Richard Lagravenese and I really like a lot of his films just purely as a screenwriter. And musicals, I just love, I just really like Stephen Sondheim so those are things to.

Me: Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

RA: Well…I either write here or at home, my office at home. When, I think, I’ve always worked best after 4pm; I don’t get too much great stuff done before then. Um, and so it was where, when, what was the other question?

Me: How. Like type or pen and paper.

RA: Oh, I can’t read my writing as you may know. I can’t read my writing at all. So I can’t write by hand. I try to take notes by hand sometimes but it’s not great for me. So I’m always writing on the computer. But when I was, like, twelve I got typing lessons for free from a friend of the family and then I went to join a local theatre group so I just stopped taking lessons, I refused to take lessons after that because I felt that I had blown my one chance to learn for free. So I just type with two fingers like the way that I think so it really works well when I write my first draft but if you gave me something to type, like “could you type this paper for me?” It would take me forever. But I type like that. I don’t even call it “hunt and peck” anymore because I just know where the letters are. But if I think about it, like if you said “type this word” I would be like.. .but if I was writing it, I would be able to do it. And I also find that I need to leave a lot of time to write with very little expectation because I need a lot of procrastination time. So even, I’m not anymore because they’ve changed the way it looks on the screen, but Solitaire on the computer; I just knew I had to play Solitaire for 45 minutes on the computer before I write. Before that, I would just be like I like to play solitaire before I write but then I was like oh, this is part of my routine. But yeah, I have to leave more time to like look at sports scores or my baseball fantasy team or something.

Me: How is technology changing print culture, specifically regarding authors and readers? Well, these questions are more geared towards books and authors and readers-

RA: It’s changed. You know, from my class, because we can write, you know, move things around so easily, it’s made rewriting a whole different thing. When people see things, writers are a little more creative because they can afford to be whereas before, when you were into the story, the idea of going back and changing stuff, the cutting and pasting was harder to do so today people take more chances and then move things around more. I think anything that has to do with word processing, which isn’t a word we use now, but that was the beginning of everything that we do now on Microsoft Word you know that kind of thing, there’s nothing negative about that. I mean, if someone prefers to still write on a typewriter, which Woody Allen still does, that’s fine but anyone who says writing on a Word …and all the distractions, you know back with the typewriter you couldn’t check sports scores or message a friend on a typewriter so I think the writing does get a little harder. But for research, it’s great just to be able to want to know, like, names of scientists. I wrote a play when I first got here and one of the main characters was a botanist and I had to call botanists all the time, to figure out what would they say so that part really helped. I know that’s not quite what the question was asking –

Me: I think it works.  When you write, who is your intended audience?

RA: Well, I think, my first instinct is that it’s always me. If I’m not entertained by what I’m writing or if I get to a part in the script where I have to write it to get from point A to point B that’s never the good part. So if I’m not entertained by it or believe it, it’s just not good. But then sometimes it gets more specific like when I wrote soap operas, it was for thirty to fifty year old women and when I wrote the children’s plays it was for children but I wanted adults to appreciate it too. Plays, I think I’m writing, I think in that case I’m writing for a universal audience but I’ve seen so many plays that I have really high standards and I hope to beat those standards.

Me: How is the current technological revolution changing your audience?

RA: Well, it’s separating me from them in a lot of ways because, you know, you’re growing up with different references than I am. So when I used to write, like I write, I think maybe I’ve told you this but in 1986 I was writing for Days of Our Lives, we were writing from an outline. So the outline said that a teenager was throwing a party and someone said “I’ll bring the CDs,” and I did not know what that was; I thought it meant chips and dip because CDs were like new technology at the time and I only had a record player. So, you know, I think that…I was watching a Samsung commercial with my wife during the World Series last night, have you seen this commercial? It’s about their iPhone, their new phone that has the charger built in –

Me: Oh.

RA: It has this song going on and it rhymes but it’s kind of like a rap song but she’s whispering.

Me: Oh, yeah. I know what you’re talking about.

RA: My wife said to me, I think we’re supposed to know that song or know that it is a song. Like, really, I felt and I was thinking of how many of the commercials I’m removed from, so I think pop culture side of writing, which used to be a big side of my writing does not have the same affect, that my audience does not understand. I wrote a play, I guess before you got here, called Professor Allen Writes a Book About Popular Culture and it was like me getting into a car accident because I was texting while driving so I’m stuck in bed so I decide with my muse, this character, to write this book about popular culture. So in this book, I complain how I can’t write anymore in the same way because the audience has changed so I decide to write about popular culture through my, and even all of these references of things that to me were second nature, the students that acted in it, I used some of the SAC kids to do the first reading of it and then I got actual stage reading actors. Things that I just take for granted that people know for once didn’t know. I wrote a rap in there and there were characters from all over pop culture from the 60s and so on that performed it. It was a very good rap, everyone was really impressed with my little  rap. It was about the Clinton era but I think that’s the change, just the references. A really big thing is that we growing up, my generation, as far as pop culture, we all had the same references. Like, there were only a few TV shows. So let’s just say Dukes of Hazards, I didn’t watch Dukes of Hazard but I was kind of familiar with it. But now, everyday I’m finding out about new TV shows that have been on for five years that I’ve never heard of. And I teach. And because there’s so many options that are so spread out, it becomes harder for me to pick up a reference or make those references. IN a way it’s great for life because it makes everyone’s experience more distinct but as a writer, it’s harder for me to say that everyone feels that way because I can say about ten different things, and you can say seven out of those ten things “I don’t feel that way, Richard.” Does that make sense?

Me: Yeah. What do you think reading and authorship will look like fifty years from now?

RA: Well, I think that, I mean I know I’m not an expert on it, but paper is going to be going away a lot. I mean my dad who is 78 only reads books on Kindle and he gets everything from the Kindle library, just everything Kindle. And he’s 78. So if a man who’s grown up with books won’t even touch a book now, but my wife loves books and she’s fifty-three. So in fifty years from now, you know, people who are five years old now will be fifty-five so why would they want a book? So I think books will have a place, I just don’t think that people are going to want to read books in different ways. It’s funny because I don’t like to read as much as I did. I was never passionate about reading but I think it’s because for years of staring at a screen. When I wrote soap operas, all I did was stare at a screen and I also, you don’t have any real memory of this, it used to be DAS, the system we worked on. It was a blue screen with white letters and even after we moved to Windows, I kept with that because that’s all I knew writing soap operas. So I think I spent so many years looking at the white letters that it actually affected my eyes. So that’s possible. Like how vinyl comes back, it’s possible. I think we’ll always have printed word, it just won’t be on paper. But you know, I’m bad at predicting things. Everything I predict comes out wrong, so I have no idea.

Me: How did you find a publisher, or I guess agent in this case, and how long did that take?

RA: Well, breaking into television, well there’s different answers because finding a TV show that will hire me, happened a year after I moved to Los Angeles but that happened through family connections and doing what they asked me to do. Finding someone to produce a movie or a play is, like, hell. I had it happened in some places, like I got Stage West to produce my play here and when I moved here I was 33 like I thought of course, I move to Fort Worth and someone will produce my plays and 23 years later, I’m like, God, you know, it’s finding people, especially in theatre and film, because there is some investment involved. And with the book I had published, you know the plays, my wife was at a conference where publishers would be there selling their books in that genre so she brought hard copies of what I wrote, sample versions, so they said if you write x,y,z then we’ll publish it. So that was actually face-to-face with a publisher at a place where you would go to for that. It’s just really, really hard, when it comes to getting a play produced or movie produced, you have to navigate through that process carefully especially with screenwriting. Wait, let me check my messages first.

Me: Sure, no problem.

RA: Ok, I’m good. Go on.

Me: How much did your manuscript, well I guess, scripts change during the editing process?

RA: Well, there were the plays, that book was interesting, that, it’s probably one of those widely known things even though it only sold 2500 copies but they make Xeroxes of them so when I go to different cities, people are like, oh you wrote that book. Kids do that at school all the time. But that one changed because I had two editors, one of them was a Rabi and he knew and understood my humor but he would change pop culture references that he thought didn’t work. So it’s really funny looking at the book because it was published fifteen years ago and there are some pop culture references that he kept in that nobody else knows what they are. But he took out a really fun joke about the Spice Girls, but I think everybody still knows who the Spice Girls are. And also he wanted to make sure everything was biblically true. So if there was something in there that implied something that didn’t happen, he’d take out. You know, tried to get it pretty accurate. With soap operas, there are different levels. One level where you write the dialogue for a soap opera and they change it and they don’t even ask you to rewrite it. I once gave my students a script of mine that I wrote for the show as the show was airing. So I was like here’s the script I wrote, watch the show, read along, and tell me what percent of my stuff was done and I think they said about 3%. So you know, it goes through, in the soap opera process, an assembly line. And early in the assembly line, if your job is to write the outlines and stuff, you have to constantly change your stuff. Once it gets to the scriptwriter’s hands, it’s changed enough and they send it back, you have to change it again. The one script I had get optioned, the producers were always changing it and changing it and then at the end, they took it to someone else and had them change it. So I’m used to always being heavily rewritten. But the play I had produced here last year, the director was really respectful about it and made minor changes. That was the first and only time that had ever happened in my life.

Me: Do you have a definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing?  If so, how definite and specific is your outline?

RA: I almost always have an outline that I start from. It’s not too specific but it helps me understand what the next beat’s going to be or what the next major beat is going to be and it always changes as I write but I need to have some sort of plan. When I wrote for soap operas, I was given an outline and wrote from that. Even back to grad school and learning from Sam Smiley, I always knew the importance of having an outline.

Me: How would you describe your writing process?

RA: Um…painful. But it involves putting aside a lot more time to procrastinate. I’ve been writing a paper recently and I’ve done more of that kind of stuff these past years. I’m actually having one published about Evita for, you know, a conference. But I found that I was so stressed by it, that I would only expect three sentences everyday. Three sentences would be enough. So with that lowered expectation, that helped me a lot. So just putting aside a lot more time and something like a good coffee beside me always really helps me. I need to be able to take breaks and walk around. If I’m at the office, I’ll break and talk to people but then I’ll have to go back. I need to have the privacy when I do the writing. It’s just one of those things that has never gotten easier. Even if I’m writing an email, like if you asked me to answer these questions over email, I would hate it. I would do it if you absolutely needed me to do it but I would much rather do it like this because otherwise I would just agonize over every sentence; I’ve always been like that.

Me: Do you have any writing habits or rituals that help your writing process?

RA: Well, like I said, with the solitaire before but I think there’s different rituals for every project that comes up. But I definitely think there are rituals. And I once had a colleague that I knew from conferences and she was such a talented writer but she was also a brilliant professor who researched things but she was interested in, like, witchcraft and voodoo and New Orleansy type stuff but she wrote amazing things about it. She was doing a study once that I participated in about writers, the rituals they have are putting themselves in a trance and I know there’s some truth to that. I think I told you in class, but when my daughter came to visit and watched me type, she said “Dad you’re moving your mouth.” And I didn’t know I was doing that but also from my acting background years before, whatever rituals I do the point is to get me into that zone and I’m writing. It may not last very long but that’s my goal is to get into that place where I can be inside the character’s heads and not in my own, which is hard to do.

Me: That’s really cool about the lady and the New Orleans stuff.

RA: She’s such an amazing woman and her writing, she wrote the craziest play about Alice in Wonderland and…it was so bizarre. But it was so great, so good. If you ever want to interview somebody about this kind of stuff at a higher level, her name is Dr. Emily Edwards at Greensborough. I haven’t seen her in a while, she’s really cool. She’s the one who got my article published because she was the editor of that journal for that issue and she had heard me talk about that stuff so she asked me to write her an article and I knew she’d publish it.

Me: Was that the one about Lost in Translation?

RA: Yes, that’s the one.

Me: Ah nice. Do you write in multiple genres?

RA: Yes, obviously. You know it’s funny, when I was in college I decided that, even in high school, I went to Stanford as a freshman, I went into liberal arts, I felt that a writer should be able to write for TV, film, or theatre it shouldn’t be that you can only write in one genre because you only know that one genre. That every idea had its own place so if you could write for all of them, including the novel, then you could write for what that idea wants and not just what you want. And I still feel that way.

Me: What was your first publication, and what do you think of this publication now?

RA: My first publication, well, one is right there. I wrote a poem about television and sent it to a TV critic and he published the poem as a way to kind of make fun of me and I knew that but it was still kind of exciting. But I had a short story published in Teen Magazine when I was in my twenties. And I had written the short story it was called The Peanut Girl and what happened was that I was doing public relations when I got out of grad school and I got to meet the editors. And I met this girl who was an editor at Seventeen Magazine and she was really neat so I talked to her about my writing she said if you send me something, I’ll read it. So I wrote something specifically to get published in a teen magazine. And I wrote the Peanut Girl and it was like the other Seventeen Magazine stories that they published but from a boy’s point of view. And she really liked it but they thought Seventeen was geared to an older crowd so they sent it to Teen Magazine and they published it. I’m still really proud of it.

Me: Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

RA: Well, public relations or something like that and obviously with the film and TV stuff. Public relations was the only thing I did where I used my writing for something different. And I did get to write a sketch for these comedians Bob and Ray who did like radio stuff. And I got to write a sketch for them when I was in public radio so I got to use that for my creative stuff. I wrote some PSAs too.

#printisnotdead

With progressing technologies and the world becoming more and more digital with every passing day, it’s easy for us to assume the art of print and books themselves will soon become obsolete. Books stores are closing down. eBooks are on the rise. Reading books has become more of a chore for youth rather than being a source of entertainment. The “print is dead” argument as we have discussed in class at the moment seems quite valid and strong.

            But wait! It can’t be! How can it? Books have been with us for centuries and have never quite gone out of style. I can’t imagine a world without books or even a world in which they are novelty items. Maybe it’s because I’m a part of one of the last few, if not the last, generations to not have been born into this digital age. Sure, modern technology and Internet did exist in the nineties but it wasn’t as prevalent or as “all-consuming” as it is now. I think modern technology, Internet, and other digital activities sort of grew up with us. We didn’t grow up with eBooks or iPods. When we were children, we read books and listened to CDs. So our generation may be the last generation to have any sort of strong attachment to such physical formats of entertainment.

            And it seems as if I am not the only one who feels this way about print becoming a dying breed.

            Last night during our final presentations, one of my classmates discussed the whole #printisnotdead campaign. This campaign was started by people in their 20s and 30s who are trying to bring awareness to the fadeout of print and trying to bring it back. I found this to be very interesting considering how the general assumption about this generation is that we’re so absorbed and consumed by the Internet, our smart phones, social media, etc. that we don’t care about the printed word.

            It’s one thing to say that you don’t want to see print die out but it’s another to actually do something about it. I’m glad that someone actually took the initiative to do something about this fading art and that this movement has gained some sort of traction with young people today. I hope that it continues to gain support as we push towards this digital age so that we don’t forget the art and joy of printed works.

Fading Industries

In these past few chapters, Gomez discusses how so many industries and our generation have changed given how “digital” we are becoming. With the music industry losing its format, people are more prone to just downloading their music as opposed to buying CDs its previous format. With the invention of DVR, people are less prone to watch live TV or commercials now that they have the option to fast forward through them.  And then less people rent movies or go to movie theatres because of movie streaming services such as Netflix. We have become “generation download” as Gomez described it.

            Though I agree that how we get our entertainment has certainly changed, based off our class discussions, I don’t think the old ways have necessarily “died” or completely faded out as Gomez seems to think. Despite the fact that apparently movie attendance has dropped, most of my peers still very much go to the movies. Even with DVR and Netflix, we still watch live television with commercials. And though most of us do prefer to buy our music from iTunes or use Spotify, some of us still buy CDs or even vinyl, which seems to be making a comeback.

            Personally, I feel as if the movie theatre business will never die despite it’s dropping attendance rate because going to the movies is partially about the experience, which is something you can’t get from streaming movies on your laptop. Watching live cable TV, I also think won’t necessarily fade out any time soon, even though with Netflix and Hulu presenting a more convenient alternative, mainly because people are always going to buy TVs and not everyone is going to want to watch just DVDs or what have you. Plus with these streaming services, you only have a limited selection of movies and TV shows that change from month to month. CDs, however, I do believe will eventually fade out in the same way cassettes did mainly due to the ultimate convenience, affordability, and portability of the iPod and downloadable music in general.

Dependent

In our last reading, Gomez touches on the idea that technology, though it has many benefits and has generally made life easier, is still subject to failure. For instance, today essentially everything is done on our personal computers: research, important documents, business, entertainment, projects, assignments, etc. But if our computers were to crash, we’d lose everything. Being a victim of such a crash, I personally felt, for lack of a better term, stuck. Going to a school that required you to have a laptop for every class, I was completely helpless; I couldn’t participate in the online activities, I fell behind on my classwork, I just couldn’t keep up. And even now when my current laptop runs particularly slow, I get unbelievably frustrated and feel as if I can’t do anything until my laptop wants to actually corporate.

            Given my past experiences with technology, I completely agree with Gomez for once. I do think technology is great in the way that it does make things easier especially from a student perspective. But I do think that we as people have grown too dependent on technology to the point where it’s essentially a crutch. No one wants to spend hours in a library, going through books to research a specific topic when you can just Google it and get access to hundreds of sources in less than a second.

            Our dependency on technology has made us more impatient and lazy. We live in a time where instant gratification trumps hard work if we feel that the work might be too time consuming. So when technology fails us, we, first get frustrated and freak out, and then we look for the easiest and fastest way to solve the problem even if it’s only a temporary fix. In a way, because technology has made things so easy for us, my generation and future generations will never quite value hard work in the same way as previous generations.