Stephen R. Neufeld (pictured here with son Behailu) is a high school English teacher, writer, and friend. We’ve compared notes over the years and had many a conversation about all things writing. I’ve had the unique privilege, as well, of working with him creatively (E for Everyone: The Mouse and the Elephant), exchanging ideas, and reading his stuff.
Steve’s latest work is garnering momentum and attention. His own adaptation (to film) of his stage play Tumaini is soon coming to DVD (Watch the theatrical trailer below). And his new, award-winning one act Unnatural Selection is being workshopped in Red Deer. Steve and I sat down (at separate times) for an (email) interview. At the given time, it was our best way to catch up. And I’m glad we did.
I admire Steve’s ability to verbalize his relationship to writing and his perspective of the craft. I’m challenged by his approach. I find in him a peer. Our conversation, which I hope you enjoy as much as I did, was a much overdue breath of fresh air.
Andrew Kooman: Where did Tumaini come from – what was the trigger for the story?
Stephen R. Neufeld: Tumaini came out of the difficulty I had relating to my own society and “normal life” after coming back from the E for Everyone shoot (which took me into Kenya, India, and Thailand for three months). The poverty people live in was devastating, but more devastating was coming to terms with a culture that seems to tick away in spite of so much pain and oppression. After spending time with the Dalit students near Hyderabad, India, who were desperate for a good education, it was really tough to face Canadian students who sometimes seemed to resent the fact that they are given opportunities to learn. On top of that, I was feeling (and, let’s be honest, am feeling) very guilty for my fabulous standard of living, globally speaking. It is so hard for me to know what kind of lifestyle to live in light of the fact that a billion people in the world are in extreme poverty. How do you justify a pair of khakis when you could feed someone with that money? But then, how do you make any money in the first place if you don’t play along to some degree?
Anyway, all these issues loomed large, and I thought that cramming them into a play would be a fun way to deal with them. Additionally, a gifted writer by the name of Andrew Kooman had started writing plays, and it looked like a lot of fun.
AK: I’m curious about adaptation. You’ve recently adapted Tumaini from a play into a feature film that is soon to be released. What was it like to tell a story written for the stage into something for the screen?
SN: It was a really fun process. The mediums are so different. I’ve often thought that in terms of the kind of geographic/narrative boundaries, film is more like novels than theatre. Plays have to take place in very limited locations with very limited opportunities for movement. Novels and films can sort of go anywhere. So the idea was how to take this story and move beyond the walls of the classroom where, in the play, all the action takes place. Sometimes that meant creating new scenes with characters that were only referred to in the play. Sometimes is simply meant moving scenes to other locations.
The other thing to consider is that when making a film, locations and actors are sort of limitless, so it adds to the sense of verisimilitude to have more locations and characters in the film.
Another difficulty is rendering theatrical scenes full of dialogue into film scenes. I think film audiences have less patience for conversation than theatre audiences. There are exceptions, like 12 Angry Men or Before Sunset, but mostly, in films, scenes average probably around a minute or something like that.
Oddly, some of the scenes that I wrote specifically for the film have become my favourites.
AK: How different did the play become from the film?
SN: The essential story stayed the same, but the canvas just felt bigger.
AK: What do you see as some of the biggest challenges as a writer and independent filmmaker?
SN: It sounds awful, but the first one is trying to make money writing/filmmaking. It’s hard to develop your craft and get it out there when you’re also busy paying the bills in other ways. And now that I have a two-year old running around, it’s even harder to find time to write and market what I write.
The other thing is finding a community of other artists who are passionate, knowledgeable, loving, but also super ruthless about critiquing each others’ work. I wish I could spend more time with other writers, workshopping stuff but also just chatting about writing – about form, about structure, about themes and characters and all that stuff we writers love to talk about.
Another one is that it’s hard to continue without the sense of an audience. I don’t think any artist can feel complete if they have no audience. I think this is actually more important than making your living writing; without an audience, writing feels like an unrequited love affair.
AK: How has your way of writing changed or evolved in the last few years? What has stood out or what has been different from your experience as the screenwriter with E for Everyone and now your role as screenwriter for Tumaini?
SN: For me personally, I think I have always been reasonable good when it comes to theme and with language itself – arranging words in pleasing combinations. I also have a natural ear for dialogue. But, as I keep working, I see some huge holes in my writing skill set. I have to work extremely hard at structure. It does not come naturally to me (maybe I can blame all the rambling, existential stuff I love, and read so much of in college). Therefore I’ve been really working on plot, on making sure that every action has a motivation, and that every event adds up to a conclusion that is earned.
For E for Everyone, my writing contribution had to do with writing scenes in isolation. Now, I’m working on how to put together plots that hold water, and people’s interest. I mean, it’s hard to look back at anything I’ve done that I can’t fix now. I’d love another crack at making E for E, even though I’m extremely proud of it.
AK: What do you do to get better – as a writer? How do you gauge your growth?
SN: I’ve read books on writing, and I’ve been to writer’s conferences, both of which have helped me (both in terms of technique and inspiration). And, of course, I read as much as possible. The more I learn about writing, the more I realize I don’t know.
This might sound shallow, but I have to gauge my growth based on what kind of audience I can find with my writing. You know, you start of with your family reading what you write and praising it (hopefully). Then, you enter contests, you try to publish, you put your stuff “out there” and hope that some disinterested party actually thinks you’ve said something worth saying in a compelling way.
The fact that I seem to be placing in contests now makes me feel a sense of growth, and that a few people who don’t really know me have enjoyed things I’ve written. Honestly, that’s the best feeling in the world, and one well-worded compliment can keep me going for ages.
AK: You’re dabbling in a number of different genres and ways of writing. What’s your process or way of deciding how best to tell a specific story, be it as a short story, a novel, a play or a film?
SN: Sometimes it’s as simple as having an opportunity to write in a certain form, so I pick that one. For instance, the Scripts at Work program at RDC is so good, that I’ve taken ideas I’ve had for “stories” (whatever that might mean) and made them plays, because I know that playwriting is one of the best ways for an unknown writer to find creative community, and that ever-elusive audience.
Other than that, I have no process I’m aware of. But I will say that I tend to see ideas for novels as potential films (or vice versa), while I often put play ideas in a different category. I think it’s because plays have so many fun and challenging limitations, and they function so differently from films or novels. There are things you can do on stage that would seem ridiculous anywhere else, but because you’re working with a finite area in a finite amount of time, you can get away with it. I love that, but it means that as you imagine scenes that might be effective, they tend to take on a shape that might be really hard to translate into another medium.
AK: Aware this could be an annoying question (I get asked it too), I’m going to venture into the realm of art reflecting life. I know it’s a question writers get asked a lot, and whether writers think it is relevant, readers often do. Maybe I’ll ease into it by asking, Why do you think readers or audiences care whether a work reflects the artists life? Is it more or less important or relevant or interesting if it does (or does not)?
SN: I actually think it is essential for the survival of art, that people are aware that by experiencing art they are touching souls with the artist. I guess I’m not speaking of content, per se, but the just the idea that the art people make comes out of the way they see the world and the way they think and feel. That’s why people feel so intensely about a painting, or a piece of music – because it comes from another person’s heart/soul/mind/pick-a-nebulous-noun-that- represents-someone’s innermost-core. I know there are computer programs that can paint and write poetry, and films are often made by committee, but to me, those things aren’t threatening to real art, because people aren’t just looking for technical brilliance. In some ways, Mozart’s requiem simply doesn’t matter if a machine wrote it. We feel the emotion because we trust that the music was born out of emotion. Without that link, art loses all its meaning.
But, that might miss the point of your question. I certainly use my own experiences to write. It’s really hard to gauge how autobiographical a given piece is. All my thoughts come from me. I borrow characters, thoughts, lines, from everywhere – other people, myself, and whatever I pick out of the cultural landscape of which I’m a part. As long as people understand that it’s fiction, I feel a freedom to use whatever I want in whatever way I want, and people won’t assume that anything is “real”. They can probably guess that some of it started in “reality”, but by the time something makes it to a page, screen or stage, it has been interpreted and filtered and any objectivity stemming from the original moment is gone. That’s a good thing.
AK: How much do you borrow from personal experience as you write? In Tumaini, especially, people might see some parallels between the story and your life and your psychological space. There’s a high school teacher. There’s a trip to Africa. There’s angst. I’m not pointing any fingers [laughing], but I’m interested to hear from you where you draw the line between your world and fiction, how you negotiate that line, and how you sift through your personal experience to translate what you question or understand into characters on a page.
SN: Yes, there are certainly parallels. I mean, often I choose my subject matter based on what demon I need to exorcise at the time, so there will always be a personal connection. Tumaini is extremely autobiographical, in terms of character, setting, theme, and yes, angst. The only negotiation I want to make with the line between life and fiction is to be clear that everything in a play is fiction, even if it’s based on true events. If that is established, I feel the freedom that comes from being able to write anything and not be directly connected to it the way I would if I was writing memoir. In this way, it’s almost easier to be honest doing fiction; since you’re lying about half the stuff anyway, you can also throw in really personally things that you might not want to be “out there” as “fact”.
AK: Which books about writing are must reads, in your opinion?
SN: By far, my favourite is Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like a Writer. It breaks writing down, using some amazing examples from some of the best books ever written. Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again!
I also did read and enjoy Stephen King’s On Writing.
Reading Lolita in Tehran was another book that resonated with me. The storytelling left me less than dazzled, but as the author (who escapes) has some brilliant insights on the seductiveness of fiction, and how good fiction is always ambiguous, and how ambiguity is central to democracy. It’s really true, and it also got me to read “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, which was really cool.
Syd Field has a book on screenwriting which is pretty essential in getting started. After that, I read one by Cathleen (I think) Wright. They both deal primarily with structure, which is essential to screenwriting. They’re a little “scientific” and not necessarily inspirational, but they are important for getting started, for sure.
AK: You’re presently workshopping your new one act (and award-winning!) play, Unnatural Selection? What’s the jist of the play and where does it go from here?
SN: Unnatural Selection is about a group of young men at a very conservative, tiny bible college in rural Saskatchewan. The plot centres around the fact that one of them is passionate about becoming a worship pastor, but is also coming to terms with the fact that he’s gay. It really explores the concept of how we sometimes compartmentalize our lives, in spite of the fact that we have holistic, indivisible identities. And, hopefully, people find it funny.
I’ll be co-directing it at the Edmonton Fringe festival this year with Jeff Woodward. Right now I’m workshopping the play with Daniel Libman through the Scripts at Work program at Red Deer College.
AK: How important is workshopping to you as a playwright and what is the process like for you?
SN: Workshopping is absolutely essential to me. When you’re as bad at structure and story-logic as I am, you NEED someone who can sit down and tell you all the ways you’ve contrived events to make them fit your ideas. It provides objectivity and those criticisms can send the story in new, and more authentic, directions.
The process does tend to be a little painful. At first, hearing all the ways your play doesn’t make sense feels a bit like taking a flurry of punches to the solar plexus. But then, I feel relieved that someone is there to warm me about them so I can deal with the flaws/questions and create something better. So after I get over some initial feelings of frustration (mostly with myself), I really enjoy getting back into the saddle, tearing the script apart, and making it better.
I enjoy every part of writing. It’s all fun in its own way. But having someone who is ruthless and objective is essential to the process. I’m not a believer in “the genius ascending from the vacuum with masterpiece in hand”. At least, I’m not capable of it. Other people can point things out to you – flaws, yes, but also further potential connections and thematic ideas, that you simply won’t see in your own work. I think that’s why you sometimes see films that you think will be great because it’s written, produced and directed by someone you admire (for me, that film was Oliver Stone’s Alexander) and they suck. When that happens to me, I wonder, okay, did you not have one person saying “this doesn’t make sense” or “this is a stupid idea” or whatever.
Workshopping as a process goes like this: I bring a first draft (which is perfect!); a dramaturge blasts my first draft to a million pieces (I always knew it was crap); I pick up the ashes and start to reassemble them into a brilliant draft 2; the dramaturge says, yes, you fixed problems A through N, but what about O through Z?; I go back and write another draft; I look back and wonder how I ever thought I could write something good on my own.
AK: What is it about theatre, specifically, that attracts you?
SN: The first thing that attracted me to theatre is the fact that in theatre you become a part of a creative community the minute you put on any kind of reading or production. Even the dramaturgy process is done with other people. As someone who started out wanting to write prose, it was frustrating because while toiling away in obscurity it was very hard to get any meaningful feedback, or that wonderful feeling of knowing that other people are engaging with your material. With theatre, you get to experience that soul to soul connection even while you are largely unknown and not successful in monetary terms.
I also think that theatre is the most magical of the writing forms I do. There is something very powerful and mysterious about the energy that connects performers and audiences, and as a playwright, I’m somehow caught up in that. I like the tension of never knowing exactly what will happen. Print forms are carefully controlled, and films are “finished”, but theatre truly happens in the present tense, which imbues it with an urgency that film and print can only create artificially, if at all.
AK: In the different forms in which you write, when do you feel most limited or inhibited, and when are you most free? Do you have a favourite form?
SN: I think novels, films and plays all have different limitations and corresponding freedoms. Plays have obvious limitations in terms of place – it’s more difficult to have many different locations. It can be done, but that brings in limitations in terms of what kinds of sets you can use to represent those settings, if any, etc. It’s also hard to show movement through space and the kind of imagery you can achieve with film or a print media is almost impossible on stage. But because theatre has those limitations, you can do so many crazy, symbolic things to achieve shifts in time and space. Because nothing on stage is realistic, you can get away with all sorts of devices that would likely be cheesy or confusing in other forms. Actors can change who they are on the fly, people can exist in different times at once, a prop can become anything, and the list goes on.
The inverse happens with film/novels. They are both capable of such accurate verisimilitude, that audience come to expect everything to be “realistic”. So, although in a novel or film you can go anywhere, have any location you want, have no time constraints, etc, you are tied down by audience expectations. In theatre, you can get away with free-associating a bit more.
I don’t know if I can pick a favourite form, but I can say that the idea of having a successful novel seems most magical to me, probably for the reason that it has been novels that have impacted me the most. If someone could put down a book I wrote and feel the way I did when I finished 1984 in grade 10, then I would be a happy guy. There’s something about spending 10 or more hours with a brilliant person’s thoughts that is so satisfying. By the end of Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, I feel like I’ve been allowed to walk beside an intellectual and spiritual giant. Maybe it’s just about the time involved; you just can’t beat the quality time you have to spend with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whoever to get through their works.
But I must add that for now, as I work away as a pretty obscure, unsuccessful wannabe writer, I’m enjoying theatre the most. It’s fun, vibrant, and allows me to spend time with other people who have passion for storytelling, for ideas, for philosophy, for seeking truth in art. Even in utter failure, there is community. I find that comforting.
AK: How does your faith or doubt – your view of the world – inform or influence your writing?
SN: Because spirituality and rationality are both super important to me, faith and doubt will probably always be foundational to my work in some way, even if my subject matter is not about those things directly. I love wrestling with ideas, so any existential crisis (or euphoria) I’m going through is going to end up on a page somewhere. I don’t know that I have any sort of overarching agenda when it comes to this area, but obviously every story has some kind of thesis buried in it, so any work I create is going to, at the very least, provide a bit of a snapshot of my spiritual/philosophical orientation at that particular time.
I love what Stanley Kubrick said about didactic motivations for art. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, that he didn’t think artists are ever really motivated to make art by didactic reasons, even if they think they are. Writers like how words sound, or look on a page. Painters like arranging colours on a canvas. Musicians love the sound or rhythm of an instrument. The ideas come second to the raw experience of creating. I do think that’s true. First you know you want to write; then you find a reason.
AK: And why not finish with a cliched doozy (that I ask with uncliched sincerity): Why do you write?
SN: I guess I sort of answered this one above. So I’ll only add this: I write because I love to write. There is nothing else I’ve found to do that allows me to be in that mental zone where time disappears. Having an audience is great. Working with others is great. But really, I just love words; I love using them to grapple with ideas and I love using them to tell stories.
