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Jason Sherman
Jason Sherman has written extensively
for the stage, radio and television. His other plays include Remnants
(A Fable); It’s All True; Patience; Reading Hebron;
The Retreat; The League of Nathans; An Acre of Time
and Three in the Back, Two in the Head, which won the Governor
General’s Literary Award for Drama. He served as executive story editor
and writer on the TV series “ReGenesis,” earning Gemini and Canadian
Screenwriting Award nominations. For CBC Radio he wrote “National
Affairs,” “Irving Invectus” and “Graf,” for which he received
the Canadian Screenwriting Award for radio drama. He is currently working
on several television, radio and film projects. He lives in Toronto.
“I once heard Edward Albee
– speaking to a roomful of young playwrights
– say that you shouldn’t start to write until you know your characters
well enough to imagine what they might say on any subject, in any circumstance.
I imagine my characters on paper. Oh, I do plenty of mulling, but a
scene in your head is only as good as its realization on paper, and
then again only as good as its representation on stage. But it says
here that you gotta start somewhere, and for me that somewhere is in
front of a blank screen, staring down a blinking cursor. Some writers
start with outlines. (If you work in TV or film, you have no choice
but to start with an outline.) I don’t get it. How can you know the
scene until you know the characters? And how can you know the characters
until you know how they speak and think and act? Knowing what a character
might say or do doesn’t mean that he’ll never surprise you; it means
he’s alive in your imagination.”
—Jason Sherman
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