We recently connected with Timothy Braun and have shared our conversation below.
Timothy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with inspirations and heroes. Are there any historical figures you look up to?
George Harrison. He emphasized kindness and thoughtfulness towards others, valued collaboration, but was still a mischievous rebel. He funded the Monty Python movies knowing he would never see his investment returned, he just wanted to watch those movies.
Timothy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a playwright and essayist. I’ve written 130 plays and operas, most of them one-acts, most of them awful. I call my esthetic “American Baroque.” I start with an organic, character-based story, and then build the setting around the wants and needs of the characters. Then I stretch and twist the world as if it were a reflection in a funhouse mirror. I try to ground the audience in something they can relate to, while adding separation with fantastic elements. I focus on structure, shape, emotion, and the time and space those elements need to be communicated. I prefer working in site-specific spaces (I have a deep love of subway cars, bath tubs, and elevators as performance spaces), festivals, and black box theaters.
As an essayist I take playwriting technique to tell memoir oriented stories with the idea that honesty trump clever. In telling these stories I use a three-act structure: Act 1 everything is established, Act 2 everything falls apart, and Act 3, everything comes back together again, but not perfectly, and in that structure I try to make the specific universal for the reader.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Reaching people, and audiences, you don’t know. It’s one thing to make my friends and family laugh, or cry, but to hear audience members I’ve never met express emotions and reactions is why I do this. I get emails from strangers usually regarding my New York Times Modern love essays that touch. One woman in Crescent Moon Bay, California, sent me an email saying she laminates my stories, keeps them on her bookshelf, and reads them when she feels low. That’s all I really want, to make a connection with one person I’ll probably never meet.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Creativity takes discipline and practice, and what I mean by practice is that the work doesn’t magically come out of your finger tips. I get up at 5:00am every morning, and immediately start drinking the coffee I made the night before and placed in the refrigerator just for that morning. Then I clean up the house, walk my dog, and get to work, and on the act of cleaning the house and walking the dog I go through what I need to do and how I need to do it when it is time to sit down and get working, and the vast majority of that work is garbage and will never see the light of day. I move scenes, cut characters, add lines, change images, until it is time to take the dog for another walk. In the afternoons I do research, take notes, and focus on what the artist Joseph Cornell called “assemblage”, and it doesn’t matter if I’m working on a play or an essay. There is an old saying that writing isn’t writing, writing is rewriting, and any one can slap together a first draft, which is like driving a car through the fog with one headlight out. It’s the second where you need to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along. Creativity is a process, and that comes from discipline and practice.
Contact Info:
- Website: timothybraun.com
- Instagram: @timothybraun
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.braun.716
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-braun-69658830
- Twitter: @timothybraun42
Image Credits
Timothy Braun