“But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn’t a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don’t have to be very smart.”

But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I’d rather write plays.

I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

Plays are so much more special if they’ve never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.

I love writing for the screen.

The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.

It’s called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn’t realize what a rage I was in.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.

I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.

And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

I’m very into the first production of the show.

I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.