Only in a novel are all things given full play.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.