"I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright"
About this Quote
Shaffer is smuggling a craft lesson inside a seemingly modest endorsement of genre fiction: don’t worship “inspiration” until you can build a machine that delivers. The phrase “organization” lands like a rebuke to the romantic myth of the playwright as purely intuitive. He’s talking about structure as a discipline, not a vibe - the ability to place information, delay it, reveal it, and make an audience lean forward at exactly the right moment.
His choice of the detective story is pointed. Mysteries are the clearest public demonstration of dramaturgy doing its job: set-up, misdirection, escalation, and payoff, all under the pressure of plausibility. A whodunit can’t bluff. If the clues don’t track, the reader feels cheated. Shaffer’s subtext is that theatre operates under the same contract, even when it pretends otherwise. Character psychology, lyrical language, philosophical themes - none of it absolves the writer from the hard math of cause and effect.
Contextually, Shaffer came up in a postwar British stage world that prized intellectual heft but also faced increasingly sophisticated mass storytelling (crime novels, later film and television). He wrote plays - Equus, Amadeus - that hinge on investigation: a psychiatrist probing a boy’s violence, a courtier “solving” Mozart. So he’s not praising detective stories as guilty pleasure; he’s admitting they’re a training ground for tension. “Budding playwright” makes it almost pedagogical, even protective: learn the bones first. The artistry comes later, but the audience’s trust has to be earned beat by beat.
His choice of the detective story is pointed. Mysteries are the clearest public demonstration of dramaturgy doing its job: set-up, misdirection, escalation, and payoff, all under the pressure of plausibility. A whodunit can’t bluff. If the clues don’t track, the reader feels cheated. Shaffer’s subtext is that theatre operates under the same contract, even when it pretends otherwise. Character psychology, lyrical language, philosophical themes - none of it absolves the writer from the hard math of cause and effect.
Contextually, Shaffer came up in a postwar British stage world that prized intellectual heft but also faced increasingly sophisticated mass storytelling (crime novels, later film and television). He wrote plays - Equus, Amadeus - that hinge on investigation: a psychiatrist probing a boy’s violence, a courtier “solving” Mozart. So he’s not praising detective stories as guilty pleasure; he’s admitting they’re a training ground for tension. “Budding playwright” makes it almost pedagogical, even protective: learn the bones first. The artistry comes later, but the audience’s trust has to be earned beat by beat.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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