Years ago, I conducted a public interview of Toni Morrison, when her novel Paradise was launched. In discussing her process, she said something that really rang a bell. And so, to your question—“When beginning a new project, how do you decide where to start?”—pick the part of the project that makes you “fret” the most. Rather than working up to it, grab hold of it early on. If you get thrown off, don’t run away completely. Make an assessment. What are you going to need to pull it off? How must you prepare? Who do you need around you for collaboration?In building collaborative environments, don’t do it in a cookie cutter way or an assumed way. In the theater, it’s assumed that a rehearsal hall includes a director, a playwright, actors, and a stage manager. In my case, for a long time, there was just one actor—me—playing many parts. I made one-person shows in which I played… I think the most was 52 characters. And that’s because I observe America as a place of many voices and, as we know, a place where we don’t agree. But that’s ripe for drama, because drama is about conflict. My goal as a dramatist has been to go right to the middle of a real American problem, or even a catastrophe, and find the people who don’t agree. That’s fine for when I was collecting interviews, which are the basis of the verbatim one-person work I did. But what happened when I got to the rehearsal hall? How do I, as the originating artist, deal with disagreement? Ironically, personally I don’t enjoy arguing or debating and in fact, I’m not good at it. I don’t have the stomach or patience for winning an argument, nor do I like 54 feeling like a wimp. Hence, I did not want to be in the typical back and forth arguments that can happen with a playwright and a director. (Directors, temperamentally, most often do enjoy winning arguments.) To tackle this problem, I brought two other conversants into the room, and chose people for those positions who I knew would (a) enjoy arguing with the director and with each other, and (b) would be variously more progressive than me, or more conservative than me. I’d watch them argue and then I’d go home and rewrite the play. This happened daily. In the end, this process enriched the playwrighting process and allowed me to do what I do best: listen.To the question of “how to do the creative and practical at the same time?” You cannot do one without the other. In fact, Steve Jobs is an extraordinary model for that. He brought aesthetics, joy, and fun into a highly technical enterprise. Moreover, his aesthetic ideas and his technological genius needed to be practical in order to work.Keep thinking different,<br>Anna