Learning from Great Writers: Sarah Kane x Brevity

Improve your writing with this 5-minute workshop

Welcome to my writing workshop, where I borrow techniques from great writers to help improve your writing (and mine too).

Today, we’re looking at writing with brevity. Our example is the 20th century British playwright, Sarah Kane (1971–1999).

Today’s Menu

1. The main idea
2. The example
3. Apply it!
4. Who was Sarah Kane?

1. The main idea

Sarah Kane rose to prominence in the 1990s and was widely regarded as the leading British playwright of her generation. Her brilliance was sadly short-lived. She struggled with severe depression and took her own life at age 28. Her printed work consists of five plays, a short television film called “Skin” and two articles for The Guardian newspaper.

Kane’s plays are an autopsy of humanity’s underbelly. Her characters dominate, humiliate, rape and mutilate others, but they also suffer, yearn for change and express hope. Violence is never gratuitous in her work. She wrote with the deepest ethical regard for life.

Some theatre critics connected her work with a 90s playwriting trend known as “in-yer-face theatre.” The term speaks for itself: confrontational, hard hitting drama that wanted to shake the world by its neck. The trend was a reaction to the conflict and genocide that loomed large over that decade — the first Gulf War, ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian war, and the genocide of the Tsutsi ethnic group in Rwanda.

One of the key characteristics of Kane’s writing style is brevity. Her dialogues flit backwards and forwards like two boxers in a ring. To achieve this, she chopped off pronouns, particles, adjectives and verbs, often leaving only a single noun to deliver her punches.

The danger of writing with this kind of extreme linguistic economy is cutting away the meaning of a text. In theatre, this is called subtext. But Kane used brevity to create speed and depth, and that was part of her brilliance.

How did she achieve this? On the one hand, she cut away those parts of speech that don’t affect meaning. On the other hand, she used single words and short phrases as doorways onto an array of meanings. A single word, as we shall see, could open up a whole imaginary terrain. Let’s take a look at both these points in the example passage.

2. The example

The passage we’re going to read is from Scene Two of Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted. The play is set in a hotel room in Leeds, an old textile town in the north of England. Ian (45) tries to seduce his ex-girlfriend Cate (21) but soon turns to coercion as she refuses his advances. He drinks, smokes, rolls off bigoted rants and wields a gun. In Scene Two, Cate wakes up to find Ian in physical pain from the heavy drinking and smoking the night before. She looks for a way out.

3. Apply it!

Let’s return to the two uses of brevity I mentioned a moment ago: cutting language until you’re left with the bare essentials for meaning, and using single words with multiple layers of meaning.

Let’s zoom in on part of the passage we just read. Notice how some of the pronouns and verbs are cut.

Ian: I love you.
Cate: I don’t want to stay.
Ian: Please.
Cate: Don’t want to.
Ian: You make me feel safe.
Cate: Nothing to be scared of.
Ian: I’ll order breakfast.
Cate: Not hungry.

What would it look like if we fleshed out the grammar?

Ian: I love you.
Cate: I don’t want to stay.
Ian: Please stay.
Cate: I don’t want to stay.
Ian: You make me feel safe.
Cate: There’s nothing to be scared of.
Ian: I'll order breakfast.
Cate: I’m not hungry.

Kane reduces the dialogue to a series of short statements. I want this. I want that. Do this. Do that. This brevity creates speed. It also gives a feeling of urgency, which amplifies Cate’s desire to flee.

Cutting the pronoun “I” means Cate’s replies often start with negations: “Don’t”, “Nothing,” “Not.” This gives us a sense of where she stands with Ian. She is fully against him, but she is also trapped.

How can we use this “cut and command” style in our own writing? Even if you’re not writing a play, stripping down your language can be productive when you want to speed up parts of your text. It can also signal to the reader that something serious is at stake.

Let’s apply it to a sample paragraph in a completely different context.

A method for cleaning up your room
Here is the perfect system for cleaning your room. First, move all of the items that do not have a proper place to the center of the room. Get rid of at least five things that you have not used within the last year. Take out all of the trash, and place all of the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. Now find a location for each of the items you had placed in the center of the room. For any remaining items, see if you can squeeze them in under your bed or stuff them into the back of your closet. See, that was easy!

Here’s the cut version:

How to clean your room
Put anything out of place in the center of the room. Get rid of five things you don’t use. Take out the trash and dirty dishes. Put the remaining items away neatly. Hide anything else in your closet or under your bed. Easy!

Alright, let’s move to the second point. Single words or short phrases that can open up multiple layers of meaning.

There are many words that stand out in the scene we just read, but there is one that is particularly mysterious. Can you spot it?

Revenge.

This single word sums up Ian’s anxiety that has been building throughout the scene. But instead of solving the problem of his anxiety, it opens up new possibilities in the story. Revenge for what? By whom and how? This single word suggests something is coming for Ian, an event that will change their fate.

We can apply this technique to our own writing. Again, we don’t have to be writing a play to do this. You can begin an article with a single word and you can explore its multiple meanings in the body of your text.

You can use single words to mark a sudden change of direction in your text without the needed for lengthy and awkward signposting.

You can use a single word to end a text. Perhaps the word sums up the different strands of the text.

In each of these cases, the use of one word with multiple meanings is powerful and efficient. Give it a try in your next article!

4. Who was Sarah Kane?

Rather than attempt to write a section on Sarah Kane’s life, I’ll apply the brevity idea and leave you with a series of links to explore. All I will say is read, read, read.

• A list of her plays and their synopses
• Her obituary in the Guardian
• Her obituary in the New York Times
• “A Sad Hurrah” by Simon Hattenstone on Kane’s legacy
• “A Sad Hurrah (part 2)
• An MA thesis on Sarah Kane’s death and the legacy of her work
• A long list of scholarly papers about Kane’s work
• “Skin” a film written by Sarah Kane and directed by Vincent O’Connell
• The complete plays of Sarah Kane

If you’d like to read more of Sarah Kane’s work, I have created a reading list on Bookshop.org, which is an Amazon alternative that supports independent booksellers worldwide.

*Note: If you purchase a book through links in my article on Bookshop.org, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.