How Hannah Moscovitch wrote This Is War by Thinking Like An Artist
‘Do what’s in poor taste.’ It’s the advice that’s never steered her wrong
Hannah Moscovitch sets the scene. The location? Her home in Halifax, where the acclaimed playwright and TV producer is sitting down to draft a pilot for AMC. An open laptop is on the table in front of her, and she's surrounded by a mess of scattered notecards — scribbled ideas that will, fingers crossed, become a finished script. But the writer is not writing. The writer can not write. Instead, she's caught in a classic conflict — a showdown, really. Mind vs. empty page.
Think Like an Artist was designed for moments like this one. The interactive tool launched today on CBC Arts, and it collects advice from some of Canada's most celebrated artists and creatives. What are the tricks they use when they encounter an obstacle in their work?
Moscovitch is among the 67 notable talents who participated in the project. She is one of the country's most well-respected playwrights, the 2021 winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, and in recent years, she's turned her attention to television. Her 2023 miniseries, Little Bird (co-created with Jennifer Podemski) is going into this year's Canadian Screen Awards with 19 nominations, the most of any series.
When CBC Arts calls Moscovitch one morning in April, the writer is, quite simply, feeling stuck. "And I'm really in being stuck at the moment," she says, with a laugh.
She wasn't especially worried, however. Every writer has faced similar hassles before, and as a contributor to Think Like an Artist, Moscovitch shared her favourite strategy for busting through writer's block. If you draw her card, you'll receive this proven advice:
"Do what's in poor taste. Whatever you think is contrived or gross or offensive. Go into it and come out the other side."
"Sometimes if you go through with what might be the worst idea, then you can arrive somewhere good," Moscovitch tells CBC Arts.
She's applied that wisdom throughout her career, sometimes unconsciously. Take the example of her first full-length play, East of Berlin (2007). Set in Paraguay, it's a story about the descendants of German war criminals. "They were essentially Nazi refugees, and I'm Jewish," she says. "It felt like poor taste, actually. Like, truly it did."
"There was something about the material that just drew me and repulsed me, and I was trying to figure out how to be a writer then. Now I sort of understand that for me, that works — to go after things from odd angles and to go after the stories that upset me, that I find grotesque."
Moscovitch occasionally takes this approach when she's having trouble scripting a scene. But it can be even more effective when she's choosing a new project, and one of her favourite examples is the story of how she wrote This Is War.
Set in Afghanistan during the Canadian Forces' combat mission in Panjwaii, the play follows four soldiers who've experienced the same terrible event — some horror of war that's left a mystery to the audience. While being interviewed by an unseen reporter, the details come together as they share their accounts. What happened? Why? How much will they decide to reveal — or not?
First staged at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, the play would win Moscovitch the Trillium Book Award in 2014, a prize that had previously gone to authors including Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Moscovitch was the first playwright to receive the honour.
What counts as 'contrived or gross or offensive?'
The very subject of war felt repellent to Moscovitch. "There's something about military culture that was antithesis to everything I knew and grew up with," she says. "The foreignness of the war" struck her as especially offensive — how distant it felt from her experience living in Canada.
"There's something about the extremes of that particular conflict. Like, how foreign it was to us here that there were a bunch of Canadians fighting in Panjwaii and Arghandab in the desert," she says.
"I've never been to Afghanistan, I've never been in the military — never seen a war. To try to take on a topic like that felt perverse, essentially."
"And I was like, f*ck it. I'm going to go right into it. I'm going to steer all the way in and figure this out. So I did."
How did she 'go into it?'
Following Moscovitch's creative prompt is about challenging the way you think. You need to push past any misgivings or mistrust — any "natural feelings of 'that's not for me.'"
"I'll write and write and write to see if I can find something that's in it," she says. "If I'm having a strong reaction — if I'm experiencing aversion — then it might be because there's something really interesting there."
"[For This Is War], I went through my aversion into appreciating what it was that they [the soldiers] were doing — how they think and who they are," she says. And the first step in that process was doing her research — "tons and tons of research."
What did she discover on 'the other side?'
Moscovitch was working as a writer for the CBC Radio drama Afghanada while developing This Is War, and the job allowed her unique access to military consultants, experts who gave her first-hand insight into the experience of living and working in war zones.
"I asked those rude questions that you can ask when you're writing on a show and you have a military consultant," she told CBC News in 2013. One conversation with a sergeant left an indelible impression on the playwright. "I asked what it's like when you kill people, and he said 'You make the call that you think you can live with in the moment.' And that stayed with me," she said.
"I ended up really loving all of the people I met in that world and really admiring them and being surprised by them," Moscovitch tells CBC Arts. By getting to know them, she'd shed her preconceived notions and discovered a new perspective that could prove equally transformative for many members of the audience: "those of us who stand outside of war and don't know about it."
"We have the space and luxury, I think, to think very ethically about war, whereas when the soldiers are there and on the ground, they're trying to survive," says Moscovitch.
How can you think like an artist?
Moscovitch's advice can help with more than writer's block. It could easily apply to visual art, she says. If you're a painter who loathes a particular esthetic, for example — abstracts, landscapes or "sentimental art, like kittens and flowers" — do that. Do the thing you hate!
But whatever your creative dilemma happens to be, ask yourself why you feel the way you do.
"Like, why do I feel like this is in poor taste?" says Moscovitch. "Why do I feel like this is so gross? What is in it that is making me feel that way? What's uncomfortable?"
Whatever you're working on, if you ask those questions you'll learn something about yourself — and the answer could free your imagination.
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