About a week ago, I blithely signed on to my e-mail to discover a note from my brother Max. A fellow writer of considerable gifts, with a wry humor and caustic outlook , he was headed to New York to attend a conference. I knew he had an ambitious schedule, meetings with agents, seminars and lectures, but I held out hope he'd have a spare moment to share coffee; maybe grab a bite at my favorite Tex-Mex place in Chelsea, where we could catch up on family dramas and even talk shop. I assumed he was zapping me a note with his arrival time, or the phone number at his hotel.

Instead, I read the following: "Doug! It seems one of the keynote speakers had to cancel at the last minute; any chance you could fill in?"

And so I stand before you today. I'd like to thank both Karen Dionne and Harry Hunsicker for following up my brother's entreaty with both swiftness and grace.

But I must confess, after I blurted my hasty, impulsive, and unexamined "yes," I plunged into a crisis of confidence. The bulk of you are novelists. You write for the page, and I write for the stage. You dispense your stories one sentence at a time, to a single reader in an armchair, or on a plane, or reclining on a beach. It's a far more private communion between author and reader; two minds in quiet conversation; two imaginations in muted concert.

Playwriting is noisier; we can't do it alone. We need carpenters, building sets. We need actors, who declaim our texts and directors, who shout commands. Our audience can range from less than a hundred to two thousand, all soaking in the story in real time. Our egos are far more fragile than yours, believe it or not; we crave instant gratification; the laugh must follow (live!) on the heels of the joke, and we can't wait for reviews; the applause must be immediate, adulatory, and prolonged.

Being a playwright and being a novelist have precious little in common. In truth, playwrights are a lot like cookbook authors. I feel closer to Betty Crocker than I do Don Delillo or Joyce Carol Oates. What are plays, after all, but recipes for three-dimensional events? They're not written to be read; they're written to be realizedlike Martha Stewart's Balsamic-Glazed Pork Loin, or Gordon Ramsey's White Peach Parfait. Recipes are little more than a set of instructions; dramatic texts are much the same.

Just as Martha lists ingredients, the means of combining them, and a method for serving, the playwright lists his characters, the scenes in which they interact and the words which they will say. A chef realizes Martha's text; a director realizes mine. And, usually at least, we serve more than one person at a time. Hardly "two minds in quiet conversation;" it's more like a shouting match in a stadium. The actors, the director, the playwright, the set designer, the producer, the theater owner, and the audiencethey all want to be heard.

Reading a recipe isn't the same as sinking your fork into a piping hot slice of chocolate ganache; and reading a script bears little resemblance to the heart-stopping experience of sitting through a production of Peer Gynt. For the novelist, words on the page are the giddy end to a long, arduous creative process. But for the playwright, words on the page are just the beginning.

Given the disparate nature of our crafts, what, then, qualifies me to speak to you now?