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Bloggers are debating whether scripts should be written for performance alone, while playwrights lament the difficulty of making money from their craft

A couple of weeks ago, David Jays asked here at the Guardian whether plays counted as literature. He was prompted to do this by the news that not a single play was shortlisted for this year's New South Wales Premier's literary awards. Australian critic Alison Croggon had also been unimpressed by this turn of events and by the similar contempt shown for drama, not so long ago, by the Pulitzer prize committee in the US.

It would be easy to assume that we could pin the blame for this kind of philistinism squarely on the narrow-minded judges themselves. However, as Croggon points out more recently, in an article for this month's edition of The Australian Literary Review, you will, surprisingly, also "find playwrights who deny a literary aspect to their work, considering it hostile to theatricality". Citing the Australian scribe David Williamson as one of these, she goes on to conclude that "too many playwrights accept the majority verdict and believe they are merely writing 'blueprints for performance'. Playwrights are too often infantilised by a workshop mentality and, as a result, can too easily dismiss the literary responsibilities of their craft."

This is something that has struck a chord with George Hunka as well. He notes, on his blog, Superfluities Redux, that the US playwright Jeffrey Sweet recently made a similar argument about scripts not being literature in the comments of a recent New York Times blog. And this leads Hunka and Croggan to an interesting discussion about how you define and, more importantly, how you read literature in the first place.

Of course, to say that plays are literature does not mean that a critic should be able to ignore the production (as so many reviewers do with new plays). Neither does it mean that a play has to be conventionally literary â€" not every writer needs to have stage directions like the one at the end of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone: "Having found his song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath ... he is free to soar above the environs that pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions."

Yet the fact that they exist as printed texts that can be read surely makes them literature by definition? And the value of reading scripts is self-evident in some of the most radical contemporary drama â€" you only have to look at how plays such as Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis or Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life are laid out on the page in order to grasp this.

While we're on the subject of plays, a frequent lament of contemporary playwrights is that it's almost impossible to make a living out of their craft. However, perhaps we can take some comfort in this article on the Lapham's Quarterly website, which lists the day jobs of some of our greatest writers, from TS Eliot (a clerk for Lloyds) to Franz Kafka (a legal secretary). So any writer who is holding down a depressing temp job in order to make ends meet: you're in good company.

In other news, there are two essays that have been floating around the blogosphere for the past couple of weeks that are definitely worth a look. This first is by Dan Bye on his infrequently updated blog Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. Entitled A Thesis On Synthesis, it is an attempt to explore how directors with such wildly divergent styles as John Wright and Katie Mitchell often work from quite "similar observations about human behaviour". And he has some excellent thoughts on how we can, generally, divide working methods into those led by instinct and those led by intellect.

The second essay is a colossal 7,500-word affair on Andrew Haydon's blog Postcards from the Gods. His theme is casting and its implications for race, class and identity. It's a subject he has touched on before, but this new contribution to the debate, and the comments it has engendered in response, are well worth a look.

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