Week 019 Module Guidelines in Writing A Play Script

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 6
At a glance
Powered by AI
The key takeaways are the guidelines for writing a play script which include brainstorming the narrative, deciding the exposition, rising action and resolution, and understanding the difference between plot and story.

The basic parts of a narrative arc in a play are the exposition, rising action, and resolution. The exposition introduces the characters and setting. The rising action makes the conflict more difficult. The resolution ends the narrative tension.

Some tips for developing natural dialogue include recording yourself reading lines aloud to identify unnatural parts, allowing conversations to take tangents as in real life, and including interruptions and sentence fragments.

GUIDELINES IN WRITING A PLAY SCRIPT

A. Brainstorming Your Narrative


1. Decide what kind of story you want to tell. Though every story is different, most plays fall into
categories that help the audience understand how to interpret the relationships and events they see.
Think about the characters you want to write, then consider how you want their stories to unfold.
Do they:

• Have to solve a mystery?


• Go through a series of difficult events in order to achieve personal growth?
• Come of age by transitioning from childlike innocence to worldly experience?
• Go on a journey, like Odysseus’s perilous journey in The Odyssey?
• Bring order to chaos?
• Overcome a series of obstacles to achieve a goal?
2. Brainstorm the basic parts of your narrative arc. The narrative arc is the progression of the play
through beginning, middle, and end. The technical terms for these three parts are exposition, rising
action, and resolution, and they always come in that order. Regardless of how long your play is or
how many acts you have, a good play will develop all three pieces of this puzzle. Taken notes on
how you want to flesh each one out before sitting down to write your play.
3. Decide what needs to be included in the exposition. Exposition opens a play by providing basic
information needed to follow the story: When and where does this story take place? Who is the
main character? Who are the secondary characters, including the antagonist (person who presents
the main character with his or her central conflict), if you have one? What is the central conflict
these characters will face? What is the mood of this play (comedy, romantic drama, tragedy)?
4. Transition the exposition into rising action. In the rising action, events unfold in a way that makes
circumstances more difficult for the characters. The central conflict comes into focus as events raise
the audience’s tension higher and higher. This conflict may be with another character (antagonist),
with an external condition (war, poverty, separation from a loved one), or with oneself (having to
overcome one’s own insecurities, for example). The rising action culminates in the story’s climax:
the moment of highest tension, when the conflict comes to a head.
5. Decide how your conflict will resolve itself. The resolution releases the tension from the climactic
conflict to end the narrative arc. You might have a happy ending, where the main character gets
what he/she wants; a tragic ending where the audience learns something from the main character’s
failure; or a denouement, in which all questions are answered.
6. Understand the difference between plot and story. The narrative of your play is made up of the plot
and the story — two discrete elements that must be developed together to create a play that holds
your audience’s attention. E.M. Forster defined story as what happens in the play — the
chronological unfolding of events. Plot, on the other hand, can be thought of as the logic that links
the events that unfold through the plot and make them emotionally powerful.[5] An example of the
difference is:

• Story: The protagonist’s girlfriend broke up with him. Then the protagonist lost his job.

• Plot: The protagonist’s girlfriend broke up with him. Heartbroken, he had an emotional
breakdown at work that resulted in his firing.

• You must develop a story that’s compelling and moves the action of the play along quickly
enough to keep the audience’s attention. At the same time, you must show how the actions
are all causally linked through your plot development. This is how you make the audience
care about the events that are transpiring on stage.

7. Develop your story. You can’t deepen the emotional resonance of the plot until you have a good
story in place. Brainstorm the basic elements of story before fleshing them out with your actual
writing by answering the following questions:

• Where does your story take place?

• Who is your protagonist (main character), and who are the important secondary characters?
• What is the central conflict these characters will have to deal with?

• What is the “inciting incident” that sets off the main action of the play and leads up to that
central conflict?

• What happens to your characters as they deal with this conflict?

• How is the conflict resolved at the end of the story? How does this impact the characters?

8. Deepen your story with plot development. Remember that the plot develops the relationship
between all the elements of story that were listed in the previous step. As you think about plot, you
should try to answer the following questions:

• What are the relationships between the characters?

• How do the characters interact with the central conflict? Which ones are most impacted by
it, and how does it affect them?

• How can you structure the story (events) to bring the necessary characters into contact with
the central conflict?

• What is the logical, casual progression that leads each event to the next one, building in a
continuous flow toward the story’s climactic moment and resolution?

B. Deciding on Your Play’s Structure

1. Begin with a one-act play if you are new to playwriting. Before writing the play, you should have
a sense of how you want to structure it. The one-act play runs straight through without any
intermissions, and is a good starting point for people new to playwriting. Examples of one-act plays
include "The Bond," by Robert Frost and Amy Lowell, and "Gettysburg," by Percy MacKaye.
Although the one-act play has the simplest structure, remember that all stories need a narrative arc
with exposition, rising tension, and resolution.

• Because one-act plays lack intermissions, they call for simpler sets and costume changes. Keep
your technical needs simple.

2. Don’t limit the length of your one-act play. The one-act structure has nothing to do with the
duration of the performance. These plays can vary widely in length, with some productions as short
as 10 minutes and others over an hour long.
• Flash dramas are very short one-act plays that can run from a few seconds up to about 10
minutes long. They’re great for school and community theater performances, as well as
competitions specifically for flash theater. See Anna Stillaman's "A Time of Green" for an
example of a flash drama.

C. Writing Your Play


1. Outline your acts and scenes. In the first two sections of this article, you brainstormed your basic
ideas about narrative arc, story and plot development, and play structure. Now, before sitting down
to write the play, you should place all these ideas into a neat outline. For each act, lay out what
happens in each scene.

• When are important characters introduced?

• How many different scenes do you have, and what specifically happens in each scene?

• Make sure each scene’s events build toward the next scene to achieve plot development.

• When might you need set changes? Costume changes? Take these kinds of technical
elements into consideration when outlining how your story will unfold.

2. Flesh out your outline by writing your play. Once you have your outline, you can write your actual
play. Just get your basic dialogue on the page at first, without worrying about how natural the
dialogue sounds or how the actors will move about the stage and give their performances. In the
first draft, you simply want to “get black on white,” as Guy de Maupassant said.

3. Work on creating natural dialogue. You want to give your actors a solid script, so they can deliver
the lines in a way that seems human, real, and emotionally powerful. Record yourself reading the
lines from your first draft aloud, then listen to the recording. Make note of points where you sound
robotic or overly grand. Remember that even in literary plays, your characters still have to sound
like normal people. They shouldn’t sound like they’re delivery fancy speeches when they’re
complaining about their jobs over a dinner table.

4. Allow conversations to take tangents. When you’re talking with your friends, you rarely stick to a
single subject with focused concentration. While in a play, the conversation must steer the
characters toward the next conflict, you should allow small diversions to make it feel realistic. For
example, in a discussion of why the protagonist’s girlfriend broke up with him, there might be a
sequence of two or three lines where the speakers argue about how long they’d been dating in the
first place.

5. Include interruptions in your dialogue. Even when we’re not being rude, people interrupt each other
in conversation all the time — even if just to voice support with an “I get it, man” or a “No, you’re
completely right.” People also interrupt themselves by changing track within their own sentences:
“I just — I mean, I really don’t mind driving over there on a Saturday, it’s just that — listen, I’ve
just been working really hard lately.”

• Don’t be afraid to use sentence fragments, either. Although we’re trained never to use
fragments in writing, we use them all the time when we’re speaking: “I hate dogs. All of
them.”

6. Add stage directions. Stage directions let the actors understand your vision of what’s unfolding
onstage. Use italics or brackets to set your stage directions apart from the spoken dialogue. While
the actors will use their own creative license to bring your words to life, some specific directions
you give might include:

• Conversation cues: [long, awkward silence]

• Physical actions: [Silas stands up and paces nervously]; [Margaret chews her nails]

• Emotional states: [Anxiously], [Enthusiastically], [Picks up the dirty shirt as though


disgusted by it]

7. Rewrite your draft as many times as needed. You’re not going to nail your play on the first draft.
Even experienced writers need to write several drafts of a play before they’re satisfied with the
final product. Don’t rush yourself! With each pass, add more detail that will help bring your
production to life.

• Even as you’re adding detail, remember that the delete key can be your best friend. As
Donald Murray says, you must “cut what is bad, to reveal what is good.” Remove all
dialogue and events that don’t add to the emotional resonance of the play.

• The novelist Leonard Elmore’s advice applies to plays as well: “Try to leave out the part
that readers tend to skip.”
Source:

https://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Play-Script

You might also like