Week 019 Module Guidelines in Writing A Play Script
Week 019 Module Guidelines in Writing A Play Script
Week 019 Module Guidelines in Writing A Play Script
• 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:
• 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?
• 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:
• 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?
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.
• 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:
• Physical actions: [Silas stands up and paces nervously]; [Margaret chews her nails]
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