Plays

[Apathy's_Child]

All ye theater majors, give me your tips on writing plays. I started working on one yesterday - the well's been running dry for poetry recently, so I figured it was time to try something new. I'm having a lot of fun writing it, and am hoping to finish later on tonight.

[Sinjob]

Hey, thanks for making this thread! Much appreciated/needed. Though personally I wish I had some advice to give, considering I recently just started writing plays again. I usually love basic symbolism through characters: Passion, Envy, Hatred, Good, Evil brought into modern-day settings and situations...

[Apathy's_Child]

Bumped for lack of notable activity in the lit section of late.

My gf is currently writing a play on Elizabeth Bathory with a friend of hers from college, and it's pretty good - they're exploring the tension between history and fiction using different styles of makeup & costume, even segwaying into different actresses at points. It's not something I'd want to have written, but helping with the edit is giving me the bug again and I'll probably start working on some new shit soon. We've been talking about a collab on changeling myths, but I don't really know if that'll happen - she wants to look at the older myths and angles like autism and childhood deformity, whereas I'm more interested in recent changeling murders which aren't limited to young children. Now that we've talked about it I shuoldn't really just go away and write it myself - I've done that before on collabs we've discussed, and naturally it kind of pisses her off. Guess I'll have to come up with something new to keep the itch at bay.

[Despanan]

Writing plays?

There's really not much difference between my playwriting process and my regular writing process. I usually start with a scene, or a piece of dialogue already in my head and then just let it evolve as I write.

I suppose the majority of my focus is on the dialogue, when I start hearing specific voices in my head I know that I'm on the right track.

After that I kinda just let the characters tell me who they are and waht they want.

The classroom answer would be something like "Theatre asks a question" or "Theatre is about stakes"

Of course I think that's absolute hogwash.

My best advice is to start writing and see what happens.

[gothicusmaximus]

Here are some of my feelings on playwriting. Ignore at your peril.

-Don't ignore the physicality of your characters or your scenes. I know this seems basic, and I come off as a condescending asswipe in pointing it out, but I've seen an incredible number of aspiring playwrights put together dramas that boil down to little more than babbling heads ebbing through a formless aether as they sling quips and pour their hearts out. Never lose sight of your characters' bodies and the tangible reality.

-Characters should say what they really mean only like 30% of the time, tops. Generally, their real feelings should be obscured beneath layers of subtext-- this imbues all of your dialogue with a dramatic friction. You can choose to implement this principle in the Joss Whedon way, whereby every character is just gratingly sarcastic all the fucking time, or the Henrik Ibsen way, whereby each idea a character articulates actually embodies the violent clash between his superego and inner life. I would personally advise erring on the side of the latter.

-Don't pad the length with bullshit to make your planned ending come at page 70 or whatever. To explore beyond the conclusion you've worked out is often very rewarding, but even should you elect not to do so, your play will only suffer for being longer than it has to be.

-As you write, pretend your play is going up in the shittiest, most ramshackle theatre conceivable, on a budget of about a buck fiddy. Not only is this practical, but it'll force you to be creative, as well as to be fully certain that each character and prop is absolutely necessary.

-Every scene should be an exchange of some kind.

-One principal protagonist vs. one principal antagonist.

[Apathy's_Child]

All good advice - but why only the one principal protag/antag? I'm not really clear on why that would need to be the case.

I learned the physicality thing pretty damned quick after writing a long dialogue scene. When I saw the guys going over it, I realized I'd had their movements in my head but had set down nothing but dialogue, and they were naturally just doing the whole thing standing around dick in hand. Now I'm kind of a Nazi about documenting the slightest movement and voice inflection. If I ever get the chance to direct (which wouldn't be for a while, but there are friendships I can probably exploit if I hand over enough decent stuff) I'll so be the guy yelling, "Not like that - I said tilt your head THIRTY degrees, THIRTY! Whilst slinging you weight onto your right hip LIGHTLY, not like the cunting hippo from Fantasia! Get the fuck off my stage. Hold on a second. Look at me. No, in the eyes. You disgust me."

[Despanan]

This kinda ties into Gothicus's "buck fiddy" thing, but if you intend to send your work out to theatres MAKE SURE IT CAN BE PERFORMED BY A CAST OF SIX OR FEWER ACTORS.

Why? Because as sad as it is, most new play competitions have a cast limit of six.

Also: While I'm a playwright who LOVES to spell out each and every bit of movement that my characters engage in, try to avoid "directing" the scene from the computer. Theatre is a collaborative art form, and a good director with even fair to middling actors, and given something to work with can bring alot to your play, and odds are they may find some great stuff that you didn't know was there.

Finally, be careful how you take notes. Listen to them and give even the most seemingly idiotic due consideration, but remember: you're the only one who knows what your play is. Don't let other people's ideas of what your work should be destroy what it is.

[CuckooTuli]

There's some really good advice in here. Totally agree about remembering the characters' physicality, and the buck fiddy tip is also a good one, if you're writing to actually do something with the finished product rather than just for yourself. But then, I guess if you ARE just writing for yourself, plays are unlikely to become your chosen medium, given that they're written FOR performance.

I stole this first tip from some famous writer whose name I can't remember, but for me it's been a good one: be prepared to kill your babies. That is, if there's a scene or line you love, but as you continue writing you find that it actually doesn't fit comfortably with what your play has grown into (and for me, most tales really DO grow a lot in the telling), don't strain yourself to force it in somewhere - axe that shit. If it looks dropped in to you, it looks dropped in, and keeping that one line isn't as important as making sure the enitre thing works without jarring deviations from your text as a whole.

I'm a very character-driven writer, and something that drives me crazy in other people's work is when they don't seem to have a clear idea of exactly who their characters are. Make sure you know them all inside-out before you even think about knocking together a final draft: what kind of person they are, what kind of life they've had, and on that basis, how they'd be likely to react to the situations you're putting them in. It's really annoying seeing a very vocal, outspoken character with only one line in a pivotal confrontation scene, or a wallflower type suddenly deliver the knockout blow with absolutely no build-up.

That's not to say characters should remain static, without developing - but if they're going to behave in a manner which deviates from the character you've spent the entire play establishing, this needs to arise from identifiable elements in the plot. Some people just seem to think "That line sounds cool", and give it to a character who's said nothing in that vein to date. That kind of sloppy writing drives me up the wall. I like to live with my characters for a while before setting them down in stone, turning them over in my mind and constructing histories for them which may not make it into the final cut, but which help me decide who they are and what drives them.

My playwriting process usually goes something like this: plot/character idea > basic plotline and first draft of all characters with small blurb about their personality and role in the story > start writing scenes and establishing their concrete voices and see where you go with it. I'm a 'patchwork' writer rather than a 'begin at the beginning' one - I'll often start out writing either small random exchanges or just scenes I thought about after devising the basic storyline, rather than doing a scene-by-scene plan of the play. This helps me establish each character's voice and get an idea of what kind of scenes would fit them, before I've really committed myself to any specific trajectory, and I end up ixnay-ing on a lot of my original scene ideas as I start to really get a handle on the characters.

[Despanan]

So Apathy, how's your play coming? we ever going to get to see part of it?

[Apathy's_Child]

I never finished that one... although I've written one and two halves (may or may not finish, depending on the odds of finding someone who actually wants to put them on) since this thread was started. I still have an affection for that first taste though. It had a guy straining for a shit in the background and everything. I REALLY need to stop being a drunken dickweed and actually do something with myself. I decided long ago that the world is lacking yet another starving writer. Now I just need to live that dream... complete with malnutritinion & optional syphilis.