Some Thoughts On Writing

I have taught playwriting to students of all ages. Over time, many of them have come to me with the same questions: why write a play? What does it mean? What does it require? How do I cultivate a writing practice?

I am sharing some thoughts that I have shared with my students. Perhaps they will be useful to you.

Some Thoughts on How to Write a Play

Feel a stirring of the soul. 

Walk around and see how long that stirring feeling lasts. If it doesn’t last, thank it and move on. If it lasts for a while, keep going. 

Walk around and wonder if there's a story going on that’s connected to the stirring. 

Walk around and wonder who is in the story. 

Ask yourself what form that story might take. Is it a play? A movie? An interesting anecdote in a phone call to a friend?

If it is a play, then ask what form the story itself might take. Is there one person talking in an empty room? Two people speaking gibberish in the garden? A very loud dance party?

When you can hear a character saying something to you, stop what you’re doing and write it down. 

Ask yourself about the structure of the story. How do time and place work?

Make some stream of consciousness writing that puts you, or attempts to put you, in the same zone as the stirring that you initially felt. 

Start to formalize initial answers to these five questions: 
This is a story about...
It takes place...
It begins when...
It ends when...
The characters are... 

Start writing scenes. Celebrate what you discover, keep asking yourself what's missing. If you know character first, story is missing. If you know form first, structure is missing. If you know subject first, characters are missing. If you know everything at the beginning, there won’t be any surprise by the end.  

Write a sketch of the play, in the same way a sculptor might make a sketch of a sculpture.

At this stage, it can help to share what you have with people you trust. Ask what's working, and what feels undercooked. Ask what potential feels exciting. Ask smart people what they think. Ask funny people what they think. Decide for yourself whether or not you agree.

Turn on your technical brain to figure out how to use the tools of theater to make it more cohesive – what structure is it closest to? What elements are you using that you’re not aware of? Could they provide shape and clarity? What are some of the minute-to-minute motivations that compel you? 

Continue to live your life, thinking about your play. 

Allow for epiphanies in unexpected moments. 

Set aside quiet time every day for two to six weeks, even if it is just an hour. Turn off your phone, your internet, your distractions. Allow yourself to sit in some quiet and some focus. Allow your agony to take the shape of inquiry. Look at your sketch. Start somewhere, there’s no wrong place to start, and attempt to build connective tissue. Expand. Contract. Revise. Expand. Allow your work to surprise you. Allow yourself to change your mind. Allow your work to become a full draft.

Meanwhile, of course, take walks. Eat food. Read the news. Relax. Speak in silly voices. Call your friends. Pay your taxes. Participate in the world. Participate in civic society. Attend to the occasions and the grunt work of your life. Underneath everything, think about your play. 

Identify for yourself what satisfies you about your work. 

Try to name what’s missing.

Try to do something about it.

If it is still the time to write and rewrite like crazy, then allow yourself to write and rewrite like crazy. But make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Keep sleeping, keep eating, keep bathing, keep walking. Keep up with your friends and your family. Keep up with the stirring feeling you feel, whenever you can feel it. Keep writing, of course. Keep going.

Share your play with actors, with a director, with designers, with space and time. Trust your gut about what’s working. Address whatever makes you cringe, if it’s not the sort of cringe you like. 

Make time to revise.

Revise.

Maintain your existence as a human being. 

Repeat some of these steps, in no particular order, perhaps over the course of several weeks, months, or years. 

Produce your play, if that’s an option.

Allow yourself to arrive at a final draft, which is to say, seek the pleasure and satisfaction of knowing when you have said what you mean.

When you’ve said it, and meant it, stand back and behold it.

Allow your play to be a play in the world, as if it had always existed. 

A Letter to My Students: Why Write Plays in Catastrophic Times?

21 January 2021

My Dear Students,

As we assemble in our virtual classroom, our world suffers profoundly. Centuries of racial violence, a surge in public demonstrations of white supremacy, acts of domestic terrorism, a global pandemic, climate chaos, and dizzying economic conditions are meeting at a chaotic, traumatic, and devastating crossroads. Perhaps we enter into this classroom with that pain in the forefront our bodies, hearts, and homes. Or perhaps it is quietly simmering beneath the surface of everything we do. However it arrives, it arrives. And we gather in its presence and we say, "now is the time to write a play." 

In catastrophic times, the skeptics will say, "but why bother with plays?"
In catastrophic times, even the playwrights may say, "but why bother with plays?"

I have no fail-safe argument for why we bother with plays. But I write to you to remind you why we might try. 

We bother with plays because in an era of destruction, we create. 

We bother because in this crisis of culture, truth, and feeling, plays can create new culture, truth, and feeling. 

We bother because plays can proclaim and celebrate the fullness of our humanity, and transform the human-made paradigms of power that attempt to de-humanize the most vulnerable among us. 

We bother to bring joy to dark places, to think intricate thoughts, to metabolize our questions, to confront our fears, to practice honesty, to cultivate discipline, to give gifts to our loved ones, to reach across the loneliness of our writing tables and find a connection with others who share our story, or a love of our story, or a belief in the transformative power of story.

We bother to tell jokes, to sing, to dance, to play, to gather in fellowship and ask each other, what has happened? What is the action? What is the feeling? What is the end, the middle, the beginning? How many characters are in this thing? Does this joke work? What do we reveal, and when? What is missing? What needs to be cut? Do I even like this? Is it legible to others? How do I make it to the next draft? What is the boldest choice we can make?

In catastrophic times, we bother to band together, in a theater of our own design, to offer our beauty, our creation, and our love. 

So let our plays begin. 

Sincerely,

Miranda

Some Dramatic Elements

Here are some working definitions of some dramatic elements that may help a playwright wright a play.

Over the course of the semester, we will investigate a range of dramatic elements that contribute to the craft of writing plays. We’ll discuss them all, don’t worry.

Drama: Drama is action that emerges from the pressure between opposing world views (and there can be many of them). Marsha Norman says that drama is the sequencing of the consequences of desire. 

Engine: the element or elements that give your play momentum. The engine is the burning desire at the heart of the story. 

Form: the way you tell your story. Some examples: a one-woman show, transcribed interviews, the organizing principle of a birthday party. 

Structure: the way you organize your story. We will focus on Paula Vogel’s six structures: Associative, syllogistic, pattern, circular, generic, and synthetic fragment. 

Promise: a bargain you strike with your audience, either explicitly or implicitly, at the beginning of the play, which tells them what to look/listen/feel for during the course of your drama. The conclusion of the play somehow satisfies the promise you made at the beginning, which gives your audience a sense of an ending. 

Dramatic action: action from one or more characters that does something to someone else. To beguile, to seduce, to forgive, to defeat, to manipulate, to pledge, etc. This differs from stage activity, which is merely what people do on stage (cooking, eating, dancing, sitting in chairs), but not necessarily what they do to each other. We can use stage activity to communicate dramatic action. (Harriet dances with Emma to seduce her. Ethan serves dinner to poison his guests.) 

Stage directions: writing in a play that communicates location, action, time, design, un-spoken events, rhythm, and any other critical information that does not live in dialogue. The sun sets. A very long silence. Nellie kills a pig. 

Line: what a character says. 

Scene: a unit of drama, of varying length, that communicates action, character, and story in one continuous view. Scenes can be so short that they have one line, and they can be so long that they are the entire play. When you end a scene (an action we also call a scene break) you punctuate your work with a stop/shift/change of some kind. It is your opportunity to arrange who is on stage, doing what, when. Measuring the length, pace, and order of your scenes communicates the pace, rhythm, and sense of transformation in your play. 

Act: a larger unit of drama, which can contain multiple scenes, or perhaps one very long scene. Acts tend to have a guiding engine of their own, which operates in relationship to the other acts. Perhaps it's useful to think of acts as seasons, and scenes as months within those seasons. There are no contemporary mandates for how many acts a play should have.  

Inciting Incident: an event at the beginning of the story, on stage or off, that kicks the whole play into motion.

Beat: the dramatist's version of a composer's rest. It is a method for imposing time on your collaborators. A beat is always a shift. Sometimes the shift is external, sometimes it is internal, sometimes both.

4th Wall: the dramatic illusion that the actors onstage are part of a world that does not include the audience.

Direct Address: when the actor speaks directly to the audience, regardless of any wall.

Given circumstances: what is true for a character at any moment in the play. Circumstances are the sum of story, history, relationships, mood, consequence, and everything else. They contextualize every single beat of your play.

Exposition: information that anchors the audience in where we are, what's going on, who's involved, and why it matters.

Reversal: when we think one thing will happen, and then a different thing happens, and it surprises us.