THE BASICS OF PLAYWRITING

The guidelines for entering this competition are explained in the separate Young Playwrights Award Guidelines handout. These include deadline dates, the way to type and present your script, and how the plays will be judged. You should review that handout for that information, or have your teacher explain it to you.

This handout is intended to give you an overview of the basic principles of writing a play for the live theater. As it says in the guidelines, your play will be judged for originality, creativity and content, but judges will also be looking at form and structure, in other words, how well you have put your play together and how clearly you told the story in theater "language." So you should read this handout carefully, understand and learn these few simple "rules," and write your play following these basics as much as possible. By using the information given here, your play will be more interesting and appealing, giving it a better chance of placing high in the competition.

If you have questions about the information presented here, ask your teacher or email GIAHA at info@goldenislesarts.org.

This is NOT a movie!
Before we talk about how to write a play, this is the most important rule you should keep in mind. Most of us today have seen far more movies and TV shows than live theater. Therefore, you might try to present your story the way movies and TV shows are presented. But you must remember, the language and structure of film is much different in many ways from plays.

When you are working on your script, always keep in mind how it will look on stage and what is possible for live theater. Of course, you don’t want to limit your imagination, and there are many creative ways of presenting all sorts of stories on stage. But unless you know that your play will be produced on a huge Broadway stage with a big budget, you should keep it simple. Think of what you could produce live at your own school and not what you would see on screen.

• Never use terms like cut to, fade, dissolve, or close-up. These are terms used for movie scripts and do not apply to a live stage production.
  Example: in a movie you can do a close-up on one person so that the audience
  sees only one person and not the others in a scene. On stage, you cannot isolate only one character; the audience will always see everyone and everything on stage.
• Keep your settings simple. Don’t go from a scene in a kitchen to another in a mall to another at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Remember that film is mostly a visual medium, produced with multimillion dollar budgets that allow for many locations, special effects, etc. Of course, plays are meant to be seen as well as heard, but they are built mostly on dialogue (what the characters say). Think of a story that deals with people and their lives. That’s not to say you can’t let your imagination run wild and create a fantasy. Just don’t think of it in movie terms. Again, imagine what you would actually see on the stage of your own school or a local theater like the Ritz.
• Do not include events or scenes that would be impossible to create on stage.
  Example: You cannot have a building burn down or a truck crash on the stage. You cannot have a person holding a frog that magically transforms into a horse.
• Keep the number of characters down to as few as possible. Avoid big crowd scenes.

These are all very important first rules to keep in mind. Scripts that rely on the type of structure you see in movies or that use the movie terms mentioned above will be automatically disqualified from competition, no matter how original or interesting your story is.

Conflict
Good drama (and comedy, too) is based on conflict. This does not necessarily mean an argument or a war! To put it simply, conflict arises when someone wants something, and something or someone else stands in the way of getting it.

Examples:
• Kiersten wants to go to a party but her parents say she is too young.
• Devon saw aliens in a spaceship land out in the marshes and tries to warn the town, but no one will believe him.

Without conflict, nothing much happens on stage. Another way to say this is: with conflict the stakes are higher. If nothing is at stake, then there is no strong reason to watch the play (or write it for that matter!). When you get your idea for your play, you should be able to come up with a single sentence like those above that simply and clearly states the conflict. This is what your play is about. (The idea of conflict should become clearer as you read further in this handout.)

Character
Plays are about all sorts of things: ideas, history, events, funny things that happen. But at its most basic, a play is about people – how they behave, what they say, how they get what they want, how they come into conflict with each other or with events in their lives. Seeing people work out problems or make their way through sticky situations is what gives the play its interest. So think carefully about your characters: where they live, what they do in their daily lives, how they talk, who their friends and family are, what kind of people they are and most important (based on the idea of conflict) what they want. Once you have a clear picture of the characters in your head, you can begin to place them into worlds and situations and conflicts, and who they are will tell you how they will behave in any given circumstance.

Here is another important rule to keep in mind at this point: Show, don’t tell. In real life, what we know about each other comes mostly from what we say and do. You want to show who your characters are through their words and actions, rather than having someone on stage tell the audience (see more below under Exposition, Narration and Stage Directions).

Example: If you decide Kiersten is a defiant girl, then she might disobey her parents and go to the party anyway. If she is spoiled and bratty, she might whine and plead and annoy her parents until they give in. If she is sensible, she might think of a plan where she has the people who are throwing the party talk to her parents and assure them that the party will be strictly supervised. You should show her character traits this way, rather than having a narrator or another character tell the audience by saying, "Kiersten is defiant" or "Kiersten was always a sensible girl." Show Kiersten dealing with her parents on stage; don’t have someone tell us, "Kiersten was a spoiled brat who whined and annoyed her parents until they let her go."

Because conflict is the basis of drama, by following the show-don’t-tell rule, you will have characters who speak and act in relation to each other. This will give you more interesting and full characters who really come alive on stage.

There are all types of characters possible in a play and they can have all different functions, but here is one important consideration, some terms you may have heard before: protagonist and antagonist.

The protagonist is the main person in your play. This is the person who wants something, the person who will run into conflict getting it. Let’s use an example from a familiar story, The Wizard of Oz, to illustrate this:

Dorothy is a little girl from Kansas who finds herself in a strange land and only wants to get home. Dorothy is the protagonist of the story. (Many things happen in The Wizard of Oz, but at its most basic, it is a story about Dorothy trying to get home, and everything that happens relates to this in some way.)

What the protagonist wants may change throughout the course of the story:

At the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants to run away from home and find a land far away from Kansas. But once she gets there, she comes to realize that "there’s no place like home."

This is an interesting and creative way to shape your play. The protagonist does not always have to get what they want. Or the protagonist may find that what they wanted was not really the best thing after all. In this way, you show how the character or characters change, learn, grow through what happens to them. This is an important idea to keep in mind. A really interesting play, one that engages and entertains audiences, will introduce a protagonist, give him or her a goal (what they want), introduce obstacles (conflict) and then show how the protagonist changes after dealing with those obstacles. In other words, they will have something they didn’t have at the beginning: more knowledge, greater awareness, a new way of looking at things or doing things. And perhaps through the protagonist’s experiences and changes, your audience will also learn something new or come away from the play changed, even if only a little bit.

The antagonist is the opposing force in the conflict. It can be a character, event, or other kind of obstacle that stands in the way of the protagonist reaching the goal. There may be more than one antagonist in the story, or the antagonist can be something in the main character’s own personality.

The main obstacle to Dorothy may be the Wicked Witch (and Miss Gulch in the Kansas scenes). Along the way, there are also many small obstacles in her way (getting lost, being attacked by the trees, etc.). You can also say that The Wizard is the antagonist, because it is the Wizard who forces her to go kill the witch first, then turns out to be a fraud, and finally leaves Oz without her. But another answer might be that Dorothy’s ignorance of her own power is the antagonist (remember how the Good Witch tells her she had the power to return home all along but needed to learn how important it was?).

You can see from these examples that there are many possibilities for character. But again, the most important thing to keep in mind is that a good play will have well-drawn characters who are trying to get or do something and encountering obstacles (conflict) along the way.

Exposition, Narration and Stage Directions
These are all ways of adding information to your play that you may not be able to provide in dialogue. But they can be the trickiest parts of writing a play, and unless you have a lot of experience in playwriting or have a really good, creative idea how to handle them, you should avoid them (or in the case of stage directions, keep them very simple).

The main thing you want to keep in mind is not to use any of these three devices when you can tell the story better through characters and dialogue.

Exposition is basically the information you want the audience to have about what has happened either before the play begins or "offstage" where they can’t see it. This might include some way of telling them where the play is set, if the location is really important. Or it could be an action or event that sets the story in motion. But as it says above, the best thing to do is show rather than tell. So unless it’s absolutely necessary, don’t bother with exposition.

Using our Wizard of Oz example again, we learn early in the story that Dorothy is living with two elderly people she calls Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Where are Dorothy’s parents? What happened to them? How did she come to live with her aunt and uncle.
Who cares?! That information is not important to the story. The important thing is that this is her family and she wants to be with them. So exposition about Dorothy’s background is not needed.

If some exposition is really needed for the story, have it come naturally in the characters’ dialogue. The key word here is naturally. It may be possible for one character to tell another about something the first character knows but the second one doesn’t.

Example: Kiersten tells her parents that there is a party on Saturday night that she has been invited to. This is okay to do as long as the scene is about more than just telling her parents about the party. In other words, once she tells them, the parents could object, then Kiersten can make her case for why she should go to the party (such as "All my other friends are going and their parents don’t mind."). In other words, put into the scene some conflict or action that moves the story forward – make something happen! Don’t ever write a scene that’s just exposition.

But if two characters who have been through the same event are talking to each other, it would not be natural for them to say something like: "Remember when we went into that old house last night?" "Yes, and then we saw a ghost." You can still get the same information across in a more natural way: "I knew we should never have gone into that old dark house last night. I had bad dreams all night." "Me too! I’m sure that was a ghost we saw and it really scared me."

Narration is when a character (or a Narrator who is not a character in the play) speaks directly to the audience, telling them parts of the story. You may be familiar with plays that use narrators, such as Thornton Wilder’s famous play Our Town. But in cases like these, the Narrator has been woven into the form of the play and used in very specific ways, usually doing more than just relating parts of the story. For the purpose of your script, you should avoid using narration, especially narrators who constantly explain to the audience what is happening or where the characters are. It can be very awkward and uninteresting to have a narrator filling in large parts of the story. Remember the show-don’t-tell rule. A narrator only tells; it is far more interesting and creative to have the same information being played out by fully drawn characters who are showing their relationships and living the situations. To put it another way, a narrator is really a storyteller, much like having someone read to you. This is theater, not storytelling, so don’t include a narrator in your script who takes the place of real action on stage and who explains the characters’ actions and personalities.

Let’s talk about that word action. You may be more familiar with this word from hearing it used in the term action movie. In that case, it means big, exciting scenes of explosions, battles, car chases, and fight scenes. In the theater, action means something different. It can be physical action, such as a character running off stage or picking up a book or dancing or simply turning to stare out the window. But it also means anything a character does. Kiersten disobeying her parents and going to the party is an action. Devon telling people on the streets that aliens have landed is an action. So dialogue, too, is action, whenever it is something the characters do to get what they want or move the story forward.

Stage directions are the statements you put into a script to tell the director or actors what is happening on stage. Never use stage directions to give audiences information. Even though in a reading of your play, the stage directions may be spoken out loud, in a true live production of your play the audience will never hear that direction.

Examples:
• Proper use of stage directions:
Kiersten throws herself down on the bed, crying. Suddenly she sits up and grabs the phone and dials.
Kiersten: Hello, Tonya? My parents said I can’t go. But I’m going to tell them I’m spending the night at your house, and then we can sneak out and go to the party, okay? Great!
She hangs up the phone and smiles.
• Improper use of stage directions:
Kiersten throws herself down on the bed, crying. Then she decides to disobey her parents and sneak off to the party anyway. She is very defiant, and this makes her happy again.

You should not plan for scenes that require stage directions or a narrator to let the audience know where the scene is. If giving them that information is really important to the story, figure out a way to do it through dialogue and action.

Example: if the scene is at the top of the Eiffel Tower, you cannot just write into the stage directions (or have a narrator say) "They are now at the top of the Eiffel Tower." In a film script, this would be the way to let the director know where to shoot the scene, then the movie audience would see the characters on the Eiffel Tower on screen. In the theater, however, the audience will never hear this direction, and it would be very difficult to construct a set that tells them exactly where the scene is. If it’s really important to have the scene there, you can have a character say "Wow, you can see all of Paris from up here!" Or have that character be out of breath from a long climb up many stairs and say "I can’t believe I finally got to climb the Eiffel Tower!" Now the audience knows where the scene is.

Use stage directions as little as possible and only when absolutely necessary to tell the director and actors very specific physical actions you want them to take when they are performing.

Write Your Play!
So many rules…they make playwriting sound kind of hard, don’t they? Well, in a way it is; it requires a lot of time and thought and concentration and imagination. But it can also be great fun and very rewarding – you get to create a world and fill it with your own characters and do whatever you want with them! All of what you just read is not meant to restrict you; don’t think of them as rules but as tools that will help you create any kind of play you want that is clear and interesting to an audience.

In time, you’ll also be able to bend and break these "rules," and that can lead to some very exciting and inspiring theater. But that takes a lot of practice in writing for the stage, and before you can bend or break the rules, you need to know how to use them to your best advantage. So for the purpose of the Young Playwrights Competition, you should stick to these basics as closely as possible.

Good luck. We look forward to seeing your work.