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Discovering the Playwright in You
By Evan Guilford-Blake
I've written seriously since childhood, but I was past 40
before I discovered I was a playwright. Not that the form was
new to me: I'd been in theatre since I was 10 and read more
plays than I can count, and seen more than I'd read. But I
never thought I could tell a story strictly through dialogue,
which is the biggest difference between writing prose and drama:
You have to make things happen through the characters' words.
The maxim for playwrights is "show, don't tell." You've got
anywhere from 10 minutes (a very popular form these days) to
two hours to make your audience understand and feel everything
you want to show them; thus, every moment needs to be chosen
with care. You don't have the luxury of long descriptive
passages; if a character in a play needs to wax poetic about
the sunset, s/he has to have a pretty good reason.
Exposition, the prose writer's friend, is the dramatist's worst
enemy. You may need a character's detailed backstory but usually,
the audience doesn't. Instead, start your story in the middle.
Effective plays grab their audience in the first few minutes.
How? By creating questions that pique the audience's curiosity,
by forcing the viewers to pay attention in order to figure out
just what the heck is going on.
The trick is called "subtext," and that's the playwright's best
tool. In fiction, characters usually say just what they mean or,
at least, you as the author provide the context where the reader
can figure it out relatively quickly. In a play, a lot of
dialogue is often "code" for something else. The example I give
in my playwriting class is, "If I say to you, right now, 'I want
a slice of pizza,' you'll think what I mean is: I want a slice
of pizza. If I say it on stage it could mean a hundred different
things, but the one thing it probably won't signify is: I want a
slice of pizza."
Why? Because in life, we have conversation. In plays, characters
have dialogues. The difference is that, while conversation is the
staff of everyday communication, dialogues are those selected
moments in which there is heightened tension, or conflict, or
intense desire -- drama (or comedy; they're water from the same
well). Characters in plays -- just like people in life -- have
objectives, and the pursuit of those objectives is both the story
and the action of the play; each scene must, in some way, show a
part of that pursuit through its dialogue.
A good basic exercise in sifting dialogue from conversation is
eavesdropping: Go to a restaurant or a park or a laundromat and
discretely record, on tape or in a notebook, a five-minute
conversation between two people. Then go home and turn it into
dialogue, by deciding:
• Who these people are
• What they were really talking about
• What they wanted from each other
• How what they said was intended to prompt each other to act
in the desired manner
• How they resolved their conflict
In the process, you'll end up changing the conversation into
dialogue, and creating characters who are much more than the
two strangers whose words you heard. When you're done, you
will have written a mini play. A few times through the
process and you'll begin to understand the technique and be
ready to start exploring your own imagination for characters
and conflicts.
Sure, there's a lot more to it -- you need to attend the theatre
(writing a stageplay involves very different skills than writing
a screen- or teleplay; seeing them will help you understand why),
read plays, talk to people, get involved in workshops. But, as
with everything else, getting started is the key, and, just like
your body, the more you exercise your playwriting muscles the
better shape you'll be in.
Here are links to organizations that can help you explore
playwriting:
Working Title Playwrights, Atlanta -
http://www.workingtitleplaywrights.com/
Chicago Dramatists -
http://www.chicagodramatists.org/home/index.html
Playwrights Platform, Boston -
http://www.playwrightsplatform.org/
Gary Garrison (a leading playwright, teacher and resource
center) - http://www.garygarrison.com/etc.htm
The Playwrights' Center, Minneapolis -
http://www.pwcenter.org/
Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights -
http://www.laplaywrights.org/
Austin (TX) Script Works -
http://www.scriptworks.org/index.php
---
Evan Guilford-Blake is the managing director of Working Title
Playwrights, the Southeast's leading play-development
organization. He has had 27 plays produced, and The Firebird
will be published this year by Playscripts, Inc.
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