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THE PROCESS OF PLAYWRITING
from Playwriting: The Structure of Action by Sam Smiley
Each writer must devise his/her own system of developing a work from germinal idea to completed manuscript. The followings are what can be your first six steps to writing a play:
1. Rising Creative compulsion: A play usually begins not with an idea but with a feeling. The first step, then, in the process of writing a play is the inner readiness of the playwright, a rising creative compulsion.
2. Germinal idea: A good germinal idea strongly commands the conscious interest of the writer. It must be one that s/he can live with daily for months or years. The germinal idea should be capable of making life excitement. That is, it should contain the potential for a work that intensifies his/her life, the lives of the characters eventually included, and the lives of the audience members it ultimately contacts.
3. Collection: This is the development of the germinal idea. The collection refers to rough notes of all sorts. A typical collection includes such items as: a cast of potential characters with qualifying traits, a description of place and time, a brief sketch of relationships, a mass of miscellaneous notes, and a statement about the organizational form of the play.
4. Rough Scenario: The fourth step in the process of writing a play is the composition of a rough scenario:
ROUGH SCENARIO
The rough scenario is more than a collection of potentially useful notes. Whereas the collection consists of a mass of quickly written bits, the rough scenario is the first stage in the organization of the materials. With the collection, a playwright concentrates on materials, and in the rough scenario s/he struggles with form. The rough scenario should not and cannot be so well shaped as the final scenario, but it ought to contain most of the materials, at least in miniature. It should include sections treating all the qualitative parts of drama. The materials – ideas, incidents, characters – normally retain their sketchy appearance, but with this step a dramatist arranges them in a viable format. The following contains the minimal elements of a rough scenario:
1. Working Title
2. Action: A statement describing what activity the characters as a group are engaged in and an explanation of who changes and how they change.
3. Form: An identification of the comprehension organization of the play – tragedy, comedy, melodrama – and how the play’s action relates to the appropriate emotional qualities.
4. Circumstances: Time and place of the action, plus other given circumstances of importance.
5. Subject: A definition of informational area.
6. Characters: A list of impressionistic descriptions; central characters identified; relationships noted.
7. Conflict: An explanation of what people or forces are fighting, an identification of obstacles to the major characters, or a description of the disruptive factors in the situation; the basis of tension explained.
8. Story: At least a sequential list of the incidents, but better a detailed outline of the entire story; also notes about how the play begins and ends.
9. Thought: A discussion of meaning, a description of point of view, a list of key thoughts for the whole play, and perhaps for each major character.
10. Dialogue: A statement about the style of the dialogue and the manner of its composition.
11. Schedule: A time plan for the writing and completion of the play.
Such a rough scenario is nearly impossible to compose and retain mentally. If not written, it probably will never exist. It permits the writer to physicalize the materials of his/her play, and it clears the writer’s mind for further creative work.
5. The Scenario, the full and formal treatment of the play is the fifth stage of the compositional process.
SCENARIO
The scenario’s formulation is an insurmountable task without the previous steps, and it is crucial to the writing of the dialogue. Again, no writer should expect to construct an adequate scenario without putting it on paper. The scenario need not restate everything mentioned in the rough scenario. It should, however, contain at least the following essentials.
1. Title: The title, if possible, should no longer be a working reference but a final one.
2. Circumstances: A prose statement of time and place, as these are to appear in the script. The statement of time and place should be refined from the rough scenario, probably shorter, and certainly more well-written.
3. Characters: Descriptions of every major and minor characters in as much detail as appropriate. The character studies in the scenario should be extensions of those in the rough scenario; they should be fuller, and the major characters should include many traits. Possibly other minor characters may be added during the drafting, but such extras will probably harm the compactness of the whole.
4. Narrative: A prose narration of the play from beginning to end, concentrating on plot and story, brief yet admitting all necessities. The prose narration comes from the story and conflict segments of the rough scenario. It should consist of one paragraph for every French scene in the play. A French scene is a portion of dialogue demarked by the entrance of exit of a major character. To compose this scene-by-scene narrative, a playwright first makes a rough list of scenes, and then s/he writes a brief explanation of each. The final narrative results from extended preliminary work, and it depends upon the care with which the playwright wrote the story treatment in the rough scenario.
5. Working Outline: A detailed outline of the play, beat-by-beat. The beat-by-beat outline should be extremely long and full of particulars. A beat of dialogue is similar to a paragraph of prose. This outline of beats is the most important portion of the scenario. It requires the major structural work in the composition of the play. Its significance even surpasses that of the germinal idea and the writing of the dialogue. The playwright must apply to it all the creativity that s/he can. The more detail s/he packs into the scenario – on paper – the more chance the play will have of being good.
The 10-Minute or One-Act Play
6. The sixth element in the process of playwriting is the drafting of a ten-minute or one-act play. Drafting as a segment of the writing process contains at least three particular steps: first draft, revision, and final draft. The writer should recognize the possibility of all three, but s/he should compose the first and each succeeding draft as though it were his/her last.