Play Around

Some months ago I talked about play writing. Time for a revisit:

You don’t have to be a playwright to write plays. You don’t have to be a novelist to write stories either. You can just write for the fun of it. Play writing is like any other kind of story telling except that almost all of the story is told through dialogue. The first play I ever wrote was in junior High School. My friend and I co-wrote a play call “Revenge of the Ant-men”. It was just as good as you might expect could be produced from a couple of eighth-graders goofing off in an Art class (sorry Mrs. McKinley, wherever you are. I have no idea what it was we were supposed to be doing.) But we had a great time writing it, and laughed ourselves silly as we read it back to ourselves.

You can write a play for fun, just like you can write a short story for fun. You might not ever see your play on Broadway, but you may get a chance to see it performed by a local community theater group. I encourage this. A play isn’t really finished until it is performed. It is kind of like a musical composition. It is nice to see it on the page and all, but you want to hear what it sounds like outside of your own head.

As writing plays is all about writing dialogue, you have to be pretty good at dialogue. The best way to get good at dialogue is to listen to how people speak. Practice the art of listening rather than talking so much. Also reading a lot helps especially if you read writers that are good at dialogue. Of course, like everything else, there can be differences in opinion as to which writers write good dialogue, but if you are looking for examples, you could do worse than to read Elmore Leonard, John Steinbeck, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or Ernest Hemmingway. Yes these are not playwrights, but they know how to capture the rhythm of human speech. I don’t recommend looking to movies or TV shows for examples. There are some good ones, but you hear way too many speeches that are constrained by what the studio wants to say or the sponsors want to hear. 

Writing plays is about writing characters, not unlike writing any other kind of story. But it is even more important in a play to have well defined characters, each with their own personality traits. Each actor is going to try to figure out what his/her character wants in each scene. This is something the writer needs to know. If you just throw a character in to balance the stage or make an even number, it is just a wasted character. Have fun. Characters that are fun to write, tend to be characters that are fun to watch on stage.

One thing you have to know going in is that theater is a collaborative art form. Unlike other art forms, your play is not necessarily going to come out like it was when it was in your head. Your vision is going to be filtered through the interpretive lens of a director. Each of your characters is going to be interpreted by actors. It could look very different from what you had planned and this is okay! This is how it should be. New interpretations can add things to the story that you never thought of. If you can’t handle this fact, then play writing is not for you.

So write for fun. Build characters. Tell stories. When you are done have your friends read it out loud. If you are feeling ambitious, send it to your local theater company. You might even produce something better than “Revenge of the Ant-men”.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner