The Playwright's Guidebook: An Insightful Primer on the Art of Dramatic Writing

By Stuart Spencer

A Crucible for Creativity: Unleashing the Playwright Within

This engaging and concise handbook is a beacon for both budding and seasoned playwrights alike, illuminating the path to creating compelling, well-structured plays. The Playwright’s Guidebook is more than just theoretical musing; it encapsulates practical advice based on the experience of a seasoned playwright, making it the ideal companion for those embarking on the thrilling odyssey of playwriting.

From crucial aspects like act structure, character development, and plot construction to the art of creating conflict and building drama, every nuance of playwriting is laid bare, empowering writers to unleash their own unique storytelling prowess.

The guidebook shines light on the lesser-explored aspects of playwriting like handling exposition, tackling writer's block, and understanding cover letters and literary agents. Offering insightful writing exercises and guidelines, it facilitates an invigorating exploration into the creative process. It doesn't stop at simply instructing how to write; it also troubleshoots recurrent problems, preparing playwrights to face and overcome the challenges they might encounter along the way.

Tap into the reservoir of creativity within you, pick up the tools of the playwright's trade, and weave dramatic narratives with The Playwright's Guidebook as your indispensable mentor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 29, 2002
• ISBN: 9781429934213

Stuart Spencer

Stuart Spencer's play Resident Alien has been produced around the country and been optioned for film. He teaches playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: HOW WE TELL STORIES

BEFORE WE discuss playwriting, let’s talk a little about theater, what it is, and perhaps more to the point, what it does.

At this moment in history, we can divide storytelling into three basic forms: prose, theater, and film. (Let’s agree to leave poetry out of this discussion, as most of it these days is not narrative.) By prose, we’ll say that we mean novels, short stories, and even some of the new computer hypertexts. By theater, we’ll agree to mean anything performed by live humans that incorporates language in front of a live audience. And by film, we’ll mean not just movies but television, videos, and DVDs—all of which are mechanically or electronically reproduced.

To better visualize these three means of narrating a story, we can begin by laying them out on a spectrum.

Each of these forms serves a particular purpose and affects us in ways the others do not. Each is particularly well suited to a form of expression to which the others are less well suited.

Bear in mind that the following discussion does not imply, for example, that film is only suited to eliciting visceral responses or that prose is only suited to analysis. These are generalizations meant simply to suggest that certain media have an inclination toward certain means of expression and will provoke certain reactions in an audience more easily than might another medium.

With that caveat, let’s start with film.

Touch a hot stove and the hand instantly recoils from the heat. One doesn’t think about it, consider the options, and then decide to move the hand. In fact, the hand has moved before one even knows how or why. Our brains are structured in such a way that we have an immediate visceral response to information received through the senses.

If we hear the loud, piercing shriek of a siren, we clap our hands over our ears. If we smell delicious food, the mouth waters and the appetite swells. If we see someone to whom we are sexually attracted, certain physiological activities begin to stir in us, not because we have decided to stir them, but because we are human and this is how humans react. Indeed, we react this way whether we like it or not. That person to whom we are sexually attracted may be forbidden to us in some way, yet the attraction continues and may in fact increase, in spite of our attempts to repress it.

Which brings us to film.

Film operates on us in this same visceral fashion. When we sit in the darkened movie theater or in front of the television at home, we are receiving images in the same way we receive them in life: through the senses. But there is one crucial difference. Film images are even more intense than those in reality because they have been selected and deliberately distilled into a purer form in order to achieve greater impact.

In Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), the classic (quintessential, even) surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali from the 1920S, there is a famous sequence in which a woman stands on a balcony, looking out at the moon. The scene at first suggests a conventionally romantic mood, which changes abruptly when a man appears on the balcony behind her, produces a long, straight razor, and pulls her head back by the hair. In extreme close-up, we watch as one of her eyes—wide open, though strangely emotionless—is sliced by the razor blade.

Certainly this is one of the most startling images in the annals of cinema. Its impact on audiences has not lessened in the seventy years since its creation. I have only seen the film once, in a college class many years ago, yet I can recall the image with absolute clarity. The memory of it retains the power to make me cringe.

Part of the potency of this image is its irrationality. We don’t expect such a violent act in this romantic setting. The violence is not accompanied by any of the usual sexual overtones, nor is the act intended to take the life of the woman. We presume that she will go on living after this event, though certainly blind in one eye. We cannot predict the violence nor do we know what exactly to make of it after the fact. It simply is.

But while the image’s force comes, at least in part, from its inexplicability, we also have to acknowledge that its impact is heightened by the medium through which it is presented. There is something in the camera’s ability to select both this single image (the eyeball) and the moment of its violation that cannot be equaled on either the stage or the page.

For the sake of this discussion we are talking about pure film, without dialogue. We can allow music, because music operates on us just as directly, as viscerally, as images do. But dialogue in film diminishes the visceral effect. As we hear over and over again from media critics and Hollywood story editors, it is the image that makes films powerful. High-minded literary critics may not like this idea, and in fact they often criticize filmmakers for writing poor or inane dialogue and for relying solely on visuals to give their films impact. But this is like criticizing water for being wet. Take away the visuals, and the audience is left with nothing but talking heads. Even if those heads speak descriptive language in addition to dialogue, one often has the feeling that one may as well be reading a book.

Which brings us to prose.

When we read a line of prose—the one you are reading at the moment, for example—the brain is required to go through certain analytical processes that are not required of it when watching a film. We are no longer conscious of these processes, at least not if we read well and often.

But if we think back to childhood when we first learned to read (or perhaps when we’ve tried to learn a second language), it becomes obvious that the act of reading in itself requires effort and analysis, regardless of the content. It requires that the reader go through a middle step, between the experience of the word on a page and the moment of understanding. This isn’t necessary when we watch a film. It’s true that we may want to reflect upon the meanings of the images in a film in order to absorb their full significance. But the act of watching or listening is a passive one, as compared to the active process of reading. It is this inherently active process that compromises the immediacy of the experience of reading prose.

What literature may lose in immediacy, however, it makes up for in its ability to plumb the depths of an experience. Prose can get to the inner workings of a person’s mind. It can analyze a gesture, expound upon it, and reveal it from an endless number of points of view. The camera is unable to articulate its point of view beyond the presentation of the image itself.

A writer of prose, though, might take the same scene in Un Chien Andalou and turn it into a verbal study of the man’s motives or of the woman’s feelings of romance as they turn suddenly to horror and pain. A writer might even choose to describe in detail the surrounding scene—the balcony, the night air, the moon—which might, in turn, impart new meaning to the entire setting, as in this passage from The Great Gatsby:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the couch on which Daisy Buchanan sits, he manages, in so doing, to describe Daisy herself. In this way, we may well lose the immediacy of a Jean Renoir film, but we gain the insight of a great novelist. Is one better than the other? Only as a matter of taste. In reality, they are merely different forms of expression, both equally good. One is better than the other only insofar as the artist is able to exploit the medium of his choice.

Literature is full of examples of this peculiar power of prose. Marcel Proust is perhaps the quintessential model for a prose writer’s ability to excavate the meaning of even the simplest gesture. Indeed, in prose it is often the throwaway look, the tiniest gesture, the passing phrase that is amplified into something of profound importance. Here, in a passage from Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator observes a man performing the perfectly ordinary act of winking as he escorts a lady companion from church one Sunday morning:

He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but striving to compensate for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the borderline of roguery; he subtilized the refinement of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chatelaine, an enamored pupil in a countenance of ice.

Proust has taken this fleeting, seemingly simple gesture and interpreted it for us in a way that could never be done in film. We might get the wink in close-up, or in slow motion, or we might see it repeated several times. But we would never achieve the same depth of analysis, the same luxuriant ability to contemplate and analyze this momentary flick of the eyelid. Prose has the unparalleled potential to reveal alternative meanings. In prose, we can lift the veils off level after level of meaning. We can present different points of view, one after another, as William Faulkner showed us in The Sound and the Fury, or Virginia Woolf in The Waves.

Before we go on, remember that this is not a set of definitive rules, merely some observations that describe certain propensities. All other things being equal, a film will tend to elicit visceral responses, prose analytical ones.

So how does this bring us to theater? How does theater fit into this spectrum of visceral versus analytical? To which is theater best suited?

Both. And then some.

Obviously, there’s a strong visual dimension to theater: we call it spectacle. Spectacle has always been considered suspect by serious theatergoers: a necessary evil by some, and a lovely but shallow diversion by others. The ancient Greeks deliberately kept sensationalistic spectacle offstage so that the audience would be forced to concentrate on what they considered the essential drama. Sophocles shows us not the moment when Oedipus blinds himself, but the moment when he realizes that he must blind himself in order to keep his oath and his honor. Euripides doesn’t show us Medea as she murders her children, but the moment when that terrible deed becomes inevitable.

The Greeks understood that onstage sensationalism could never compete with the brutal and common viscera of life, and so they concentrated on something that is all too rare in the everyday world but to which the theater is well suited: moments of penetrating and profound understanding.

Still, the elements of stagecraft—sound, lighting, costume, not to mention the actors’ bodies themselves—all contribute to an immediate, visceral effect on the audience, whether high-minded purists like it or not. Aristotle himself accepts the necessity of spectacle, so long as it is kept within certain limits and insofar as it is part of the organic whole. In other words: spectacle, yes; empty sensational thrills, no.

I think Aristotle gets the balance just right. When we watch Olivier as Othello (preserved in a film version) fall backward off a ten-foot platform, collapsing into an epileptic fit, this is spectacle extravagantly imagined but tightly integrated into the needs of the play. When we watch Mama Rose’s dancers in Gypsy metamorphose from small children into adult teenagers before our eyes in the flickering of a strobe light, this too is spectacle, but again justified by the demands of the plot. When we watch the set of Medea collapse around Diana Rigg, the spectacle is warranted because it serves as a metaphor for Medea’s shattered emotional state. It supports, and is supported by, the meaning of the text.

Yet even so, the theater cannot select and distill images as the camera can. A stage director can focus our attention in one area of the stage or another, but it will always be a clumsy effort compared to the work of a camera, whose focus is absolute. If Buñuel wants us to see only the act of mutilating an eye, he shows us that and only that. We’re as close as he wants us to be. We look either at the image he provides, or we don’t watch. There is no in-between. A stage director, composing the same scene onstage, would have a tough time getting us to focus with the same intensity on that eye. Especially from the balcony. And even if he could, would we have the same reaction to its violation by the razor? We’re simply too far away, and there are too many other things to look at.

The theater is a medium based as much on words as on deeds. In this sense, it is more like prose. The story unfolds onstage through the use of words. Characters speak to one another, as they do in prose, though onstage the words that the characters speak are the only words. We have no narrator except in particular instances when the effect is either ironic, as in Our Town, or merely clumsy, as in many high-school pageants.

In the theater, we have no controlling narrative voice. What we do have is a variety of points of view. In fact, we have as many as there are characters onstage. This is a feature that prose only developed in the twentieth century with authors like Faulkner and Woolf, who were noted for being daring innovators.

But the shifting point of view is a central and eternal truth of the theater. Plays would not be plays if the point of view was not diffuse. What’s more, the theatrical point of view does not shift clumsily around as it does in prose. We do not have to start a new chapter, or call attention to the new viewpoint by developing a new section. Instead, the shifting point of view in a play is a built-in reality. We accept it as readily as we accept that books are printed on paper or that films are shown on screens. When one character stops talking and the other starts, we’ve made the shift effortlessly, without even thinking about it.

But the question remains: What does theater do best?

The theater, at its most effective, is a mingling of the attributes of both film and prose. Or to be historically accurate, film and prose are splinters torn from the original tree of theater. Let’s remember that theater preceded both those other forms. In Homer there are references to the singing and dancing of the Dionysian ritual, the predecessor of Greek drama. Even in Homer’s time, those rituals were ancient, and they incorporated both spectacle and language. They were, for all intents and purposes, theater.

Since then, we’ve carved up that great tree of theater and distributed its potency to other forms for our own peculiar reasons—economic, technological, sociological, and so on. No one is complaining. Literature and cinema have their own important places in the culture.

The fact remains that it is theater as an art form that is the most vigorous way of telling a story. How could it be otherwise? It is the theater that combines all the best parts of those other media we also enjoy.

In Euripides’ Bacchae, we are shocked not only by the spectacle of a mother, blinded by primal bacchic lusts, parading her murdered son’s head on a pike; we are also horrified when, seeing what she has done by her own hand, she articulates, through language, her sense of horror.

We respond not only to Macbeth’s tormented soliloquies on the nature of his crime but also to the moody, night-shrouded setting of the play.

It is not just Nora’s words that stab us with their continued timeliness and painful truths, it’s also the sound of that slamming door. It is Hedda Gabler’s cries of defiance against a world that would confine her that engage our minds, but it is the sight of her burning Eilert’s manuscript that fully reveals her character.

Chekhov’s beautiful words artfully portray his characters in their struggle against stasis, yet what would The Cherry Orchard be without that distant, mysterious, ambiguous sound of a breaking string that he describes in the stage directions? And it’s not just Tom’s lovely words telling us of his anguish over his lost family in The Glass Menagerie but the sound of a violin in the wings that move us. Stage designers—sound, lights, set, costumes—are not adjuncts to our experience. When the play is worthy, and when these elements serve the text, they are fully equal

Reviews for The Playwright's Guidebook

[devil_llama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very solid, well-written text to help the beginning playwright - or even the playwright who just wants to hone their craft a bit. Overall, it's easy to read, the exercises are helpful, and he doesn't bog you down in thousands of rules that you "have" to follow if you want to be a playwright. Instead, he gives you tools you can use as you need, and recommends you figure out which ones work for you. Anyone who is aspiring to write a play, or who just wants to know how it's done, could find a lot of good in this work.

[quantum_flapdoodle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very solid, well-written text to help the beginning playwright - or even the playwright who just wants to hone their craft a bit. Overall, it's easy to read, the exercises are helpful, and he doesn't bog you down in thousands of rules that you "have" to follow if you want to be a playwright. Instead, he gives you tools you can use as you need, and recommends you figure out which ones work for you. Anyone who is aspiring to write a play, or who just wants to know how it's done, could find a lot of good in this work.