Experienced prose writer but new to Playwriting

I'm new at it too...exir. i just had my first play performed...a very short 10-minute play. afterwords, I was invited to submit a full-length...during the past month I had to cram a lot in order to figure out how to actually write a play. i had a little under a month to write a 45 minute play...and i never really wrote one before. it was a bit crazy. There are some great links here at AW...I will chase them down for you in a minute.


As far as getting the thoughts and emotions of the characters into the script...I can tell you from watching the one I just had performed that the actors are pretty terrific at figuring that out. There is, though, stage direction and character direction. you can sometimes get stuff you need into the character direction. i just wrote my dialogue and hoped that the emotions came through in the words. slight character directions while the characters went through their dialogue spoke volumes too. other than that, i can't really help you. let me go get those links...

I found this one really helpful:

playwright link.

Exir said:

Haha, that's the kind of thing I'm not familiar about. What is the exact difference between stage directions and character directions? From what I've read it seems "Exir walks to the side of the stage, then sits" would be a stage direction, because it changes the position of character(s) on stage, while "KTC winces in horror" would be a character direction. Am I right?

ETA: Thanks a million KTC!

Click to expand...

(remember that i just started playwriting on march 13th...so hopefully somebody more experienced will help you out here too.)

I liked this link the most from the link i provided above:

http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/howtoformatastageplay

it describes character direction and stage direction.

Character direction would be placed under the character's name

TOM
(Shakes head.)

something like that. it is directly related to TOM.

just go to the link and it has examples and explains it better than I can...

I hope this helps. (-;

A few hints

Your original question dealt mostly with how to handle action and how to avoid "directing" the play.

Just a couple of thoughts ...

Playwrights have much more power and freedom than screenwriters.

You can include a lot of your thoughts about action (when and how the characters move, laugh, etc.).

Do not abuse your freedom. People tend to overdescribe by reporting way too many actions and emotional responses. But you should include some of these, the ones that you think are important.

As for the formatting ... it is not an easy question to answer, because no one way, no standard, exists. Nonetheless, manuscripts do have a similar appearance (with some variations).

The biggest variation is in the handling of action. In a previous era, the closest thing to a standard was probably the little Mollie Ann Meserve manual called "Professional Playscript Format Guidelines & Sample," which is sold by Samuel French and is apparently the basis for the so-called "Samuel French style sheet."

Meserve handled action and parentheticals the same way except that action had a blank line before it and after it. Both were indented a bit from the left margin where dialogue began. In stage plays, dialogue runs from left page margin to right page margin, unlike the situation in screenplays, where dialogue is a narrow paragraph.

The Dramatists Guild (DG) last year put out a style sheet for stage plays which is a little different from the Meserve method in regard to the format of action. The DG indents the action block all the way past the middle of the page (a few spaces past the character name). It also eliminated the parentheses around action. Parentheticals remained the same as always.

Unfortunately, no style sheet adequately addresses all the issues that come up in writing a play. Somehow every one of them ignores something or makes a statement that is clearly at odds with another authority.

An example of this is the issue of how to handle scene numbering and page numbering. Some style sheets say to restart page numbering with each act (I think that is stupid, and most authorities contradict that rule or leave it unaddressed as if common sense would dictate that you number consecutively from beginning to end of the whole work). Similarly, some authorities say to restart scene numbering with each act, but others say to number the scenes consecutively from beginning to end of the work, so that the first scene in ACT II might be Scene 3.

I have taken what I regard the best from the various recommendations and adjusted a thing or two to make up my own style sheet. It is very close to the DG template, but I recommend Courier instead of Times Roman (which looks crappy in FinalDraft, because the letter spacing gets messed up), and I take advantage of FD's capabilities to create a "Technical" paragraph type to use for LIGHTING and SOUND, with right-margin justification. (You can use plain old action for these if you want.)

Stage plays also may have "preliminary" pages that include a character list, a list of scenes, and other things. For these matters, I suggest following the format recommended in the VCU playwriting seminars. There is no hard and fast rule about the preliminary pages, either, but the Toscan recommendations in the VCU seminars are very good.

When I write plays I write the general large movements/blocking of the scene (sits, gets up, interacts physically with another character) but leave the little things (nodding, shrugging) for the actors to do for themselves. Obviously, if I think a nod or shake of the head is important, I'll write it in, but overall those little bits of business aren't essential to my piece.

I generally dislike notes about HOW something is said, or WHY something is said. If your dialog isn't strong enough to have it's own subtext, than telling me the subtext won't make the piece suddenly work. Your dialog shouldn't need those hints, and reading a play with too many (he says angrily) or (he says this hoping to get her mad) is annoying at best.

The only exception would be where there would be confusion if there wasn't a note. Like, a character says something and it NEEDS to be said sarcastically, or it won't make sense, and it's not obvious given the context if it's sarcastic.

***

I would say it's fine to describe what general lighting/scene effects you want, just don't get too detailed. Say what you want things to look and sound like, but don't say how the job should be done.

"The thunder that was in the distance rumbles again, but this time it seems closer"

is fine

"the thunder rumbles again, but this time, instead of being wired through the speakers throughout the house, it's amplified heavily at the front of stage, making it seem closer"

is doing someone else's job.

I had a short play that took place inside the human body, and i described what the body environment was (rushing water sounds/when it got light or dark, etc) but never said EXACTLY what the stage needed to look like. Give the crew inspiration, not direction.