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How to Write a Play: Some Tips

By Glen C. Strathy

If you want to write a play, Dramatica theory can help you overcome one of the most common problems new playwrights face.

I was speaking recently with Charles Robertson, a playwright and artistic director of Bottletree Productions in Kingston, Ontario. Every year, Bottletree holds a playwriting competition, which Charles and his associates judge. (You can find out how to enter this writing contest by clicking here.) The contest is open only to plays that have not been produced professionally (that is, with actors hired under an Actor's Equity union contract). Many of the contestants are therefore young writers or people who are just learning how to write a play.



Charles told me that the biggest problem he sees with new playscripts is the lack of a cohesive plot � or indeed any semblance of a plot at all.

In case you're wondering how a person can write a play of 50-100 pages without the benefit of a plot, let's remember that plays are primarily composed of dialogue. Many people it seems can easily write page after page of people talking. But when it comes to a plot with a proper beginning, middle, and resolution, they are stymied.

Our conversation reminded me of a study conducted nearly two decades ago by Larry O'Farrell, one of my former drama education professors. Larry had sent out a survey to a large number of professional Canadian playwrights, asking them what procedure they generally use to write a play. (Teaching playwriting was part of the high school drama curriculum in Ontario at the time.)

What he learned was that roughly 20% of playwrights begin by inventing a cast of characters. They then experiment with putting those characters into situations and envisioning how they would interact with each other at different points in their lives. Eventually, they find a plot emerges out of these interactions. This strikes me as similar to the Pantster approach of novel writing (with perhaps a little more planning).

However, Larry discovered that 80% of professional playwrights will create an outline before they write a play. Some outlines may be only a paragraph long. Others may be ten pages or more. But the point is that the majority of successful playwrights find that creating some sort of plot outline is an essential first step.

As someone with a fondness for structure, this makes perfect sense to me. It's much easier to write a scene � whether for a novel or a script � if you know how it will fit into your overall story arc. Without an outline, there is a danger your dialogue could head off into totally unproductive directions. (Yes, sometimes meandering can lead to valuable discoveries, but it can also take you into a lot of dead ends.)

Of course, there are always exceptions. George Bernard Shaw, for example, claimed he never knew how one of his plays would end in advance. If you read his works, you'll see he kept his plots together by structuring them like debates � with arguments and counterarguments evolving in a dialectical process until they reach a conclusion. Watching a Shaw play, is like watching Shaw's process of deciding what he thinks about a topic.

For most of us, it is better to decide what we want to say before we start to say it. If you want to write a play, I suggest you start with the article, Create a Plot Outline in 8 Easy Steps. It will help you write a one-paragraph plot outline which you then expand. It's the simplest and one of the most useful ways to apply Dramatica theory.

For that matter, most of the articles on the How to Write a Novel page can also be used to develop an outline for a play.

A few other things you should keep in mind:

Even if your play is mostly dialogue, every bit of that dialogue should advance the drama. A good play will have a plot that revolves around a Story Goal. Every scene or beat should be an integral part of the whole. Sometimes, the goal will be directly stated, as when Shakespeare's Macbeth is first told by the witches that he is destined to become King. In other plays, the story goal and the aims of the individual characters are subtextual; that is, they are never stated openly but they are the motivation behind the characters' actions and words.

While many contemporary plays consist mainly of dialogue, action can be just as important. Maybe your local theatre company can't afford to stage an epic battle scene, complete with horses and cannons, but that never stopped Shakespeare. He knew how to use small skirmishes to represent the entire event.

For instance, let's say you want write a play with a car chase. Try having one car (or maybe just two chairs that represent a car) with some sound effects. Let the characters' reactions to things they can see, but the audience can't, convey the reality of the story.



Along the same lines, remember that most theatres don't have the budget of a Hollywood movie. The less it costs to produce your play, the more likely a theatre will produce it. Try to use as few locations as possible to save on sets. If you want a realistic set, consider having your entire play take place in one location. If you must have multiple settings, consider using a minimal amount of scenery (ala Our Town) or a set that can easily transform into different locations. Remember that lighting effects can sometimes substitute for scenery. (Shakespeare, for example, had no scenery to work with but was able to convey his settings using dialogue alone.)





















Answer by Charles Robertson:

Scene Changes

One Act Plays have a basic set of rules and a basic structure that have to be followed that have nothing to do with the writing. Great writing can be torpedoed in a one act play by a flaw in play construction. While a set might be held together by tacs and twine, a script needs solid construction. In this article we will look at scene changes.

One Act Plays are different than multi-act plays because they are uninterrupted by intermission. They flow from the beginning to the end in sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 15, and sometimes much longer, stretching to an hour or an hour and a half. The uninterrupted time flow is an important consideration when writing your one act. It is easy to take an audience out of a play with scene changes and especially with scene changes that are not integrated into the action on stage.


For example, if a dramatic scene occurs and the audience is waiting with baited breath to see what will happen next and then suddenly, a backstage crew in blacks interrupts by marching onstage and dragging set pieces around, it naturally takes the audience out of the play. Incorporating any scene changes with actors or backstage crew dressed in costume keeps the audience in the play, particularly if the actors changing the set are in character, if they appear to be part of the play. It is better though to have no scene changes, to have one set.

If your play requires scene changes, think of what is going on in the scene changes, how these changes are to be achieved. Many new playwrights write as if their one act is actually a television episode where the set is magically changed during commercial timeouts. The less thought given to the logistics of your scene changes, the less saleable your play.


What would be ideal from my experience is to have one set representing a specific place or one set representing many different places with a minimum of changes to suggest a different time and place. In Shakespeare's time, they had one set for all the action with the actor's words effectively changing the set.The words in a play do more to convey location than any clunky set changes can.

If you are writing a one-act play, you have to think that it will likely be placed in an evening of other one act plays and if that is the case (ie festivals and showcases) the less stuff to lug in and out of the theatre so the next play can be loaded in the better. There will also be time constraints for getting your set on and off stage. In many competitions, if you can't set up in ten minutes and take down in five, your play will be disqualified.

Miss Julie; by Scandanavian playwright August Strindberg, which is a long one act, has a very effective scene change to suggest time passing and to rough up the set. Local people come onto the stage forcing Miss Julie and her valet to flee into a bedroom. The local people are partying and play music and make a mess. When the partiers leave, and Miss Julie and her valet come back out, the suggestion of time passing is made believeable to the audience. This scene change which can also be an intermission of sorts is very engaging and is integrated seemlessly into the play.

Tenessee Williams in writing The Glass Menagerie had the idea of projections from a projector that would herald scene changes. He wanted to keep it interesting for the audience. I am sure most directors don't use that device but as a writer he was conscious of how things would look when changing scenes, and he wanted to confirm the audience's interest by giving them something to look at.

Music, a character giving narration, a choreographed action can all add something to the flow of your one act play, can sew the different scenes together. It is never a good idea to think that you are only the writer. The writer is creating a world. This world needs nurturing by paying attention to details. You can't hide your writing in a fancy set, and if the audience is looking at your fancy set and not the action onstage then your play is in trouble.

If you are writing a one act and have never been involved in a play, join your local theatre company, help out backstage or audition for a role in a play, offer to direct or assistant direct. Practical experience in the theatre should iron out any delusions a playwright might have about set changes and scene changes.

Imagine that you are taking your audience on a journey. Let it flow from beginning to end, instead of being interrupted by a succession of annoying pit stops.

This topic has been archived as of 5/5/2013.