So You Want To Be A Playwright?

Tim Fountain

• Editorial: Nick Hern Books
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780010939
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Creative Writing

How to write a play and get it produced - a manual for playwrights.

Playwright and former literary manager Tim Fountain guides the budding playwright over the many hurdles involved in getting a play on - from finding a story that only you know, through the detailed construction of the play, and on to the strategies you can use to get it on stage.

• What kind of play do you want to write?
• Where do you get your ideas from?
• How much exposition do you need?
• Where do you find your characters' voices?
• What should you do when you get stuck?
• Where should you send your play?

The book also deals with the actual production: choosing directors, designers and actors, and coping with rehearsals, previews and press nights.

Includes appendixes of vital websites, and contact details for new-writing theatres, agents and publishers.

'A marvellous and invaluable guide... full of wisdom and no-nonsense practical advice on the tricky but thrilling business of making plays' (Willy Russell)

PART ONE

Getting Started

Storytelling

The good storyteller

Think about the people you know. Think about the characters in your life that command the most attention, the ones who garner the most laughs when they tell a story. Are they the cleverest people you know? The most highly educated? The most articulate? Perhaps, but more likely they are the ones who are simply the best storytellers, whose stories you believe because they have the hot stink of authenticity.

But why do they have this authenticity? I believe it’s because the person doing the telling dares to be himself or herself. This seldom involves self-glorification (except by default because they have entertained others); often the stories told by good storytellers will be against themselves. The time they ended up drunk with X, bought a car with no engine from Y, fell in love foolishly with Z. No one wants to hear tales of extraordinary success – unless it was achieved against all odds and with a considerable price paid along the way. Far more appealing to an audience is when the storyteller has the confidence to reveal his or her failings. In doing so, they square with us, they become one of us, they tell us that our vulnerability is shared by them, they speak universally, they confirm we are part of a society, and they make us feel less isolated as human beings.

Releasing the story only you know

Many writers start out writing highly autobiographical plays. So perhaps you should begin by looking at what is closest to you. Look at the stories in your everyday life. Think about the myths handed down through your family. The stories you remember most clearly from your school days. Could you take the kernel of them and expand it into a play? Perhaps there is a full story there already? Are there missing pieces to the tales that you could fill in to create a play? Is there a character from your past who fascinates you, whose voice you can hear clearly and around whom you could construct a story? Do you have regrets about things you did or didn’t do that you wish to examine? Do you sometimes fantasise about leaving your lover? Taking a lover? Giving up your job? How your life would be now had you made a different decision at a crucial crossroads? All of these things may inspire a play.

However, this approach may be too directly autobiographical for some: you may find yourself unable to free yourself from the ‘vérité’ of your actual life. After all, you must never let the facts get in the way of a good story. If this is the case then you may find the following exercise useful. It is an exercise designed to release a very personal story in a very simple way. But before we look at it we need to define some terms so that when we use them later on they mean the same thing to each of us.

Definitions

CHARACTER Decision under pressure. Characters are not what they say they are, but what they do, and what they do is prompted by the decisions the narrative and the other characters force them to make. For example, Iago in Othello says he’s honest; what he does is the exact opposite. Character only emerges through action, and action is decision under pressure.

INNER CONFLICT Conflict between the person and themselves. For example, Lear wants to accept what Cordelia says at the beginning of King Lear but is too insecure to do so. Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman wants to stop selling but doesn’t believe he has achieved enough.

INTER-PERSONAL CONFLICT Conflict between people and others. For example, Romeo and Juliet and their parents; Lear and his daughters; Willy Loman and his sons; Shirley Valentine and her (offstage) husband in Willy Russell’s play.

EXTRA-PERSONAL CONFLICT Conflict between people and their world. For example, a woman in a patriarchal society; a Muslim in an Islamophobic country; Willy Loman and the American Dream.

INCITING INCIDENT The moment without which the story would not exist. It is often something that destabilises the protagonist and compels them to go into action. It should be at least in part generated by the inner conflict of the protagonist. For example, Lear banishes Cordelia because she refuses to tell him what he wants to hear, but also because his character will not allow him to accept her public behaviour. Shirley Valentine accepts the invitation from her friend to go on holiday to Greece, but deep down has doubts about whether it’s the right thing to do, which affects her behaviour.

SCENE A unit of action in which something changes.

ACT CLIMAX A major change, shift or reversal, the sum total of the scenes that precede it (nothing to do with intervals or curtains coming down!). For example, C.S. Lewis in William Nicholson’s Shadowlands acknowledges that he is in love with someone, having always denied he needs love.

CRISIS A moment of decision forced upon the protagonist by the narrative. It should not be an easy choice and whichever decision they make should have disadvantages as well as advantages. For example, Nora leaving Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She may have found her voice, escaped her unhappy domestic circumstances, but she has also given up her safe life for an unknown one as a single woman in a society not tolerant of such behaviour. It is by no means an easy choice, nor risk-free.

CLIMAX What happens as a result of the decision taken in the crisis, and a logical outcome of the train of events set in motion by the inciting incident. For example, Lear banished Cordelia; result: he effectively kills her. Shirley Valentine went on holiday without her husband; result: she is forced to decide between staying in Greece and risk losing him, or going back home and forfeiting all she has gained.

RESOLUTION When the deeper meaning of the story becomes apparent. Even though, as Samuel Goldwyn famously said, ‘Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union’, the resolution is where the writer’s underlying meaning is most clearly heard. The resolution is the last moment that the audience experience and a strong part of what they take away with them from the story. For example, in Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis preaches a sermon to his congregation in which he flatly contradicts what he said to them at the beginning of the story, accepting that even though the only woman he has ever loved has died, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Shirley Valentine’s husband decides to come to Greece and see his wife on her terms.

Definitions out the way, let’s return to our exercise:

Character and inner conflict

1 Try and recall a situation in your life – it could be in the distant past or within the last hour – when you did or said something you didn’t mean to. Not because of a slip of the tongue or ignorance or because anyone else compelled you to, but because of your character (you!) acting under pressure. You may have wanted to ask a girl or guy out but didn’t. You may have wanted to apologise to someone but didn’t. You may have bullied someone when really you meant to be tender.

2 Now ask yourself a deeper question. What was really going on there? Why did I do what I did? The answer to this question cannot be ‘Because they made me do it’ or ‘Because my father kicked the cat when I was twelve’ (though he may well have done and we will return to this later). I want you to find the answer that is ultimately your nature, or your nature which, at that time, was acting under pressure.

3 I want you to boil the incident down to two very specific things: your goal (what you wanted to do) and the obstacle (what stopped you from doing it that was nobody’s fault except your own). For example, the goal: asking the girl out; the obstacle: your fear of rejection. Of course there are many other reasons you could come up with for why you failed to achieve your goal: ‘I didn’t feel worthy of her’, ‘I was too proud to do the asking’, ‘I was worried about the financial cost’, ‘I didn’t know where to take her’ . . . But what you must do is come up with the single answer that was absolutely true of you at that moment.

Often when I’ve worked through this exercise in a classroom situation, students feel very exposed and blush when I press them for the real reason they failed to achieve their goal. When we do arrive at the answer, they feel ashamed, as if I have revealed them to be some sort of emotional inadequate. Often they will say, ‘But I’m not normally like that’ or ‘It never happened again’ (even if that’s not the case and, on closer examination, they repeat this behaviour in many different areas of their lives).

But what is always most fascinating is when I ask the rest of the class if they have ever done the same thing, and made the same ‘error’ under pressure. Invariably, every hand in the room goes up. Who amongst us has not experienced failing to ask someone out because of the fear of rejection? Answer: no one. Some of us may have spent a lifetime doing it – like a character from one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – or some of us may have only done it once with massive consequences. But by being specific, by revealing a truth about him or herself, the playwright will have tapped into a universal truth. They felt they were revealing some terrible secret about their inner psyche when in fact they were holding a mirror up to the rest of the group, their audience. They dared to be themselves. Thus, they have sown the seeds of a story and, more importantly, created a character with universal appeal. Yet we know nothing of this character aside from his goal and the obstacle which prevented them from following it through. How can this be? The answer lies in character and the nature of character in drama.

Firstly, it’s important to grasp that character in drama is very different from character in life. Put on stage a person with a thousand contradictions (as we often perceive ourselves to have), with all those contradictions playing out at once, and you will almost certainly have a mess of a play with no character and no drama. But put on stage a person who makes specific decisions as a result of inner conflict acting upon him or her, and character will emerge.

Character is decision under pressure, and it cannot emerge without both pressure and decision (even if the decision is to avoid decision, as in the case of Hamlet). In drama, as in life, we are not what we say we are, we are what we do. I may tell you I am a selfless person, but if under pressure I choose to put myself first, then that is what you will rightly deduce to be my character – unless I later prove otherwise, and even then doubts will linger in your mind about me. However, if a character simply makes the decisions he or she wants to make, or has to make, under the pressure of the narrative then you are in danger of creating a fairy story, and a character like James Bond or Cinderella. In these examples, the central character has few dimensions and exists simply to achieve the goals they want to achieve (save the planet or marry the prince).

When your characters have inner conflict (in our earlier example, the fear of rejection when asking someone out) then they become three-dimensional, interesting creations, and an audience will be compelled to watch them. The central narrative of Richard Curtis’s romantic comedy film Notting Hill, for instance, is generated from just such a simple central inner conflict. Hugh Grant’s character is incapable of asking out Julia Roberts because he doesn’t think he is up to it, and from this conflict springs his (albeit slim) character and the whole plot – and indeed other Richard Curtis/Hugh Grant movies based on similar conflict, like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually.

Shadowlands, William Nicholson’s TV play (later a stage play and then a film starring Anthony Hopkins) about the writer C.S. Lewis is generated from a very clear central inner contradiction on the part of its protagonist at the start of the story. Lewis has never fallen in love and lives with his brother in the groves of academia. Along comes a woman who wants to love him, and he struggles hard to resist, oppressed by his innate conservatism and fear of change. But he succumbs, takes the risk, falls in love, and develops as a person, before tragically discovering his lover is dying. Having never loved before, he is now forced to deal with love and grief, another conflict. The central question the play poses – Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? – is resolved at the conclusion. Lewis, who preached otherwise at its outset, tells his congregation that grief is the price we pay for love and that it is a price worth paying.

In the first scene of King Lear, the ageing monarch divides his kingdom between his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. He asks each to profess their love for him in front of the court. Goneril and Regan fawn and flatter. Cordelia is more forthright and says that she loves him ‘according to [her] bond; no more nor less’. Now if he’d had fewer ‘issues’, Lear could have said, ‘Thank you, Cordelia, here’s your third.’ Then there’d be no difficulty, no play. But he doesn’t. He can’t. His inner conflict, his vanity, his neediness – call it what you will – makes him demand more from her and when she refuses to give it, he banishes her, thus removing from his life the daughter who loves him most and putting himself at the mercy of those who have least time for him. The whole narrative arc is launched from a seemingly small incident at the start of the play which is, in turn, generated from Lear’s inner conflict.

Many years ago I recall seeing a play by Richard Cameron set in the mining community of South Yorkshire, and overhearing two Sloaney teenage girls discussing it in the interval. One said to the other, ‘Oh my gosh! The father in the play is just like Daddy.’ I thought to myself, ‘But he is nothing like your daddy. He is working class, he is from a different part of the country, he speaks in a vernacular that could not be further removed from yours . . . ’ And then I worked out what she meant. The scene we had witnessed on stage was one in which the father tried desperately, but unsuccessfully, to tell his son what he felt about him. The inner conflict – the desire to express feeling and the inability to do so – had created a universal character capable of speaking to miners from South Yorkshire and minors from South Kensington.

It’s fine to begin writing from a position of indignation about the political system you or someone else lives in (extra-personal conflict). It’s human to be angry at those who mistreat others either deliberately or inadvertently (inter-personal conflict). But in all my experience as a literary manager and reader of scripts, the primary level, the inner conflict, is the one too often missing.

Those other levels of conflict are necessary and can make for good drama, but unless your characters are also victims of themselves and their own nature, they will prove unconvincing, with no backstory, and noth...