Playwriting and Screenwriting: Seven Script Starters
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| Theater by Hernán Piñera. Used with Creative Commons License |
Knock Knock Script Prompt
One quick prompt for getting started is based on the popular form of the knock-knock joke. This prompt helps writers make decisions by providing two built-in characters, a bit of conflict (one character wants to come in), and an inciting incident. The writers must provide, at minimum, characterization (names, actions, language, and motivations of each character), dialogue based on the characterization, rising action, and a resolution. In doing this, a clear setting and theme may emerge, or writers can revise their exercises to include elements that are unclear or missing.
Comic Strip Script
The Comic Strip Script exercise, although difficult to enunciate, makes for an excellent exercise in writing stage directions. The comic provides plot, character, setting, dialogue, movement, and theme. The writer must provide the complete script, sans images, in the appropriate screenwriting or playwriting format. This requires clearly articulated stage directions to describe the actions, transitional actions, and actions of closure between panels. As an added lesson in Reader-Response Theory, writers in a workshop can compare interpretations of the given comic strip at the end of the exercise to demonstrate how differently people perceive the same work.
Swaperoo Script
This exercise requires some knowledge of famous characters and a bit of playfulness. Writers will swap one character for another. For example, a writer could write a scene from Hamlet that answers the question, "What if Xena were swapped for Hamlet?" or "What if Kermit were swapped for Bob Cratchit?" That has already been done, but there are a multitude of additional options: Bugs Bunny for Mary Poppins, Tony Stark for Oedipus, Dexter for Snow White. It's a great exercise for helping writers understand how each of the elements of drama must interact with one another to create a whole. When a character is swapped, everything changes.
Collecting Dialogue
One very popular exercise is eavesdropping on unsuspecting others in order to "borrow" real dialogue. This is a great way to study the way people speak at a particular time and in a particular place. What makes this ever more interesting, as I learned in a workshop with playwright Mac Wellman at Naropa University in 2006, is writing this dialogue as one long paragraph. The paragraph is then passed to another writer to bifurcate the lines, and passed to a third person to add stage directions. With groups of four, the fourth writer can add a title, additional character and location descriptions, and format the final script. By the time the short script makes it back to the original eavesdropper, the words may be unrecognizable, and therefore, eye opening.
Insight and Theme
Writers can base scripts on real life. One way to help writers write about their own lives is to ask them to write narrative essays about a time when they learned a valuable life lesson. Most writers are familiar with how to write an essay, so it's a great way to get them thinking about insightful thesis statements. Those thesis statements and the narrative sequence of events they tell in the body of their essays become the basis of their plays. To add a step, ask writers to incorporate a narrative frame or first person narrator, much like in The Glass Menagerie when Tom breaks the fourth wall. In this exercise, theme and the idea of "the trustworthy narrator" are emphasized.
Design and Build
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| Designing a set helps emphasize the importance of setting |
Many beginning playwrights, especially those within English departments, have never studied theatre as an art form. To get these new writers thinking specifically about setting, they should design a set for one of their own plays or one of a workshop or classmate's plays. These make for excellent presentations and can be as simple as 2D sketches of theoretical stage spaces, or as complex as 3D models with realistic budget projections on an existing stage or set. The same assignment can be used to emphasize characterization by asking writers to design costumes and make-up, planning for any required backstage changes. Although these can be fun and enlightening assignments, especially important are justifications for each of their choices.
Story Cubes
Generating characters and stories for script exercises doesn't have to be stressful. Writers can use Rory's Story Cubes (Amazon affiliate link) or other storytelling dice games to quickly generate a character traits and a story idea that has a beginning, middle, and end. Because it's quick and low stakes, it leaves writers more time to practice other steps in the writing process, like developing a plot that helps tell the story, creating dialogue that matches a character's traits, or revising for consistency in form or function.
When new writers are faced with writer's block or decision paralysis about their scripts, get them moving in the right direction by helping them get started. These seven script starters can help those writers learn to synthesize and negotiate the elements of drama: plot, character, setting, dialogue, movement, and theme.
Want to read more about theatre and drama? Try
Origins of the Term "Deus Ex Machina"
The Medieval Morality Play
What's a Dramaturg Do?
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