How To Assess Your Writing

Very few artists can create a masterpiece in one pass. For the vast majority of writers, writing is rewriting. It's working and reworking phrases, scenes, and even entire plot lines to get just the right combination.

I usually pattern my work after an old joke about a sculptor who says that if he's sculpting a horse, for example, he takes a piece of marble and cuts away everything that doesn't look like a horse. Similarly, I write and gather as much information, snippets of dialogue, jokes, plot ideas, characters, and everything else that could be part of the play, then critically look at it all and remove everything that doesn't belong in that particular script.

It requires focus: knowing precisely who the protaganist is, what the protaganist is trying to achieve, who the antagonist is, what are the incidents that move the play forward, and what are the incidents and characters that are ultimately unnecessary.

Once you've finished a script, you need to hear it. You recite it aloud to yourself to hear all the words spoken; first doing all the parts, then doing each individual character's lines to check for consistency. But after that, you need external help. After all, a play is meant to be performed, not read.

Production

This is the ultimate place to test a play, but also the hardest to get to. It is during rehearsals and performances that you find out...

Which lines work,

Which lines don't,

Which characters are not developed correctly,

Which characters may be unnecessary,

Whether there is sufficient action and conflict, and

Whether considerable rewrites are required.

Unfortunately, going straight to production with a play is far from the norm. A number of other steps are usually required to polish a script enough to make it stageworthy.

Readings

After completing my first (or more frequently, second) draft, I get a group of friends together for a read-through party. Some are actors and writers, some are friends of theatre, and others just like to hang out. I make sure there are enough people to fill all the parts, make sufficient photocopies, and then we read through the play. (Actually, they read. I listen.) Afterwards, there are always the "it was nice" comments. But what I specifically look for are the spontaneous reactions during the reading - that is, whether they laugh or react according to what the script should have them do. Polite comments are to be expected. But spontaneous reactions tell a lot, since people cannot help themselves when they find something funny or dramatic or bland.

The copyright of the article How To Assess Your Writing in Playwriting is owned by Dave Brandl. Permission to republish How To Assess Your Writing in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Go To Page: 1 2 3

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic