Playwriting - Tumblr Posts

throwback to when I was trying to write a play last year.. I think I might've been a little bit frustrated

Underrated playwright appreciation post!

Anyone who doesn’t know the work of Scott C Sickles… fix that.

His dialogue is gorgeous, premises alternate between hilarious and heart-wrenching, and there’s so much stuff to love.

Also I just reread Unjust Sound of Unseen Waves and… honestly one of my favorite plays ever. It’s so good. 100 out of 10 would recommend, get this man some more of the recognition he deserves.

“[In storytelling] niceness tends to kill characters - if there is nothing wrong with them, nothing to offend us, then there’s almost certainly nothing to attract our attention either.”

— John Yorke (in ‘Into the Woods: How stories work and why we tell them’)

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

Fun Writing Challenge!!! Brought to you by a ✨Theatre Kid✨

Now, for clarification, I’ve done this multiple times, but it has been with multiple people and under a time limit, something I’m aware may be stressful or difficult for some people, so adjust as needed.

So I’m currently a part of a theatre troupe and every year we do a couple of cabaret/vaudeville type shows to bring in some extra cash for little cost plus fun for us actors! It’s a mix of songs and skits, the songs are all from musicals but the scenes are written and directed by the actors themselves. It’s fun, we all have a great time, hallelujah. Anyways, our director/supervisor in charge of this event has participated in a few 24-hour playwriting challenges in her time and decided to give us, her wonderful actors, a similar challenge. It goes as follows:

At the beginning of the show as the audience is walking in there are several props and costumes on stage as well as several lists. The audience is informed that they get to vote on a few things. Once the show begins, the votes are tallied up and handed to the writers in the back. Out of the tallies, we are given the top 3 costumes, top 3 props, the top setting, and the top line of dialogue to create a scene with. We are then given approximately an hour (really it’s just however long the show is) to write a scene, cast it, and block it. At the end of the show, we print out the scripts, get into costume, and perform it for the audience. I just did it for the 4th and final time (moving for work) and had a blast!

It took a lot of trial and error to work at some of the kinks in the process. We originally had 3 lines of dialogue that were personally suggested by the audience and pulled out of a hat, but that led to a lot of trolling and directed the outcome of the scenes a little too much for our liking. We also had a much larger writing group the first few times which made the process far more chaotic and distracting than we had time for. However, that’s the fun part: there is no set rules to this challenge, you can manipulate the general premise to fit whatever works best for you and your resources, but it also helps get you out of your head and takes away some of the pressure of making those big decisions or worrying about the smaller details. Have fun with it!!!

I just wanted to share it here because 1. I had fun and I hope others will too and 2. I think Tumblr polls could make this so fun and chaotic for a creator to do with their audience. Enjoy, Tumblrinas, go wild!

What program do you write your scripts in?

Google Docs, haha. It's definitely not the preferred or industry-standard way of doing it; it gives older writers at my program hives when I drop a Docs link in the homework folder. But I was raised on it and it's a great collaboration tool, so I haven't made the switch yet (and maybe never will? Actually probably will once Google inevitably starts charging money for it. But not quite yet!).

Through my school I have a free Final Draft license, so I use that for screenwriting (which has a lot more pesky formatting rules and things), but I'm not planning on buying it once my license expires because A. I don't write films that much and B. I can probably hard-code it into Google Docs for free.

If you're insane like I am and wanna use Google Docs for scriptwriting, here's some formatting tips under the cut:

We're gonna be using a page of the Ghost Story script to demonstrate!

I use Times New Roman because Deborah Brevoort recommended it as a more readable (and slightly more condensed) font than Courier. Your font should adapt to your style; I tend to write short, snappy lines with a lot of back-and-forth, so I use Times which is a common font style for comedy writers (despite not writing comedies.) If you write a lot of long monologues, Courier New might give you a better sense of how your script flows on the page. Basically, you want to space your writing so it comes out to 1 minute of performance time = 1 page of writing.

Scene headings are centered and in bold.

Stage directions that start a scene are left-aligned and in italics; in NAMT-standard style, these are center-margin aligned, like this:

But it's kind of your personal preference.

4. All names are centered and underlined

5. Any stage directions that take place during a scene and cue a line of dialogue are centered, in italics, and in parenthesis. If they can start eating whenever while they're talking, I'd put They start eating left-aligned between two lines of dialogue. However, it is important to me that Hao and Józef start eating before Hao says his next line, so I put it center-aligned.

6. When you get to a song it looks like this:

Basically, songs should be numbered and come after a stage direction (even something basic, like "He stands up.") The enter after the stage directions isn't kosher, it's a Google Docs thing I'll get into later. Then you close the parenthesis on the stage direction and put a page break. Songs should always start on a new page. This is because when you integrate the book and score, you can just take those lyric sheets out and put sheets of music in. Nifty!

7. Lyrics are always capitalized. When two people sing the same thing at the same time, you can put both their names over it:

But if they're singing something different, I usually put it in two columns (there is some debate among musical theater writers on what the proper notation for this kind of thing is. But columns are easy on Google Docs, so I use those. When I have four or more people singing different things on top of one another, I use a 1x4 table and make the lines between the cells invisible, haha.)

Google Docs Specific Formatting Stuff

Ok, so, if you're lazy like me and don't want to be hitting 800 buttons while you're writing to format everything correctly (and please, god, format while you're writing -- going back and doing it later sucks) you can use the Google Docs headings to format your writing! And it will even make a nice little outline for you!

So, the default of these settings (on the left) is useless and ugly. But mine looks like this (on the right!)

If you want yours to look beautiful and be useful like mine, you can format some kind of text the way you want it to (for example, I want all my names in 12 pt Times New Roman, centered and underlined.)

Then I go to some random heading and I hit "Update heading to match"

Now, anytime I type a name, I can go back to this menu and hit "Apply Heading 5"... and it will automatically make it centered, underlined, and 12 pt Times New Roman! I make one of these for all my categories of text: stage directions, song titles, scene headers, etc.

But, ok, you still have to open all those menus while you're writing. Well! See this thing?

All of these have keyboard shortcuts (the Windows ones will show up on a Windows computer). You can really easily hit them after each name/stage direction you type instead of fiddling around with font settings. You're a formatting machine!

And here's the bonus: If you do all this correctly, you can get a really nice outline like this one embedded in your document on the left (this is where the song titles on a new line come in; I make a heading style for them so they show up on the outline, but headings only show the start of the phrase that they are part of in the outline. Ignore the numbers being wrong, lol. There's a secret song 3 that we haven't released yet.)

And it's clickable, too-- like I can jump right to Your Face from the outline without having to scroll down 20 pages.

Is this all needlessly complicated and doing manually something Final Draft will do for you? Yes. But I'm set in my ways, and it's free, so maybe it'll be helpful to another Musical Theater writer out there working with someone else on Google Docs.

That's it! Thanks for the question.