Some closing thoughts for playwrights
An artist afraid to do it badly is already failing as an artist.
(Heather McHugh (paraphrased, from Not a Prayer))
Is there any material art or artisanship that is undercut by a progressive understanding of how to make the thing?
(Elaine Scarry (from Dreaming by the Book))
Dramaturgy as presented in this book is a discipline practiced professionally in theatre companies during the production of plays. Its applications to the specifics of playwriting deserve a separate book, but in this brief Afterword I note a few suggestive ways in which the principles – indispensable for the analysis of already-written plays – can by anticipation guide the difficult art of composing play scripts, especially for beginners.
A would-be playwright who starts by writing dialogue is starting at the opposite end of a creative and imaginative process that must be based not in what people say but in what they attempt to do, the spine of the plot. To build a full-length dramatic plot requires an effort of the imagination that I can best express as the mental equivalent of “palming” a medicine ball. Everyone knows what an advantage it is when playing basketball to be physically large: not only to be near the basket, but to handle and control the ball. To compose a play, a playwright must “hold” in her mind a clear guiding image of an envisioned action, whole and complete, about to unfold itself in time – and this is what a plot-bead diagram achieves. It thus makes sense to envision a full anticipatory plot diagram as a guide for “filling in” the scenes of a new play. This used to be called preparing a scene-by-scene scenario before writing dialogue.
To frame the mind to the work of composition for the stage, one must incite the imagination to anticipate the stage event. This effort of imagination is at its hardest when the inner core of the dramatic plot is not yet constructed in the mind. Playwrights are doing their particular poietic work when they are clarifying, in their minds, an intended structure of action. When one is striving to write a play, one must fill the empty page with what Elaine Scarry in her book on aesthetics, Dreaming by the Book (2001), calls “delayed sensory content” – instructions for some future re-construction of a real and immediate performance.
For conceptual clarity, scene writing and plot building – making the parts and arranging them into a whole – are frequently discussed procedurally, as though one activity necessarily preceded the other: that scenes must be written before they can be arranged into larger structures, or that a master plan must precede the methodical “filling in” of the parts. In practice it is likely that the two will be highly interactive, with constant shifting back and forth from one activity to the other. Scenes are written, then arranged into a plot; plot developments are planned, then scenes are written according to that plan – and re-written – and re-arranged – and so on.
The plot-bead diagram and the habit of “plot-beading” can help with this. The aim for playwrights is to develop an acutely conscious grasp of the relation between individual segments of a play (what Chapter 1 teaches us to draw as “beads” in a plot-bead diagram) and the completed structural whole that makes the artifact “One Play.” “The Plot” should be the result of the artful concatenation of all the individual time-segments we have called “beads.”
These remarks are necessarily just hints in this short space. But they imply a direction for a serious apprenticeship: take seriously the formal idea that a coherent play imitates one action. This has little to do with “telling a story.” Constructing a play is a poietic craft based on successive created time-durations. Design these consciously according to principles. Plan these as a meaningful sequence, and fill them in as actions. None of this is easy or obvious, but technique matters, and sound technique teaches as it proceeds. It is necessary, to be a playwright, to “activate” vivid fictions in the mind until they move and/or talk, but a vigilant poet (the playwright) needs always to control form once the fictions start to move. To do that, you have to know what an action is as a term of art.
Scarry, E. (2001). Dreaming by the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.