A play’s got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It’s not music, it’s not poetry, it’s not dance, it’s not narrative—it’s dramatic … it’s about conflict. It’s about forces coming together.
—ROMULUS LINNEY
“The hardest thing about writing is getting from nothing to the first draft.”
Every successful, experienced playwright I know agrees with this statement. They accept it as fact, but have managed to find a way of pushing through the writing process. The initial chapters of this book are designed to ease you out of the starting gate well positioned and in good form as you begin the journey to your first draft. It probably won’t make the work any less strenuous, but it will provide you with a proven approach to launching the writing of your next play.
The first consideration as you begin work on a play is to come up with a workable idea to write about, something that will easily hold all the basic dramatic ingredients. It doesn’t matter what length play you’re planning to write. In fact, at this beginning point that shouldn’t really be a concern. Your task is to find that seed of an idea that can grow into a brilliant play.
Finding that idea isn’t always easy, and there are innumerable places to look for it. But even before you begin the search, you need to know what you’re looking for. You have to have a clear sense of the dramatic potential of ideas as they present themselves. You need to know how to put them to the test. This, then, is the obvious place to start the process: Learning what to look for in an idea.
This chapter presents a brief overview of the basic dramatic ingredients present in all successful plays, no matter the style or length. It’s probably the most important discussion in the entire book, in that it strips everything down to the bare essentials—a preliminary engineering lesson in how plays are supposed to function. This will arm you with the basic criteria necessary to test the potential of the ideas as they come to you. You want to know:
• Will this idea work as a play?
• Does it have the basic dramatic ingredients to sustain itself?
• Will it form the solid foundation needed to support what I’ll be building on top of it?
As we proceed, it will be important for you to keep in perspective what this initial discussion is attempting to do. It is definitely not intended to rigidly confine your thinking or to stifle your creative juices regarding your ideas for possible plays. I encourage you to explore and try things, to keep an open mind, and to stay flexible. What follows is meant to bolster your expertise in testing potential ideas early on, so that you can at least get a sense of whether or not something has promise.
My primary reason for writing this book is that I’ve read hundreds of plays, many by extremely gifted writers, that do not work. In almost every case it’s clear that the writer did not conduct some sort of preliminary analysis of the central idea. It’s as if the entire script had been written blindly, without regard to basic dramatic principles—perhaps in the hope that, in some mysterious way, everything would simply fall into place.
The sad truth is that this rarely, if ever, happens. People spend hundreds of hours, often slaving a year or more over a manuscript which, having little chance of coming to life on the stage, is doomed to sit on a shelf. Like the carpenter who builds a house on sand, many writers build their plays with little or no regard to the essential dramatic underpinnings that plays need in order to work.
I ask you to be patient as you begin. I feel, with every new play I write, the urge to start with the first scene and get those characters talking. And that can be a wonderful exercise to get inner currents flowing and ideas popping. However, be aware that such early exploratory work, exciting as it may be, needs to be identified for what it is. Remember that before you actually start writing the play itself it is critical that you make an initial effort to chart your course. Things may change as you go along (and probably will), but by doing some preliminary thinking and planning, you’ll at least be prepared for departure.
In one way or another, all the playwrights I’ve interviewed for this book report that they do chart their course. They’ve accepted it as just one of the necessary steps in the process.
More than likely, you already have in your head an idea you think might make a great play. Later on, we’ll take a close look at where ideas come from and where to search for them. For now, keep in mind your most promising hunch, even if it’s just a shred of an idea. The best way to use this book is to actually apply what I’m talking about to your work.
If you are setting out to write your first or one of your first plays, consider the following preliminary suggestions. They may appear to be somewhat restrictive and limiting, but keep in mind that they’re intended to guide you into this business of writing plays without becoming completely overwhelmed. Although you have to put your heart and soul into any play you write, you can’t get around the fact that your early efforts are also your learning pieces.
• Aim for a short, or one-act, play of around twenty to forty script pages or less. Writing a few “short short” plays of five to ten pages is also a good place to start. And I suggest that you stay with the short form for your first several efforts. Just as students of prose fiction are urged to write several short stories before attempting a novel, I urge you not to attempt overly long and ambitious projects your first few times out. Obviously, this dictates that you consider ideas which are not overly complicated. You’ll be surprised at how simple a dramatic idea can make a wonderful play.
• Try to limit the number of characters to two or three. Generally, the more characters you introduce, the more complicated the writing of your play becomes, much like the degree of difficulty confronted in juggling the more balls you try to keep in the air. The greater the number of vivid personalities thrown in the mix, the more intricate become the human interactions and the plot mechanisms. Keep in mind that many brilliant full-length plays (usually 75 to 100 script pages) have only three or four characters. This economy allows you to focus more clearly and confidently on the dramatic heart of the play, and this is especially important in your early efforts.
• When considering the characters, also be aware that in most cases you’ll have an easier time of it if the central character and at least one other major character share a part of their past, or backstory, together. Characters who already know each other and have shared important life experiences almost always open up a richer and deeper dramatic field in which to set your play. Obviously, there are exceptions to this; for example, Edward Albee’s classic one-act, The Zoo Story, is a meeting between two strangers on a park bench. But most great plays involve characters who share a long history. A conflict between a parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, or two old friends has a special potency because of their long-standing relationship and memories of closeness and past conflicts.
• Choose an idea set in the present time—that is, a contemporary story, taking place in the general “now.” It’s possible to dip into the past if you know it intimately and are more comfortable with a bygone setting for a specific idea, but, generally, the present is the least complicated time frame to write in. I urge you not to dive too far into the past (or blast off into the future), especially when the time you’re considering is unfamiliar to you. That would bring up a whole new set of demands—namely research—which we’ll get to later on.
• Write your play in the realistic style. Have your characters be real, believable people and put them in a real, believable place. The tone of the play should approximate real life. As restrictive as this may seem, I urge you to avoid fantasy, allegory, and highly stylized approaches in your early efforts, for as soon as you introduce unrealistic elements there’s an automatic tendency to throw out all the rules and make up new ones as you go along. This can work beautifully if you understand the dramatic conventions you are departing from and know what you’re getting yourself into. But if you don’t, you can get very lost very quickly.
• Try to visualize your play as one continuous scene in one setting. More often than not, beginning playwrights think they need four, five, or six scenes to tell their story when, in fact, it is in scene five or six that the real play is to be found. Everything else is backstory, which leads up to the actual dramatic event. Keep the story simple and direct. Go right to the heart of it and stay there.
• It’s generally easier to tackle and sustain a serious, dramatic idea than an overtly comic one. The motivations driving characters and the mechanisms of plot are usually more clear-cut and direct in serious ideas, and therefore they tend to be more manageable. Good comedies and farces are a delight, but the more effortless they appear, the more tricky they are to write. Of course, I am not suggesting that you avoid humor. Your characters will determine whether there are potentially funny, even hilarious moments or scenes in your play. But the initial idea should be basically serious in intent.
Writing good plays is not easy. It’s a craft that must be learned and acquired over time. Keeping the foregoing guidelines in mind as you begin will help you select a project you’ll be able to manage as you start applying the tools of the trade. You’ll stand a much better chance of keeping things under control and of gaining a working knowledge of the basic building blocks of all successful plays.
The first step in the process is to scrutinize potential ideas as they come to you to see if they have the potential to become good plays. And to do this, you have to know what to look for. All good plays—short and long, one-act and full-length, comedies and farces, tragedies and dramas, and everything in between—have the same basic dramatic ingredients whether the playwright is conscious of them or not:
1. One central, or pivotal, character.
2. The central character has a strong inner need or desire that must be satisfied.
3. The central character’s need or desire is being thwarted, setting up conflict and an intensifying dilemma.
4. A resolution of the conflict/dilemma is somehow achieved, leaving the central character a different person at the end of the play.
That’s it. One central character struggling with a strong need which is being thwarted but who manages, in one way or another, to resolve that need by the end of the play, leaving him or her a changed person.
There are infinite variations on this, but all successful plays have these basics firmly in place in some fundamental way. Sometimes they’re carefully and skillfully camouflaged or partially hidden from view, but they’re there.
It can be expressed even more simply:
Central Character → Conflict/Dilemma → Resolution
This is a basic structural truth. When you strip away the elements that make each play unique—the use of language, theatricality, character personalities, humor, specifics of plot and setting—you’re left with this basic structure. That’s why it’s dramatic writing and not another form of fiction, like the novel or the short story.
Plays are more akin to music, in that there is always forward movement—action played out in time. There is always conflict and turmoil, a working through of the central character’s dilemma.
Arthur Miller explains: “There are two forces always working. One is working against the other … and the business of the play is to explore that conflict and resolve it.”
John Guare says that he asks himself: “Do I have a good argument going on? Do I have a character who believes in something and a character who believes in exactly the opposite? It all starts with a disagreement.”
Or, as Marsha Norman puts it: “When you go to the theater you want to know who the main character is, and you want to be able to see what they want, see what’s against them, and see whether they get it or not. Then you want to go home.”
A brief word here about screenplays: Also inherently dramatic, film scripts operate in much the same way as plays, but with a visual rather than a verbal focus. Much of what is said in this book about basic dramatic structure can be applied to the writing of a screenplay as well as a play, although the focus here is definitely on writing for the stage. And there are important and obvious differences, such as length of scenes, settings, rhythm and pace, dominance of the camera’s eye over dialogue, and so on. But all good movies, like all good plays, contain the same structural basics.
This progression—central character → conflict/dilemma → resolution—which is the play’s overall structural shape, is often called the motor or the thrust of the play.
“It’s about finding the motor,” Emily Mann explains, “… finding out what keeps it moving, what propels the play, what keeps it going forward actively.”
We don’t really sense the structure in performance, when, we hope, the language and specific actions of the characters effectively cover it over and sweep us away. It’s like watching a car pass by on a highway: You see the color, make, model, and the people inside, you hear the tires on the pavement, but you never think of the motor propeling it all down the road.
However, should that motor break down, everything comes grinding to a halt, the hood is propped open, and you stand there staring at that dark, greasy mass of iron. If you know something about engines, you stand a good chance of getting the car running again. It may take some time, but you’ll probably find the problem and be able to fix it. Likewise, if you’re staring at a play that doesn’t work and you know something about its motor, you’ll probably be able to put your finger on the problem.
Some years back, at my own theater, I functioned as the chief mechanic, or dramaturg (also spelled dramaturge), helping playwrights get their scripts’ motor running smoothly. For your own work, you need to become the mechanic, or at least a part of you does. Otherwise, you won’t know how to fix your plays, let alone know how to build them effectively from scratch. It’s essential, then, that you permanently install in your playwright’s head the basics of dramatic structure. To help accomplish that, let’s take a closer look at each of the ingredients we have listed above.
It’s critical that your thinking focus on one central character. Probably the single biggest problem I’ve run up against over the years as a teacher and dramaturg is that people can’t decide who their plays are about. I find myself reading ten, twenty, thirty pages into a script wanting to know who I’m supposed to be attaching myself to and identifying with, and I don’t have a clue. Sadly, I too often still don’t know by the end of the play.
The point is that audiences demand to know which character they’re supposed to be watching and listening to more than the others and what his or her problem is. They demand a focus. They need to know up front who the play is about and then to engage with that central character as the dilemma is wrestled with. If they don’t get this focus, they don’t know how to listen to the play or engage with the story as it begins to unfold. They don’t have the information needed to position themselves properly to make sense of what’s being thrown at them. When the central character is not identified early on, audiences fall asleep or get that tingling feeling in their legs signaling an intense desire to leave the theater.
Arthur Miller says: “I’m better off if the central character’s there to start with. It will more likely work out. If he or she’s not there, I’m going to run into trouble sooner or later.” And the trouble he’s talking about is a lack of focus—the same lack of focus the audience ultimately experiences when a central character is not clearly discernible.
Of course, other characters play a critical role in the development of the central character’s dilemma. That’s what sparks conflict, and conflict is what plays thrive on. All these other characters must be fully realized; they may even end up with as many or more lines than your central character. They should have their own needs and desires and, consequently, their own conflicts and dilemmas. The more human and complex you make these characters, the more powerful and exciting their confrontations are with your central figure. However, as you begin working with your idea it’s crucial that your thinking focus on that one focal, pivotal character. This is the structural spine of the play.
As David Ives explains:
I figure out who is in the play, what the basic thrust of the play is, and, if I don’t find that the main character has some sort of powerful objective, the idea probably isn’t ready yet. The main character is, after all, the person whose problem or objective runs the action.
The reason most people write plays is that they believe they have something important to say. Whatever that something involves, it’s the central character’s primary need, want, or desire that serves as the framework for dealing with the issue. Because of this, the central character is sometimes referred to as the point-of-view character, for the author’s ideas are being conveyed through the character’s struggle and the way the struggle is resolved. So the need of the central character, in a very real sense, is really what your play is about.
Dramatically speaking, what’s important is that the need be deep-seated and compelling, something the central character must satisfy or fulfill. It is what drives that person, pushes him into conflict, or propels her to an inevitable end. “People have to want something,” Horton Foote explains, “and I don’t mean in an overt way or necessarily in a social way, wanting to change the world or something like that. But a want.”
Lanford Wilson concurs: “Usually you can’t write ten lines without someone wanting something. Even if you don’t know it.”
John Guare relates:
I learned about playwrighting from the jackets of show albums because I always noticed that the first or second song in any musical was the “want” song—“All I want is a room somewhere.” I want. I want. And then I realized that, in a sense, that was no different from page one of The Three Sisters: “I want to get to Moscow.” King Lear says, “I want to give my property to my three daughters.” There is always this searching at the beginning. And this operates much more powerfully in a play than any other form. I think there’s a connection between The Three Sisters and even a play like Waiting for Godot: “I want to get to Moscow” and “I want the man with the answers to arrive.” In both cases the wants are not fulfilled. And the failure of that expectation creates the dramatic energy and is extraordinary. When I’m writing and looking at that material, that raw clay I’m creating, I look for the want in it.
Arthur Miller says that for his tragic heroes, this has to be “an unstoppable emotion. It cannot be derailed, it cannot be stopped.” In Miller’s classic drama Death of a Salesman, for example, Willy Loman has an intense inner need for self-acceptance and a justification for his life. It comes from deep inside him, from his own insecurities, his fears and buried feelings of guilt. It is this inner force in Willy which drives the action of the play.
Or look at John Proctor, in Miller’s The Crucible. Here is a man with a compelling inner need to be forgiven in the eyes of his God. This need propels him into a confrontation which leads to the ultimate crossroads—choosing death and forgiveness, or life and perpetual guilt.
Often the need is so submerged that the central character is unable to acknowledge it or recognize the degree to which it is shaping and driving him or her into an intensifying dilemma. Instead, the need manifests itself in surface desires, such as a person’s lust for sex, money, or power. Underneath Willy Loman’s desire for success for his favorite son or for his own recognition as a salesman is a deeper, unfulfilled need that motivates the behavior we witness on the stage. Miller says: “I gravitate toward people who are aspiring even wrongly to some spiritual engagement and are being held down to the earth by the situation or by part of their nature.”
I think that drama, as opposed to storytelling, is what Aristotle said: It’s an action. You’re imitating an action, which is a person who decides there’s something he wants and he gets off his ass and goes for it. Now that thing he wants might not be what he really wants, or he might discover when he gets it that that isn’t what he wanted at all, but I think drama does break down into being people going after something.
Romulus Linney, in describing what separates a play from other forms of fiction, says: “A play is a piece of action; it’s something that rushes by, like life. It should have that kind of vibrancy to it, that kind of rush, and that kind of presence. It shouldn’t be delicate.”
What’s important here is that this inner need, however it manifests itself, is the fuel that keeps the motor of the play running. It’s what gives the play its forward motion. It’s what hooks an audience and keeps them with you. They identify with the central character because they recognize his need, even if he doesn’t. They become emotionally involved and willingly commit the time it takes to see how he’s able to deal with the obstacles before him as he struggles to satisfy his need.
“The audience is always waiting to see what will happen,” Marsha Norman says. “That is the drama—whether the central character is going to get what he or she wants or not.”
Now that you have a central character with a strong, compelling inner need which must be satisfied, you must invent ways in which that need is frustrated and thwarted. Marsha Norman says:
In all really successful plays, there is a protagonist who wants something, and then there are obstacles. And those obstacles may be people or inabilities or circumstances beyond their control or the gods—they could be anything.
Lee Blessing says that he asks himself the following questions:
If this is the guy’s central problem, then how does he want to solve it, and where does he go, and who are the people he encounters, and what are the things that get in his way, and what are the various shifts he tries to get someplace?
The answers to these kinds of questions, of course, will become the action of your play—the actual plot that your pivotal character, in interaction with other characters, works through onstage. In other words, the play itself is your central character’s conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action.
Moreover, the action you’re going to dramatize is the culmination of the dilemma—that is, the final struggle before a resolution is found. There may be a long, involved history of the central character’s problem, but your play should focus on the specific events surrounding his or her final confrontation with it.
There are two ways a central character’s dominant need is frustrated or thwarted, thereby creating the play’s conflict/dilemma. First, the character is often his (or her) own worst enemy and is, in a very real sense, at war with himself. He chases after the wrong things; he thinks he has all the answers; his pride blinds him to the truth; his ambition leads him into trouble; his inferiority complex leaves him helpless, and so on. The second way to set up obstacles is through introducing other characters who, in one way or another, block your central character from fulfilling his need.
These barriers from within and without are what make plays come to life. The word, again, is conflict. Your job is to put your central character into hand-to-hand combat (verbally and at times literally) with himself and other characters as he struggles to fulfill his need and resolve his dilemma.
In speaking of how she wrote her 1983 Pulitzer Prize–winning play ’night, Mother, Marsha Norman recalled her thinking process when choosing to pit mother against suicidal daughter: “I only wanted to do it in the most direct fashion. Here’s a person who wants this, here’s a person who doesn’t want that person to do that. Let ’em go and see what happens.” The conflict is clear-cut: Before the action begins, the daughter, Jesse, has made up her mind to kill herself, and the play dramatizes Mama’s attempt to talk her out of it. Norman adds: “If there isn’t heightened conflict nobody will want to do it. We have a lot of non-heightened conflict in life. What we go to the theater for, I think, is to see extreme versions of the things that trouble us on a moment-to-moment basis.”
As you begin thinking about possible ideas, remember that in most cases the more intimate the relationship the central character has with the other characters, the more potent the resulting conflict. This is why most great plays are set within the family unit. In ’night, Mother, for example, that Jesse and Mama have lived together for years and know each other’s habits and routines down to the smallest and most inconsequential detail is what gives the play its intensity.
Also keep in mind that the stronger the need of your central character, the more compelling and desperate you can make it, the stronger your potential for conflict. Likewise, the stronger you can make other characters’ needs and desires, which should in some way oppose those of your central character, the stronger the potential for conflict. Your goal should be to have, either directly or under the surface, some sense of conflict present constantly.
Nothing is more deadly than a play that ticks along minute after minute with no conflict manifesting itself in some way. (I should say nothing is more deadly than a play that ticks along page after page with no conflict. Because chances are that such a script will never make it to the stage!)
As you begin inventing and building on each initial seed of an idea, try to follow this rule: Add not a single component into the mix which cannot contribute to your central character’s dilemma, further the conflict, or intensify his or her struggle. Always find some way, even if indirectly, for each and every element you throw into the pot—be it other characters, setting, the central character’s inner psychological makeup, major or minor twists of plot, and so on—to propel the play forward and heighten the dramatic impact. At this early stage of the process, you want to be sure that every piece of your material has the potential for enhancing conflict.
Plays, in a very real sense, are like taking a trip, and a trip always involves arriving at a destination, a final stopping place. Although the audience members remain in their seats, their minds and emotions should be on a journey with your characters. As Athol Fugard puts it: “You literally, without any interruption, are going to ask an audience to join you at the start of an experience and to travel through time with you until you reach a conclusion.”
And as with any trip, as opposed to open-ended wandering, the audience expects eventually to arrive at a destination. They want to feel that they’re being taken to an interesting new place, and when they arrive they want to know it, to recognize it, to sense that the journey has ended.
“I think the end is the play, and that’s what you’re looking for,” Arthur Miller explains. “Until you’ve got that end … it’s not a play.”
Wendy Wasserstein says basically the same thing: “I start writing the play when I have an idea where the play is going to arc to, or land on. Then I know that, in fact, it’s a play, that it’s starting somewhere and going somewhere.”
Marsha Norman explains:
I used to have the idea that you could just start to write and see what happens. Now I find that doesn’t work out so well.… If you set out on a Sunday afternoon for a drive—you’re just going to see what happens and where you wind up—you could have an extraordinary day. But the odds are not good. You could get really lost, you could run out of gas, you could get tired of talking to the person who’s in the car with you. On the other hand, if you set out on a Sunday afternoon and you decide you are going to Niagara Falls, there’s already a structure to the day. There’s something at stake: “Will you get there or not? Will it be interesting or not? What does it mean to go there?” Once you have a destination, lots of things come into focus for you as a writer—and as a car passenger as well. So now I would never begin to write without an end.
David Ives says it this way:
I never start writing anything until I know what the end is. That is probably the one definite condition I have, and I don’t think I’ve ever changed an ending that I started out with. If I know that I have to go to Buffalo, I can go by way of Alaska, but I’m still going to Buffalo. But if I just set out on the road with no destination in mind, I quickly return home with nothing.”
What’s being said here, of course, is that you’ll have trouble planning your play without having at least some idea of how your central character’s dilemma is resolved and how his (or her) struggle has changed him, how different he is at the end of the play from the way he was at the beginning. Every choice you make along the way will be influenced by where you want your play to land.
This is not to say that what you come up with in this preliminary thinking can never change. Of course it can, and often does, as you progress with a project.
As John Guare points out:
You have some sort of sketched-up resolution that you’re going to go to. But you can’t commit to it. You should leave every door open so the play doesn’t become too schematic. Because if it does, it won’t surprise you and you don’t have to take any detours in the course of writing it.
The important thing is that all good plays have a strong sense of closure, a feeling that the story is finished, the tale spun. Audiences want this. They need it to make sense of what they’ve just witnessed. Your goal should always be to leave the play in the audience’s lap, so to speak, so they can pick it up whole and walk out of the theater with it. This can’t happen unless you hand it to them with authority and leave them something to think about. You do this by resolving the central character’s dilemma. It can be happy or sad, but it must be resolved.
Not resolving the dilemma leaves an audience stranded and frustrated and, at times, angry. Provoking audience frustration and anger is sometimes important at the end of plays, but this is not the way to accomplish it. Ignoring resolution is one of the most effective ways to get the audience to dismiss your play altogether and tell their friends to stay away. The problem is that after you’ve whetted their appetite for some sort of final destination, you’ve then denied them the fun of arriving.
Imagine this: You find yourself stranded on a beach without food or water and with one dollar in your shorts. It’s a hot July day, and you’ve been walking for hours. You see an ice cream stand in the distance, manage to find the energy to get over to it, and with your dollar purchase a double-decker peach and raspberry swirl on a wafer cone. Then, ready to devour this indescribable treat, you trip on a piece of driftwood and send the ice cream spinning off the cone into the sand. Major frustration. Don’t do this to an audience.
Although it’s much too early to come up with precise resolutions, it is essential that you give serious thought now as to how your central character’s conflict might be resolved and how he or she is changed at the end. For it is through the way you resolve the dramatic dilemma that you communicate your own beliefs about the issues being dealt with in the play. It’s the way playwrights speak to an audience, the way they get across their message, the way they can make powerful statements about the world they live in and get people to listen.
This is why, when asked if he has the ending in mind, however vague, before committing to writing the first draft of something, John Guare says, “I’d better, or there’s no sense in starting.”
In your preliminary thinking about resolution, you should constantly ask yourself two simple questions: First, do I honestly believe the message that is communicated by resolving my play this way? If you don’t, change it or discard it as a possibility. If you don’t believe what your play is going to say and believe it passionately, why write it in the first place?
And second, is my central character truly changed by the end of the play? Is there a readily perceived difference in his or her outlook toward the world, inner self, or both? Has that character arrived at a new place emotionally or spiritually? “The whole thing ought to add up,” Arthur Miller explains. “You ought to be in a different space by the end of the play than when you entered at the beginning of it.”
In musing over possible resolutions, be tough on yourself. If there is little or no perceived change in your central figure, you must do some rethinking. Don’t charge ahead without a genuine sense that you have a character who’s going to be “put through the ringer” and come out meaningfully changed. You’ll avoid one of the common mistakes writers make. Remember that plays never work without this change taking place.
Good plays well performed have the potential for being our most potent form of communication. The immediacy and power of brilliant live performance coupled with a well-written script can leave people profoundly moved. It can change lives and instill entirely new ways of looking at human interaction or social issues.
Consider again Miller’s The Crucible. John Proctor is ultimately faced with the choice of death and redemption, or life and loss of self-respect. Miller’s message is clear and powerful. Proctor chooses redemption. It all happens on the final page. Everything earlier has led up to his staring at a piece of paper he has just signed his name to. Then he rips up the paper, is led out to the gallows, and the audience is left stunned. Miller has communicated a precise and awesome message in a powerful way, for he knew his destination. His play comes to closure, and his central character’s dilemma is resolved.
Considering up front what your destination is, in a sense, the most important of all the early steps. What do you want to say? What do you want to leave in the hearts and minds of your audience? It’s all there in how you resolve your play.
The first step in the process, then, is to analyze and test your idea, to measure it against the basic dramatic ingredients and see if it holds up, or appears to have the potential of holding up when further developed. Your idea must have one central character with a compelling inner need that is being frustrated by his or her own mistakes and by other characters with opposing needs or desires. From this conflict develops a dilemma which must ultimately be resolved. It is critical that your idea incorporate these ingredients before you commit to going much further with it.
This is the time to be tough on yourself. Take a close, hard look at each play idea you have and determine if it’s fully formed enough to pass this test. If it isn’t, either file it away for the time being and let it percolate longer, or keep working with it, exploring fresh approaches until you sense that the pieces are in place.
Burn these basic ingredients into your brain. As you proceed through the process of writing your play, you’ll run into surprises and hidden turns which you can’t anticipate at this point. That’s normal. But with the basic building blocks at your disposal, you can stay in control and do your adjusting, rethinking, and reshaping with an awareness of what you’re doing—namely, writing a play that will work dramatically.