I tend not to start writing a play until I have a fairly good strategy about how I’m going to take the audience through the experience of an evening.
—MICHAEL WELLER
Your next step in developing the idea for your play is to plan—as Michael Weller does—a workable strategy for yourself. Such planning, in one way or another, is a commonly shared procedure among established writers. It involves taking the idea you feel strongest about—even if, at this point, it’s just a hunch, a fragment of character or conflict—and getting as many of its essential elements down on paper as you can, so you can examine the idea in a more structured way.
John Patrick Shanley explains how he discovered early in his career the value of this type of initial condensation:
When I was looking for plots, when I started to get a sense of what plots were, the place I really found them in was fairy tales. Fairy tales really boil away everything but the absolute essentials, and that can be very powerful. It can be very interesting to ask when you’re looking at your own play and the story you want to tell: “What can I do away with?”
It’s not important at this point to be entirely sure of your idea’s dramatic premise or its central character→ conflict/dilemma→ resolution construct. What is important is that you sense some real potential and that you can feel a pull on your heart in some significant way.
As you move to this step, remember: Writing a play is a process, and process means moving from one place to another and yet another. It means constant change and adjustment as new information reveals itself. It insists on flexibility, on always being willing to throw out the old and embrace the new, to incorporate an ever-increasing number of discoveries into your creative thinking. Putting your idea down on paper at this early point, therefore, has to be looked at as just another early step that will allow you to move on to other steps and eventually to your first draft.
The intention here is not to lock you into anything, but rather to help clarify your thinking, which will further trigger your imagination.
The way to get off and running with your idea, shaping it into something that will have solid dramatic possibilities, is to write out the basic dramatic ingredients as you conceive them now. I have drawn up an actual form that I use for this, a worksheet that keeps everything simple and to the point (see this page). The worksheet consists of eleven entries, as explained here:
PLAY IDEA WORKSHEET
Date: It’s a good habit always to date your exploratory work.
Working title: If you cannot think of a preliminary title just yet, write at least a label that, at this point, captures the essence of what you think your play is about. Keep it simple and clear.
Central character: Give him or her a first and last name and write a brief, one-sentence description of the character.
Central character’s dominant need: Keep this simple. For instance: “to win the heart of Margaret,” “to put her guilt behind her,” “to achieve material success.”
Other major character(s): Write their names and brief, one-sentence descriptions of them.
Setting: If you know the setting at this point, write a one-sentence description. If you haven’t decided on a setting, put down the one that now seems the best.
Occasion: If you know this also, describe it in one brief sentence. Again, make a choice here. Put something down.
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: In one sentence, describe how your central character’s struggle is manifested in action—that is, tell briefly what happens in the play in terms of the physical and/or emotional conflict that brings the dilemma into focus and forces the central character to respond. Be sure you describe an action here—how the central character struggles with his or her dilemma.
Resolution: In one brief sentence, describe how your central character’s conflict/dilemma is resolved.
How the central character changes by the end: Write one brief sentence that describes how this person perceives him- or herself and/or the world differently at the end of the play.
Dramatic premise: This is the most important of all. Following the form as discussed in Chapter 2, write one simple sentence, indicating movement and change, that captures what you think now is the primary communication of the play.
Using the worksheet, let’s work through a potential idea you can be objective about before you put your own idea through it. This is a simple idea for a short play: Imagine that you, the playwright, read in your local newspaper that an eighteen-year-old boy working the night shift at a filling station in your town was held up at gunpoint by an older man at four in the morning. You know nothing more about the actual incident than the brief report in the paper, but you recognize the story’s dramatic possibilities. It raises some enticing questions: What could happen in a situation like that? What could be said between the attendant and the robber? How could the two personalities interact? What would bring someone to the point of robbing a gas station at 4 A.M.? What could be at stake for the attendant? For the robber? Let’s consider the worksheet entries:
Date: Don’t ignore this. Put the day, month, and year that you’re doing the work. Beginnings have a way of taking on major significance, and what you think of now as a simple and quick series of jottings may turn out to be the start of a complicated major effort that takes a long time to complete. More often than not, you’ll make use of this early reference as you work your way through a process of constant changes and adjustments. Knowing when something was thought of or written down can prove useful.
Working title: Don’t spend a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect title. Something as simple as “The Filling Station” or “The Night Robbery” will suffice. Attempt to capture the content and sense of your idea as you conceive it now.
Giving your idea a label, an actual name, is a great help psychologically, because now you have a work in progress rather than just another idea you’re knocking around. You’ve started work on a new play. You have something tangible to refer to, something to write on the tab of the file folder or the cover of a notebook.
Terrence McNally says: “I usually have a title pretty soon. So that’s a place to put these notes. I mean, you have to have a title to put the notes under. It’s like using a computer; you’ve got to title everything before you can store it.”
Later on, we’ll deal with “real” titles and how to come up with them. For now, a good working title is all you need.
Central character: Given your filling station story, you have to make a choice: The central character could be either the boy or the man. So you have to ask yourself which of the two you want the play to focus on and who’s going to be left the most changed at the end of the encounter. This in turn makes you stop and think about what the play is going to be about, what primary message you’re going to be leaving the audience with—why you’re writing this play in the first place. To a degree, you are already considering your dramatic premise when choosing your central character because it’s through the working out of his dilemma that you communicate what you want to say.
At this point you have two options. And in choosing either one, you have to dramatize a life-changing experience. The boy could be a bitter, angry young man whose eyes are opened to the desperate lives that some people live; that is, through his interaction with the man, he gains a new understanding of the troubled and downtrodden. Or, withdrawn and afraid of life, he somehow rises to the occasion and forces the man to leave without taking the money, thereby gaining a new, stronger sense of himself.
The man could be at the breaking point and suddenly forced, through his interaction with the boy, to look at what he’s doing to himself and to others. Or he could be a hardened criminal and now faced with the choice of killing the boy to get the money and having to decide if it’s worth it.
As with all ideas, there are numerous possibilities here. More than one of them, or a combination, should be operating in the play on some level. Making a choice about who is going to be your overall focus may change as you get deeper into the project, but for now you need to “try one on for size” to be able to continue the development process effectively. Otherwise, it would be like trying to drive down two roads at the same time or trying to build two different houses on one building site. You’d lose the ability to shape your play dramatically.
Let’s say you consider your options as to what you really want to write about and decide to focus on how a man in the midst of despair and frustration is finally able to come to grips with his problems and himself. In other words, you choose the robber as your central character. You’ve decided to make him your overall focus as he struggles with his dilemma. This is not to say that the boy isn’t critical to the play—obviously, there wouldn’t be a play without him. But you’ve decided to make the man your “hinge” character, your protagonist, your hero.
You’ve just made a critically important choice, for if you’d chosen the boy, you’d be developing a different play. Later on, after you’ve explored the idea further, you may discover that indeed the boy is your central character and that it’s his dilemma you’re really interested in. This happens all the time. So you go back and make the necessary adjustments.
The important point here is that if you’re going to proceed, you have to start somewhere. Go with the hunch that seems strongest at the time and see what happens.
Since we’ve decided to focus on the man, we’d write down on our worksheet something like this: “Harold Davis, 48, a proud but unemployed blue-collar worker, seriously depressed; married, three teenage daughters.”
Giving names and ages to your characters as soon as possible immediately makes them people rather than abstractions. It gives you something to build on when you start your in-depth character development later on. The rest of the description should hit on the elements of character that you think might have direct bearing on the situation of the play.
Central character’s dominant need: “To end the agony of deep-seated depression and sense of failure in life.”
Again, this need could be any number of things. What’s important is that this is what is fundamentally driving Harold to do what he does. It’s what has pushed him to this night and his central action of holding up the gas station.
Other major character(s): “Dave Marshall, 18, defiant, from a middle-class home, no self-confidence or sense of direction in his life.”
Your initial thinking about your antagonist (the character most strongly pitted against your central character, the protagonist) should focus on the ways the conflict can be heightened and enriched. In other words, this character should have a dilemma of his own that ties in some way into the play’s main event. This will strengthen the play’s dramatic underpinnings.
Here Dave finds himself in a situation that will force him to deal directly with a life-threatening problem, represented by Harold. He’ll be jarred out of his aimlessness and complacency, and for the first time in his life as a young adult he’ll have to take some meaningful action. As the main barrier to Harold’s achieving his external goal of robbing the gas station and as the trigger that forces him to face his internal dilemma for the first time, Dave can be given real punch and power as we see him struggling to rise to the occasion. Finding dramatic richness in Dave is critical to the play’s ultimate success.
At this early point you need to consider ways in which Dave’s personality and background will collide head-on with Harold’s at every possible opportunity. Think in terms of the potential for conflict based on the characters’ age and class differences, specific personality clashes, and so on. Where and how can sparks be generated? Think of Peter and Jerry in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. These two are about as opposite as they come, and Albee’s choices contribute tremendously to the play’s vitality throughout.
As far as we know from the published news report, Dave and Harold have no shared backstory; they’re two strangers meeting in the night. And for our purposes here, that’s fine. But imagine how some past relationship, however slight, between a central character and antagonist would give you more material to work with in this early, formative phase of invention. Ask yourself: Is there some way these two could have connected in the past, even indirectly? Could Dave think he recognizes Harold’s car? Or is there perhaps something about Harold that reminds Dave of someone? Does interacting with Dave trigger some memory in Harold?
Be careful here: You can’t force this. Coincidence is very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off successfully in a play. But you should always make these kinds of probes into character relationships and look for any and every possible point of contact that could exist. Making connections in backstories, if the connections are there to be made, can greatly heighten dramatic impact. Generally speaking, the more intimately connected characters are, the more “stuff” you have to work with.
Everything you throw in at this point won’t pan out, of course, but that doesn’t matter and shouldn’t concern you. Again, remember: At this initial stage, nothing is set in concrete. Many of your early conceptions will change. What’s important is that you’re aware of why you’re putting in what you do.
Setting: “The front office of a filling station.” This could be more detailed, obviously, but it’s fine for now. Specifics can be added as you uncover what the play requires.
On the other hand, if you “see” a vivid room in all its detail, describe it here. It may help activate your powers of invention.
Occasion: “The night after Harold received his last unemployment check.” This could add fuel to Harold’s desperation.
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: “Harold demands the money and Dave unexpectedly resists.”
What’s important to capture here is how your central character’s attempt to satisfy his dominant need manifests itself in action. The robbery is Harold’s desperate attempt, however misguided, to fulfill his need. Dave is the obstacle to the execution of his plan. It doesn’t matter that Harold’s solution is faulty; this is his reality at this time. Life has brought him to this place, he’s determined to end his agony, and this is how he’s decided to do it. When Dave puts up resistance, the sparks start to fly. Harold demands, and—in opposition—Dave resists. In putting down the major conflict that occurs in the play, state it in action terms. Don’t be vague or philosophical here. Your focus should be on what happens—what literally takes place onstage that ultimately forces the central character to come face to face with his dilemma and decide what he’s going to do about it.
Resolution: “Faced with shooting Dave to get the money, Harold breaks down and for the first time admits to himself that he’s in serious trouble.”
This resolution doesn’t immediately fulfill all aspects of Harold’s need. The resolution of a complex human drama rarely can, especially in a pat or cut-and-dried manner, and that would be neither true to life nor interesting for your audience. In this resolution, certainly, Harold’s need isn’t fulfilled—not right away. It does, however, represent a critical first step in his being able to deal with his predicament. His depression and pride have been working against him, blinding him to a real solution. Now he can begin to look at his life more clearly and start putting the pieces back together. It took this event, his encounter with Dave, to get him to this point. He thought he could fulfill his need by robbing the filling station of its cash. Instead, he finds out that the real solution lies in a very different place: inside himself.
How the central character changes by the end: “Harold is a humbled man, no longer blaming the world for his problems.”
Your resolution will always answer the question “How is my hero changed?” If it doesn’t, something’s off track. The way you resolve your play is really only the dramatization of your central character going through a major realization or change in perception. He or she is left a different person as the lights fade because of the resolution, and it’s important to clearly see and understand what change it has effected.
Dramatic premise: “Admitting defeat leads to recovery.”
You can come up with other premises for the idea we’ve been considering, but this one comes closest to leaving the audience with its meaning as we’ve initially conceived it: It’s only when a person admits to himself he’s got a problem that he can start doing something constructive about it. Many people go through their lives never getting to that point. They live year after year in a haze, talking themselves into the myth that the world is to blame for their misery and not themselves. In terms of Harold, the premise “Admitting defeat leads to recovery” captures this point of view.
Walking this idea through the worksheet gives you a sense of how important it is to secure the basic dramatic essentials early on. You can see how a possible play begins to take shape as you work through it. It forces you to ask the key questions and gets you thinking about the fundamental structure of your play. It goes a long way to turning a relatively abstract series of thoughts into the basic building materials for a workable script. Most importantly, it gets you going.
Terrence McNally says: “Sometimes people sit down to write a play when they’re not ready to write it. They stare at the screen for days and get very discouraged.” The idea worksheet is intended to help you avoid the agony of staring at that blank screen, sheet of paper, or writing pad.
As you go through this exercise, realize that it’s not something that you will always and necessarily go through before writing a play or that established playwrights all apply in a precise way before writing their works. Neither is the worksheet a formula for playwriting success. It’s simply a “thinking aid” to help you gain an appreciation for the unseen structural underpinnings of dramatic writing, a way to learn how to build a play out of the ideas you’re interested in. At some point, if you keep on writing plays, much of this analysis may become as automatic and unconscious as it is for many of the playwrights interviewed.
I suggest that you draw up your own worksheet listing these eleven items on one page and making several dozen photocopies. In laying it out, don’t leave yourself much room to write out your answers. This will give you a constant reminder to keep things short and to the point when you start using it.
It should look something like this:
PLAY IDEA WORKSHEET
Date: _________________________________________________________
Working title: __________________________________________
Central character: _________________________________
Central character’s dominant need: ____________________________________
____________________________________________________________
Other major character(s): _________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Setting: ___________________________________________________
Occasion: ________________________________________________
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: ____________
_______________________________________________________________
Resolution: __________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
How the central character changes by the end: _____________________
__________________________________________________________________
Dramatic premise: _________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Before applying the worksheet to your own idea, a good exercise is to put a few of your favorite plays through the paces. It’s important that you get comfortable with the thinking process involved in breaking down plays to their bare bones, especially those which have special power for you. It’ll help you understand why these plays work and what fundamental components they have in common.
Here are worksheets on three of the well-known American plays we’ve been using as examples:
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Working title: Miller’s original working title was The Inside of His Head, which to me makes perfect sense, considering that the play is really dealing with Willy’s growing inability to cope with reality.
Central character: Willy Loman, weary traveling salesman in his late 50s.
Central character’s dominant need: To be seen as a success in the eyes of his family and the world.
Other major characters: Linda, late 50s, sweet, faithful wife to Willy; Biff, 30, the Lomans’ oldest son, a troubled drifter; Happy, 28, the Lomans’ other son, following in his father’s footsteps.
Setting: The Loman home and yard; the offices of Willy’s boss and of Charley, his neighbor; a restaurant; a hotel room; a graveyard.
Occasion: Biff’s return home after a long absence.
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: Willy struggles with his family and the outside world, trying to preserve a self-image that is no longer valid.
Resolution: Willy refuses to admit defeat and ends his own life.
How the central character changes by the end: Willy is dead.
Dramatic premise: There’s obviously room for variation here. I think the most powerful is “Looking for fulfillment in worldly success ultimately leads to despair.” Others might be “Refusing to admit one’s own weaknesses and failures leads to despair” or “Pride leads to ruin.” No matter how the premise is actually stated, however, the major communication of the play centers on what happens when a man’s estimation of himself doesn’t measure up to reality.
THE CRUCIBLE
Working title: I don’t know what Miller’s working title was, but a good guess would be The Witch Hunt. Possibly it was The Crucible—sometimes, with a little luck, working titles really work!
Central character: John Proctor, mid-30s, a farmer, “powerful of body, even-tempered, and not easily led” (Miller’s own description).
Central character’s dominant need: To rid himself of the guilt he bears.
Other major characters: Elizabeth, John’s gentle, intelligent wife; Abigail Williams, 17, a beautiful orphan girl with an endless capacity for dissembling; Rev. John Hale, nearing 40, a “tight-skinned, eager-eyed intellectual”; Deputy Governor Danforth, etc.
Setting: Parrish’s home; Proctor’s home and woods; the Salem courthouse; a prison.
Occasion: The Salem, Massachusetts, witch-hunt hysteria of 1692.
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: Proctor fights for his life and honor against the witch hunt hysteria triggered by his adultery with Abigail.
Resolution: To gain his redemption. Proctor chooses the gallows rather than cooperate with the authorities.
How the central character changes by the end: Proctor is freed from his guilt, his integrity and honor restored.
Dramatic premise: Honor and integrity triumph over sin and evil.
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Working title: Albee reportedly had this title from the start. The story goes that before he wrote the play he found the phrase scrawled on the wall in a Grove Street bar in Greenwich Village and fell in love with it. (Moral: Graffiti may have a useful function after all.)
Central character: Martha, 52, intelligent faculty wife, very discontent. It’s important to note that in his interview Albee insists that the play is about all four characters and that he didn’t write it thinking of Martha as the central character. However, when analyzed dramaturgically, she clearly emerges as the central figure struggling to fulfull her need. That Albee didn’t consciously think this way doesn’t change the fact that the play functions as such structurally.
Central character’s dominant need: To break free from her illusionary existence and live in the real world.
Other major characters: George, 46, history professor, husband of Martha; Nick, 28, new math professor, self-confident and ambitious; Honey, 26, Nick’s wife, naive and innocent.
Setting: Martha and George’s campus home.
Occasion: The late-night visit of a new faculty couple.
Major conflict/dilemma as it manifests itself in action: Martha fights George’s attempts to hold up the mirror to her.
Resolution: Martha is forced to drop all pretense and accept her true self and the reality around her.
How the central character changes by the end: Martha is living in the real world for the first time in her adult life.
Dramatic premise: Accepting reality opens the door to personal integration.
You may come up with a different way of wording these, but you can see how the worksheet captures what the plays are basically about. Notice how all three deal with a person’s private struggle to fulfill a powerful need. All good plays deal with this. The more plays you analyze using the idea worksheet, the more you’ll be convinced of this basic truth of the craft.
It’s not always easy to fill out a worksheet for a play. You have to become a mechanical engineer of sorts, and it can cause a bit of brain strain. But becoming familiar with this type of analysis by applying it to the best plays you know is worth the effort if you expect to use it on your own ideas effectively. I strongly urge you to keep up the practice of filling out worksheets on plays that move you in some profound way. Developing and maintaining your critical thinking skills in this arena can only sharpen your skills as a playwright.
Now fill out the worksheet on your own idea. Be as concise and brief as possible. All you’re trying to do is tack down the basic dramatic ingredients in as simple a way as possible. If you allow yourself to ramble on with any item, you reduce the effectiveness of the exercise. It’s imperative that you keep each item to one simple, clear sentence. Then it will be a useful tool. So choose your words carefully. Struggle with it a little until you’re able to say exactly what you want to say, but with extreme economy.
Don’t worry if you’re still unsure about certain items. After all, it’s early in the process, and you’re just starting to explore your idea. What’s important is that you attempt to fill out everything. This gets you started and tells you right away where more invention and thinking are needed.
Don’t be timid here. Remember, at this point it’s all trial and error, so you want to try things and see how they strike you. Fill out several worksheets if necessary. Then choose the one you think comes closest to capturing what you want to work with.
And don’t throw away any of these early explorations. You’ll be surprised later on how honest they really are. They won’t capture everything you’ll eventually need to write your play, but they will get down your initial thinking and your first impulses. They can be invaluable if and when you get stuck or lost and are close to going out of your mind writing your first draft. So start a file, and keep them all handy.
When you’ve finished filling out the worksheet, even if you’re not entirely satisfied with it, sit back for a minute and congratulate yourself. You’ve started work on a new play! Your worksheet is a useful tool that will help you clarify where you’re going. Think of it as your preliminary road map as you head further into this adventure and a steady flow of new material presents itself. Because you have kept the worksheet simple, you’ll be able to easily adjust it as you make new discoveries along the way. Answers concerning the items you were unsure about will indeed come when the time is right, when enough layers have been peeled off. Eventually, your worksheet may change beyond recognition, but for now you’ve begun the process that will lead to a finished script.