Alright playwrights, it’s time to get organized. Time to make a plan.
Day 26 – Plan your scenes. Order your scenes and sketch out what will happen in each scene. Give your primary and supporting characters scene-specific goals related to their overall goals. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).
So, what are we shooting for here? Keep in mind that a full-length play runs for about one and a half to two hours, which is around 90-120 typed pages. You can do a traditional play with 2-5 acts, but the more modern approach is to simply write a collection of scenes. Maybe just one extended scene, maybe dozens of short ones running together. You get to decide.
For each scene, decide the following:
- What is the setting?
- Which characters will be in the scene? Give each of them a scene-specific goal and one or more tactics they will employ to try to achieve it.
- What is the overall purpose of the scene? To introduce the conflict? To bring diverging storylines together? To reveal a twist?
- How does the primary character grow in this scene?
- Is there a ritual that the scene revolves around? How is it disrupted? How do some or all of the characters try to get the ritual going again or further disrupt it?
- If it’s a group scene, is there a central reflector to bring everyone together? Something that happens or that the characters are invited to share their opinions on?
When thinking about the order of your scenes, remember, you have a lot of options. Maybe the play unfolds chronologically. But it could also go in reverse. Harold Pinter’s Betrayal starts with the aftermath of a love triangle and the scenes then unfold in reverse to reveal the triangle’s origin. Your scenes can even go back and forth in time, as long as there is some cue for the audience to understand that this is happening–maybe the season changes, or the way the characters are dressed. In the play I’m working on, there is a scene in which the stage is divided into different parts and similar things are happening simultaneously in the different parts to represent the different trajectories a character could be put on, sort of like parallel universes.
And remember to incorporate some variety. Maybe a serious scene is followed by a comical one, a bustling group scene by an intimate one with only two characters.
Get creative writers! Tomorrow we dive in and write our first scene.