The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  This is compounded by the question of how the dramatist ‘thinks’

  the relationship between the written text and the performance ‘text’.

  In our culture the novel is still the dominant literary form, defining reading habits (and purchases and popularity) and conventions of narrative and storytelling. Critical approaches to drama are heavily influenced by literary-critical approaches to the novel and often the same issues arise in both, though reflected in a differentiated terminology.

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  Size matters

  To begin with (to state the obvious), the drama contains fewer words than the novel. The average-length novel is likely to be around 80,000 words; the drama (for evening stage performance) around 20,000 words and, in the case of film, where dialogue forms a small amount of the final scripted text, there are even fewer words devoted to what appears as speech. So, while the scope, the imaginative world, the subject matter and themes etc. addressed by the dramatist may be as major/significant as those addressed by the novelist, there are fewer words in which to contain and convey the material.

  This relative concision implies the application of a distilling imagination, which is sometimes similar to the way in which the poet, rather than the novelist, might work. However, both dramatist and novelist have to think about matters of narrative and ordering.

  This does not, I must stress, mean that each does or should just write

  ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’, only that, at base, both the drama and the novel are predominantly narrative-based fictional genres, in a way that poetry is not.

  In terms of distribution and consumption, the distinctions between novel and drama are major. Novels are bought as individual artefacts and read idiosyncratically; a bit at a time, different amounts at each reading, with the reader in complete control of this process.

  Pages can be reread, the reader can refer back, or leap ahead. The reader can start anywhere – ‘cheat’ and go to the end, before returning to see how the novel gets there. By contrast, in performance a play is seen and heard at one sitting, in a designated location, alongside other people: the individual reader has become a member of an audience.

  The audience must see the event in the order in which it is produced and presented. Even with the advantages of video and DVD, where novel-like control is a possibility, the same principle largely operates. After the event, each member of the audience relies

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  on memory for further thought and discussion. Even if the dramatic text is published and can be read, it cannot reproduce the experienced performance. It can act as an aide-memoire to the performance, of course, but it also produces a new reading experience in its own right.

  There is a one-to-one ‘intimacy’ created between reader and novel (or between reader and dramatic text) which is very different from the collective experience of being a member of an audience.

  This can be exciting and also a mixed blessing. Extraneous sounds in a theatre or cinema (coughing, paper-rustling) can disturb the concentration of other audience members in our Western convention, where certain codes of behaviour are expected. In other cultures and other situations performances often take place with audience noise (families eating, people wandering in and out, sometimes heckling). I remember an account of a production of Hamlet given in a small village in the Middle East, performed on an improvised scaffold, with everyone sitting on the ground with a local cast. At Hamlet’s death, the audience cheered and applauded, and would not allow the play to proceed until the scene had been replayed and the actor had ‘died’ all over again.

  The immediacy of the theatrical experience (the play happening at the level of different kinds of ‘presentness’ time frames), gives a clue to some of the features which attract people to write drama, as against, or sometimes alongside, writing prose fiction and poetry.

  Playwright Howard Barker wrote that he ‘came to theatre . . .

  because I would write speech and was impatient with novels . . .’1

  Playwright Sheila Yeger linked an enthusiasm for writing drama to the excitement of performance: ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would decide to write a play, as opposed to a story, a poem or a novel, unless they had already experienced as spectator, or possibly actor, the extraordinary power of theatre, unless they had been part of an audience and become involved in that unique transaction, where the 1 Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester, 1993), p. 24.

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  actors agree to pretend to be these people, say these things, do these things, if the audience will agree to believe in them totally.’2

  Narrative voice, point of view, character and

  subjectivity

  The dramatist has a very different task from the novelist in the way she/he deploys language in the imaginative text. David Lodge, novelist, dramatist and academic, with experience of writing in different forms and genres, has pointed to one critical difference in the dramatist’s working process, which is that the novelist retains

  ‘absolute’ control over the text, until it is published.3 Referring also to the centrality of singular-voiced narration (even where there is more than one narrative point of view), Lodge argued that, as a result, ‘The dramatic form is much more impartial, and there is no authorial voice in the drama text which may betray a sympathy for one character over another.’4 Because of this, he suggested, ‘The novel . . . is . . . the best equipped to represent thought, and therefore the subjectivity of experience.’5

  This is a complex idea, with resonances which are debatable in terms of what they suggest about ‘character’ and narrative point of view. Narrative in the novel can, of course, suggest thoughts, emotions, what is commonly referred to as the ‘inner life’ of characters, whether it is in the first or the third person, in a far more direct way than their equivalents in drama. However, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the novel is any more

  ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ than the drama. The single-narrative voice may suggest a conflation between authorial voice and the ‘real-life’

  experiences or thoughts or feelings of the real-life author, but this is 2 The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Amber Lane Press, 1990), p. 16.

  3 The Practice of Writing (Secker & Warburg, 1996), p. 205.

  4 Ibid., p. 209.

  5 Ibid., p. 208.

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  the special illusion which belongs to prose fiction. It is, in any case, never a provable (nor, often, a very interesting) correlation.

  In the end, it comes down to the question of how the language is deployed and how human agency (i.e., character) is represented and realised in the two distinctive conventions. The distinction, as far as narrative point of view is concerned, is critical: ‘In the theatre we have no controlling narrative voice. What we do have is a variety of points of view . . . the shifting point of view is a central and eternal truth of theatre . . . a built-in reality.’6 It could, in fact, be argued that the mono-vocal (ego-centred) basis of dialogue in drama, as against the poly-vocal (narrative plus character) voicing in prose fiction, provides an even more transparent access to apparent ‘subjectivity’.

  However, this depends on the definitions of subjectivity which operate, and how they are assumed to be refracted in imaginative writing via the representation of ‘individual’ human beings; as we shall see (chapters 7 and 13), in the analysis of the literary fabric of the drama, subjectivity as such cannot ever be the primary focus in drama.

  ‘Subjectivity’, insofar as it is represented through the agency of character and/or performer in the drama, is differently written, differently inscribed in the text through the form and devices of the writing itself. Thus
anything ‘imagined’ (i.e., in the mind, in the imagination) could potentially be written as poem, story, novel or drama. To elect and proceed with the dramatic mode of writing is to transform imagination onto the page, deploying a particular kind of mental/imaginative skill, which is then translated into a particular literary convention – however much or little it may also be informed by an understanding of performance. This has a spin-off effect on the different ways in which readers/audiences ‘read’ the relevant artefact: ‘In most novels, the reader is, so to speak, personally conducted, the author is our guide. In the drama, so far as the dramatist is concerned, we must travel alone.’7

  6 The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer (Faber, 2002), p. 12.

  7 Baker, op. cit., p. 7.

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  Poly-vocality and the dialogic

  The work of Bakhtin has come back into prominence in the past two decades because of the way in which his socio-linguistic insights have influenced analytical approaches to the novel. In general, literary theory has paid less attention to drama than it has to the novel and, from the point of view of Bakhtinian terminology, there are certain categories which allow of some extrapolation towards drama, even though he did not explicitly write about the genre.

  According to Michael Holquist, ‘Bakhtin’s search . . . led him to explore parallels between the conditions at work when any of us speaks in the most common everyday situation on the one hand, and on the other, conditions that obtain when an author writes what we call a literary work.’8

  Bakhtin is responsible for a term which is now widely used and which, for obvious reasons, suggests a link with drama: this is

  ‘dialogism’. According to Holquist, the term ‘dialogism’ was never actually used by Bakhtin himself, but ‘Dialogue is an obvious master key to the assumptions that guided Bakhtin’s work’, from his thinking as philosopher and linguist. In particular, he conceptualised the relationship between individual consciousness (and its different forms of expression in the world) and the society (historical and contemporary) within which it functioned. In terms of literary artefacts, there is a complex dialogic relationship between the world and the individual creating consciousness, and there is also a complex dialogic process, which takes place within the work itself. This comes down to the function and uses of language. For Bakhtin, ‘the dialogic concept of language he proposes is fundamental.’9

  8 Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World by Michael Holquist (Routledge, 1990), p. 13.

  9 Ibid., p. 15.

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  Narrative, structure and causality

  There is an interesting structural imperative, which follows from the (relatively) shorter length of the drama (fewer words). The optimum length of prose fiction is really the same question as ‘how long is a piece of string’. It can be a short story (how long is a short story?), it can be what we characterise as a novella – somewhere between a short story and a ‘full-length’ novel, which itself can be, etc., etc. Because of this architectonic flexibility, narrative in the novel can expand at will to include detail of a kind not necessary or relevant to drama. This degree of flexibility, as well as the power of the narrative voice, points to different ways of constructing causality in prose fiction and drama.

  Longer prose fiction is structured in ‘chapters’; their equivalents in drama are scenes, traditionally (but not always) organised into larger groups of acts. This structuring has both extrinsic and intrinsic implications. From within the drama itself, each scene is characterised generally by a change in time and/or place. This corresponds to the practical imperative of having to change or modify the stage set. Chapter distinctions may correspond with these, or they may simply be ‘rests’ between different moments of the same event or series of events. Writing nearly a century before Hayman, Baker commented that as far as drama is concerned, ‘This needed swiftness requires methods of making effects more obviously and more emphatically than in the novel.’10 Such distinct appropriations of genre in relation to the imagination and literary uses of language are of profound importance for the dramatist who, in the end, imagines and writes exclusively in dialogue.

  10 Baker, op. cit., p. 6.

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  6 Methods of teaching – the workshop

  Teaching the art of writing drama mostly takes place in higher education, like other creative writing teaching, in classes generally called workshops. This term evokes the idea of the craft-based workshop, where functional objects (chairs, tables) as well as artefacts (decorative pottery) might be made. Fine art teaching has its own term for the places where paintings or sculpture are made –

  the studio. Above all, these terms draw attention to the fact that something new is being made, created, which has connections with both art and craft.

  The term ‘workshop’, however, has more than a history associated with other arts and crafts. In the context of creative writing it is packed with various ideological and methodological assumptions about what sort of activity goes on and what its purpose is. In creative writing classes the main activity of the workshop consists of students bringing in fragments of incomplete writing to be subjected to the critical responses of the class and the tutor.

  Thus, the creative writing workshop exists in two senses: the Workshop, referring to the institutional distinctiveness of Creative Writing (CW) as an academic discipline, and the verb, to workshop, referring to the practices and methodologies of CW pedagogy.

  Student writing is ‘workshopped’. The pedagogy of drama in higher education owes a great deal to the ideologies which inform general creative writing teaching, along with the practical ways in which

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  post-1960s theatre combined elements of otherwise discrete skills in conceiving, preparing and rehearsing drama for performance.1

  Early workshop history

  The dominant model for the CW workshop was developed at the University of Iowa. The university’s first taught course in ‘Verse Making’ in the spring of 1897 set a precedent, which helped to pave the way for ‘creative’ work to be submitted as part of the require-ments of postgraduate Masters ( sic) degrees in the 1920s.2 Stephen Wilbers, historian of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, suggested that some of the protocols of the CW workshop originated in local writers’ clubs: ‘Their purpose was to improve the participants’ skills as writers by allowing each member to have a turn reading his or her original work, after which the group would respond with suggestions and literary criticism . . . Accordingly, the method (later to be called the “workshop” approach) was adopted by the University when it offered its first course in creative writing . . .’3

  Norman Foerster, director of the Iowa School of Letters (1930–44), succeeded in getting the creative dissertation accepted for the Ph.D. degree in the early 1930s and in 1939 the title

  ‘Writers’ Workshops’ was officially used for the first time. In 1949

  the Iowa English Department incorporated CW into its undergraduate English Major. The consolidation of Iowa’s achievements in the 1940s and 1950s, under director Paul Engle (1942–66), led to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop becoming, in effect, the prototype for CW courses in the US during the 1960s, often founded and run by Iowa Workshop graduates.

  1 For a detailed history of Creative Writing in the UK, see The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else by Michelene Wandor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  2 The Iowa Writers’ Workshop by Stephen Wilbers (University of Iowa Press, 1980); Seven Decades of the Iowa Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (Hyperion, New York, 1999).

  3 Wilbers, op. cit., p. 19.

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  The tutorial
precedent

  In academic terms the workshop is also another word for the seminar: small-group teaching, which aims to maximise student participation.

  Interestingly, the university seminar originates from both ends of the educational class spectrum. In the nineteenth century, principles of self-government were reflected in classes in the Co-operative and adult education movements. The ‘tutorial class’, which became the pedagogic method for this movement, was developed by the University Extension movement and took its teaching model from the oldest-established universities of Oxford and Cambridge, making a distinction between mass lectures and the small group.

  CW was more easily established in the US, in part because when English became a degree subject in its own right, supplanting the study of Classics and Philology, it retained some of the elements from both in the subjects of Composition and Rhetoric. These became, and still are, compulsory forms of writing instruction for all first-year university students. We have no equivalent to this in UK

  higher education. Composition acted as a disciplinary bridge in the US when CW was first taught in the 1920s.

  CW took longer to arrive in the UK (the best part of a century, in any formal sense). However, community writing and informal professional writers’ groups were not unknown. In ‘The Teaching of Creative Writing’, Philip Hobsbaum reminisced back to the early 1950s. As a Cambridge undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge, where F. R. Leavis taught, Hobsbaum organised a writing group in 1952, typing out copies of poems and stories, and sending them round beforehand for members to read. In 1955 he started a similar group in London, and subsequently ‘managed’ (as he put it) others in Belfast and Glasgow. He described part of his role: ‘I usually let the discussion polarise to some extent before intervening . . . it was a matter of avoiding closure.’4