10 Egri, p. 224.
11 Gooch, p. 25.
12 Archer, p. 192.
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The theoretical justification for this structural notion of conflict and crisis is largely seen as mimetic: ‘The plain truth seems to be that conflict is one of the most dramatic elements in life, and that many dramas . . . turn upon strife of one sort or another.’13 Drama is thus seen as an imitation of ‘life’ (however that may be defined) in ways which, as we shall see later, have resonances with some of the ideas informing creative writing pedagogy.
However, the notion of ‘action’ as a driving force becomes either conflated with ‘character’ or with action as a means to an end: ‘As a play dramatises a pattern of action it simultaneously explores human character. Drama, then, reveals the relationship of character to action . . .’14 In the discussion about whether action or character
‘drives’ a play, there are some decisive claims: ‘plays, strictly speaking, do not have actions. Characters do . . . Trying to talk about the action of a play is not real. Talking about a character is.’15
Spencer is emphatic that ‘Characters, in fact, drive every play that ever was’.16 Gooch counters with the argument that ‘action is the principal definer of character in a play.’17
Somewhere between these two positions, Ayckbourn argues:
‘Characters in plays are there . . . to further the plot, whilst also informing us – directly or indirectly, through word or deed – of their individual thoughts and emotions.’18
13 Ibid., p. 18.
14 Smily, p. 123.
15 Spencer, p. 42.
16 Ibid., p. 210.
17 Gooch, p. 72.
18 Ayckbourn, p. 35.
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Character
Whichever the prime mover may be (action or character), attempts to come to terms with the latter are equally diverse, even contradictory. First, following the mimetic line of argument, there are those who see characters as ‘real’ people. Taking his point of departure that character creates plot, Egri comments: ‘You may not believe it, but the characters in a play are supposed to be real people.
They are supposed to do things for reasons of their own.’19 Using a more familiar formulation, Yeger argues: ‘Creating believable characters . . . is perhaps the most important aspect of writing a play.’20 The often repeated mantra that characters are or are not
‘believable’ or ‘convincing’ or ‘real’ permeates a great deal of dramatic criticism and is, in my experience, a mainstay of student response to drama.
But what exactly does it mean to suggest that a character must be convincing or believable? Attempts to provide guidance tend often to produce another familiar cliché or aphorism, that characters must/should be ‘three-dimensional’, or ‘fully rounded’ – whatever that may mean. This is often taken to be at the heart of the dramatist’s task: ‘Creating vivid, three-dimensional characters with a life of their own is probably the greatest challenge a new playwright faces.’21
The relationship between the fictional/invented and the ‘real’ is at the core of this knotty formulation. An attempt to reconcile these different discourses informs one definition: ‘Characters, however, are not human beings; they are constructions that resemble real people . . . In order to create lifelike characters, writers need to understand real people and apply their insights to their dramatic creations.’22 In turn, this leads to the familiar advice to the dramatist 19 Egri, p. 18.
20 Yeger, p. 61.
21 Pike and Dunn, p. 17.
22 Smily, pp. 123–4.
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to ‘know the character as thoroughly as possible’.23 And Ayckbourn clinches this with the claim: ‘You can never know too much about your characters before you start.’24 The concept of ‘knowing’ here stands in for the imagination and, according to the dominant principles in virtually all these books, this returns us to the impossible-to-define idea that ‘characters’ must, in some way,
‘imitate’ or be based on ‘real life’.
Some observations wrestle with the problems raised by these simplistic mimetic assumptions: ‘If characters in plays are not real people but inhabitants of that separate world within the author’s head, by what criterion can they be judged effective?’25 With a more conceptual approach to the significance of ‘character’, Taylor suggests: ‘Stage characters are highly developed embodiments of . . .
status distinctions.’26 From this perspective, Gooch offers the more abstract view of ‘characters as forces’.27
The difficulty of separating action from character has a material justification, because of the way human agency is foregrounded in dramatic writing, which consists of many, rather than a singular narrative voice, followed by and/or related to physical embodiment in performance. The crude mimetic notion that characters are somehow the same as or similar to people in real life leads to the semi-mystical notion that the characters somehow take control of the writing: ‘Characters – central and secondary alike – must be allowed to write themselves . . . set them free to behave as they will.’28
23 Egri, p. 32.
24 Ayckbourn, p. 45.
25 Gooch, p. 66.
26 Taylor, p. 3.
27 Gooch, p. 86.
28 Spencer, p. 190.
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Premise, idea, vision, theme
While discussions of action and character constantly revert to discussions of mimesis and real life, at the other extreme is a concern with an issue which seems to be more particular to drama than to other fictional forms. All the books wrestle with this; the terms are often interchangeable and the exhortations are grand, if not apocalyptic. A play apparently must have ‘a well formulated premise’29 and Ayckbourn warns: ‘Never start a play without an idea.’30 Ultimately, argues Gooch, ‘A play’s idea is, after all, the most important thing in it.’31
This ‘idea’ seems to be associated with a theme, or a message, something the author needs or wants to ‘say’: ‘Your theme is what you want to say in your play.’32 Gooch defines this as ‘a sense of the world’,33 while Pike and Dunn prefer the term ‘vision’, ominously suggesting that ‘Defining your vision takes time, perhaps a lifetime’.34
The difficulty with all these is that, however serious and well-meaning the attempts are, major questions of theme and imaginative execution are at stake. Critical literature is packed with competing argued exegeses of what the most important idea, premise, theme of any work of literature (novel, poem or drama) may be. To expect or assume, let alone to demand, that dramatists must be able to provide their own cut-and-dried critical understanding of the play they have not yet written is fairly odd, to say the least. Of course it is important to think; but the relationships between thinking, imagining and writing drama are infinitely more complex than these exhortations suggest.
29 Egri, p. 6.
30 Ayckbourn, p. 6.
31 Gooch, p. 7.
32 Spencer, p. 154.
33 Gooch, p. 24.
34 Pike and Dunn, p. 88.
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Scenario
The demand for the dramatist to be able to ‘know’ and, presumably, articulate his or her idea or premise or theme at the start, also permeates approaches to methodology and the process of writing itself. Virtually all the books suggest starting with a scenario.
Ayckbourn summarises the process, based on his own way of working as writer and director: ‘Preparatory work is vital to all playmaking . . . The questions need to be asked: how, when, where and with whom are you going to choose to tell you
r story? In other words, narrative, time, location, characters.’35
More concrete advice entails writing a complete scenario, listing scenes, with information about what happens in each scene: ‘it’s really valuable to spend substantial time planning the complete arc of your story from beginning to end, before you actually start to write the scenes.’36 While there is nothing wrong in principle with beginning with an outline/scenario/plan, there is a very serious problem heralded by the implication of this kind of preparation.
This may stem from privileging action over character: ‘Thinking through the play means . . . perfecting what the characters do before worrying about what they say.’37 But there is significant censorship involved.
Dialogue
The censorship imposed is on the very fabric of writing drama itself: the production of dialogue. It begins with a health warning: ‘You have probably spent a long time creating the detailed scenario. You’re probably aching to start writing dialogue. Not yet. Take a break.’38
35 Ayckbourn, p. 12.
36 Taylor, p. 67.
37 Smily, p. 37.
38 Pike and Dunn, p. 113.
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Breathtakingly, dialogue is addressed only in the last part of the how-to books, then sparingly treated, with the student advised to leave dialogue till last. Archer, Lawson, Smily, Spencer and Taylor refer to dialogue only in the last twenty pages or so of their books, Egri about ten pages from the end.
Ayckbourn argues that everything should be planned in detail – a process which should take about a year – before any dialogue is written. McKee, writing about film scripts, advises: ‘The wise writer puts off the writing of dialogue for as long as possible, because the premature writing of dialogue chokes creativity.’39
Locking into the argument that action is more important than character, Gooch advises: ‘To think in terms of an “action”, then, of what happens on the stage, is far more important to a playwright than the dialogue.’40 Picking up the line that character is more important, Smily comments that ‘Thoughts in characters within plots must exist before words can be put on paper’,41 though quite how and where they ‘exist’ is not at all clear.
Dialogue in itself can be diminished or denigrated if it appears too soon, ‘The characters talk, but nothing much happens’42 and
‘writing dialogue can be very similar to an actor performing an improvisation’.43 At the other end of the spectrum, and even though he gives only four pages to dialogue towards the end of his book, Spencer does acknowledge that ‘it is the one, solitary means by which you have to express everything you have to say: theme, character, story, plot.’44
We are faced with the paradox that dialogue appears to be both the last and least important part of the process (or impossible to write until everything else has been decided), and that it is the most significant part of the manifestations of dramatic writing.
39 McKee, p. 417.
40 Gooch, p. 23.
41 Smily, p. 183.
42 Ibid., p. 35.
43 Gooch, p. 60.
44 Spencer, p. 195.
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Narrative and causality
The stress on scenario and planning, taken apart from its censorship of dialogue, does, however, address the important issue of structure.
As has been pointed out, there is generally more fluidity in the way chapters operate in novels than there is in the way scenes operate as building blocks of the structure of drama. In drama, as a general principle, changes in time and place are marked by new scenes. The notion of action returns here to lend shape to the greater foregrounding of cause-and-effect relations in drama and dramatic plotting.
McKee argues that the drama begins with the ‘inciting incident’, and Taylor rounds up the totality of the structure: ‘cause and effect sequences as units of action help to generate the movement we require to bring about change.’45 Cause and effect are enacted through a more clearly conceptualised formulation of ordering:
‘ Sequence means a continuous and connected series, a succession of repetitions, or a set of ordered elements. It implies order, continuity, progressions. An event refers to an occurrence of importance that has an antecedent cause, a consequent result, or both.’46 It is worth noting that all of this could equally well apply to the structuring of a novel.
Drama and creative writing
The contexts in which drama is currently taught derive from the dominant practice of teaching creative writing in the workshop.
This returns us in a rather different way to the concept of drama as mimesis, as imitation – in this case, of the dramatist’s personal
‘experiences’ or life. The idea of writing ‘what you know’ is a common one in creative writing pedagogy and clearly it has real 45 Taylor, p. 58.
46 Smily, p. 101.
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resonance; many writers of all kinds may draw on aspects of their experiences and memories. However, when this is elevated to a writerly principle it becomes restrictive and problematic: ‘The major source for writers is direct experience.’47 At the very least, this imposes a serious limitation on the dramatist’s imagination – unless, of course, we assume that Shakespeare knew what it was to be a king and/or a murderer. More cosily, we are enjoined: ‘Just think of your aunt Helen, the family gossip.’48
As was argued in chapter 6, one of the double-binds of creative writing pedagogy is the simultaneous promise (explicit or implicit) that a course will enable the student to become a professional writer, along with a series of warnings. This results in a paradoxical construct: talent versus creativity. Egri claims that we all have creative ability, while at the same time cautioning that
‘Even if you will never be a genius, your enjoyment of life can still be great.’49
If you are lucky enough to be able to fight off the fear that you may not be a genius, ‘merely’ creative, there are further problems: Writing a play entails entering ‘a bustling and terrifying arena’,50 in which ‘it’s really normal to be frightened.’51 From this follows all the usual assumptions that if you have no exciting or worthy experiences about which to write, you will end up with writer’s block; and if you have no talent (the implicit sine qua non of creative writing), then the very purpose of all pedagogy – the assumption that there is something to teach and something to learn – is rendered superfluous. You either have it or you don’t have it.
47 Smily, p. 12.
48 Egri, p. ix.
49 Ibid., p. xii.
50 Yeger, p. 18.
51 Ibid., p. 12.
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Conclusions – dialogue – the absent centre
All the books from which I have quoted were written by knowledgeable and experienced practitioners, committed to thinking about what is entailed in writing drama. They rely heavily on aphorisms and often contradictory definitions. Clearly any student or teacher could easily take from these the bits they like or agree with, or which appeal to them as newly enlightening sayings. But, with all due respect to the commitment of their authors, none of the books go very far beyond definitions, assertions and tips. While they may challenge their reader/users to think, they tend to provide prescriptive advice and one book often contradicts another. The relatively common-sense critical notions often owe unacknowledged allegiance to ideas derived from the novel, with little far-reaching investigation into the genre of drama, its distinctiveness and what is at stake in developing skills in the art of writing drama.
Particularly telling is the virtual exclusion of the central textual element in drama which is contained in dialogue. At best the books are evasive, at worst they mo
stly dismiss the importance of dialogue.
Images of babies and bathwater spring to mind. There are two exceptions to the list from which I have culled examples – The Playwright’s Workbook by Jean-Claude van Italie52 and Playwriting: a practical guide by Noel Greig,53 both of which address the writing of dialogue in a concrete, and to some extent, cumulative way. In particular, Greig’s book is a meticulous and gently detailed progressive work which first initiates students into ‘creative writing’
in a generic fashion, before spelling out stage by stage exercises which introduce students to the practicalities of putting dialogue on the page. However, even in this very useful text, the writing of dialogue rests on many of the unquestioned principles and clichés which have been discussed in this book. A different, more genre-specific approach is very much needed.
52 Applause, 1997.
53 Routledge, 2005.
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8 Stage directions
Following the brief discussion about narrative voice in chapter 5, it may seem that stage directions provide a bridge between the novel and the drama. After all, they are generally written in prose, and they are a distinctive, specialised form of ‘narration’, ‘description’, or ‘direction’ in an impersonal voice. The voicing of stage directions is not within the mono-vocality of any individual character; it is
‘outside’ the action, generally written in the third person. While drama-writing manuals may spend some pages discussing the importance of location or setting, very little space is generally given to stage directions. Such discussions are also relatively rare in theatre theory – Aston and Savona rightly comment that stage directions are ‘a particularly undeveloped topic’.1
Where stage directions are discussed, they are implicitly or explicitly compared with the novel. In the drama such description may be seen as second-best, as Baker wrote: ‘Let it be remembered
. . . that the stage direction is not a pocket into which a dramatist may stuff whatever explanation, description, or analysis a novelist might allow himself, but is more a last resort to which he turns when he cannot make his text convey all that is necessary.’2 From this angle, stage directions are secondary parts of the written text, 1 Aston and Savona, op. cit., p. 71.
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